My Life

Secrets

(Free writing)

There are a few things in the back of anybody's memory that have been repressed from childhood, and just emerge onto our consciousness once in the blue moon by accident or triggered by a random event.

I have a very vivid memory of my childhood, associated with a particular smell, related to a family secret. I was about 8 years old, the youngest and only boy in a family of four siblings. Our house was always crowded with female cousins and aunts staying over, gossiping around, from which I was kept out of "Girls talk". My closest friend was my youngest sister, who was just 2 years older than I. She kept her distance from me in public, because in those days girls and boys where meant to play and stay away from each other. Just in the intimacy of the family's common bedroom she was tender and comprehensive; she taught me how to pray at night; how to make my bed; how to brush my teeth and to how stay away from the night spittoons. Anytime I felt in trouble, I just looked up to her, and she would tell me silently with a wink or any facial gesture what to do.

Leonidas De Los santos

2

One night, I was awakened in the middle of the dark by guardian-sister. There were screams and rumble in the immense density of the night. I was scared and concerned, curious rather than startled. My guardian-sister put her hand on my mouth, and I felt her warm morning breath telling me to hush. For a moment, a minute or so, we stood motionless next to the bed, trying to X Ray the darkness, and to radar with our ears the faintest sound. Then I heard it, a flush of air escaping furiously someone's nostrils like a bull before it charges, a humming of a cry mufflered, like somebody screaming under tons of dirt. I was reviewing with mental flashes scary bed time stories I ever heard, trying