IF – A WORD THAT FLOATS effortlessly from the lips and fades along with its forgotten promises and takes with it a myriad of possibilities and a wealth of potentially better memories. It has cast its shadow over every misfortune in my life: if I didn’t take that year off in university or if my father hadn’t died when I was eight years old. If my mother had remarried she may have had enough money to visit her father before he was on his deathbed . . .
My mother, my sister and I caught an evening flight from Toronto to Lima. When we arrived at Jorge Chavez airport the three of us went tiredly through the terminal, past the other sleepwalkers, and into the dark night that smelled of diesel exhaust and the salt of the sea. An overpriced airport taxi wound its way through the slumbering city to my grandparents’ house. A houseful of somber spirits awaited us. Family reunions shouldn’t happen under such circumstances.
My mother hugged her sisters. My grandmother eventually shuffled out of a back room, groggy and still dressed in her nightgown. Many tears were shed, but none by me. I recognized these people solely through pictures in albums back home, and I was faced with the stark contrast of a happy instant captured in a photograph and the grim reality of passed time. All the colours seemed faded – in people’s hair and clothes, on the walls and dusty ceramic tiled floor. My grandmother walked
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David Burga is a Peruvian born Canadian geologist and writer. His work has appeared in Big Truths, Lockjaw Magazine, and the Nonbinary Review. Excerpts of his work-in-progress, The Devil’s Gold, were published in issue 4 of Burner Magazine and issue 2 of The Lunaris Review. He is @davideburga on X and is a former board member and planning team member with the Festival of Literary Diversity in Brampton, Canada.