Human

What does it mean to be human? What did it mean to be divine? There was a moment in Ramos’ life where these questions were only like shooting starts to be admired momentarily with its passing in and out of existence. But one day, without knowing why, he began to chase the falling stars until the trail disappeared and left him looking back into the mouth of the universe, the abyss. The strange boy was born out of nothingness, manifested from a cloud of dust, without roots. He was completely free to do whatever he wanted with his destiny in this world. He had no shackles that bound him to any worldly responsibilities. He could roam and observe the world without reservation. He could venture away from his origin, if it can be called that, without guilt or nostalgia. The cruelty of man, which he would observe from afar, was like a ray of light was looking for the darkness of the earth except he could watch it pass without the slightest idea of ​​how bad it could burn, he had no real reason to understand it. But he still lacked human suffering, and by wanting to suffer he began little by little losing his divinities and gradually collecting the traits and habits that humans hold with tired arms.

They had named him Ramos, like the church that adopted him, but after a few years of being able to speak, he changed his name, or rather he relinquished it. He argued that he did not need a name because he was not from this planet and subsequently did not need anything to tie him to it. During the days of the Cuyo regions, he would walk through the mountains that divide Chile with Argentina. He was often told that to go to Chile, he needed a passport and also to be of legal age, but the boy explained that these limits were imaginary and that they were placed by bad men in times of death and that we continue to impose out of bad habit.

At 10 years of earthly life, he decided to befriend a wild boar and went walking through the lands. The church only looked for him for a few days because they knew him well enough to know that he danced to the beat of his own drum and that the rules did not apply to him. His wild boar, although it was not his but from the same shared land, accompanied him crossing the various faces of the earth, finding old communities from before the days of imposed borders. The natives listened to him as if he were a wise old man, because according to him, he was, but from another planet.

He told his stories to the best of his ability, considering that he had to translate them into Spanish from his original language but nevertheless his words were exact and with explanations only the divine could speak. His planet had cities completely made of gold bricks and other precious stones such as jade and opals, which were all contributions of the inhabitants. Each citizen brought a brick to build the city and the city in essence belonged to him or to her and to everyone. In reality, gender did not exist or rather it was not assigned at birth on their planet, but they chose it entering maturity. The animals ate each other but did not suffer and the inhabitants did not die of old age or sickness but of other human conditions if, they were to accidentally adopted them.

When the inhabitant began to dream human dreams, they were presented with the option of travelling to earth to die, knowing in their final moments, the life of human man and woman. His curiosity was born the moment he read a book in the old bookstore of his capital, he dropped it and lifted it upside down and from then on he saw a dialect, a completely different language but somehow understandable, which revealed the secrets of his future and of the stories of the planet which began to pollute his dreams.

He took these secrets to the other sages to tell them of his discovery and they told him that it was a forbidden tale that once read could never be forgotten. But they gave him the option to erase it from his memory but once he had started it, human curiosity began to sprout like a weed and he denied himself the opportunity to be divine again.

With each telling of his stories to the native folk of the human world, it became more difficult to recall the details of his previous eternal life until it began to embarrass him, something he had never felt before and he began to lie to them. He could remember the awe and the perfection of his world but not the why. As his indignation with forgetting grew, so did his stories change. His word was taken as something legitimate and concrete, which in its first moments, it was, but with the turns of the universe the stories were developing in an almost invented or interpreted way until it reached the moment of being completely forgotten and fabricated from false memories with the image of his origin faded. He was still telling the stories but from a place of rage and anger of having forgotten. Within each community that he passed, the great spiritual or religious officials wrote his letters and books and were placed in the highest references of the communities, which developed little by little according to the teachings of the wise boy.

Until one day the boy, now an adult, finds himself desperate to know the name that the nuns of the chapel of the Andes in Mendoza had given him. But the ones he had known were gone and his records nonexistent. Lost in the never, searching for roots in the sands, giving the search of his name a sort of importance that never could have occurred to him in his divinity. He had become human without knowing it. He walked the streets hungry and thirsty, looking for food in the unfinished plates in the restaurants which surrounded the town squares. He was once again adopted but this time by the streets and the poor, and by the homeless artisans. In himself, he had all the questions and unknowingly the answers too. He wanted to be human a lifetime ago and from that first moment of hunger and despair, he was, and now searches for a divinity in the books of the various religions and churches that he himself, without remembering, created. As he searched for human meaning in the books written from his essence, he cries with anguish with the realisation that the future before him will be full of unanswerable questions and all that awaits him is his end.