For the Beautiful Girls in the Photo
Nothing guarantees that the smiles will last forever
I run my eyes over this strange world of Facebook. I see a beautiful photo in black and white: five happy girls show smiles, more than smiles, shameless laughter with joy. They look natural, it is certainly a natural picture. I go on, I see one thing, another. Then I suddenly stop. I roll the bar up. I’m back to the photo.
I already know this old wave inside me. Like a detective who does not lose the habit of sniffing out evidence of a possible crime, my sensitivity, always driven by the search for tenderness, is activated by an inner alarm. I am static in front of the photo. Now my heart is pounding. It is that wheezing breath of archaeologists who shake their hands as they pick up the brush and dust the million-year-old object. It’s a treasure and I have found it!
This photo has something else, my sensitive nose is already sure, it never misses. I can’t let it go. Here is something, I mean, here is pure tenderness, the kind that fills the eyes and the heart. I call the words. Girls! Get to work!
I look at the faces. I don’t know them. However, they are not unfamiliar to me, let’s say that they have atavistic traits, ways, looks, in short, things that denounce their ancestry. My mother would say: it seems like Lopes people, or, they make me remember the Abreu, or even, there’s something about the Souza.
But the charm is exactly that when I suppose, I imagine. For me, they are already characters for my stories, maybe they were schoolmates, more than that, they became friends, made plans for the future, exchanged confidences, shared secrets, tears. They had codes that only they would understand, almost a language of their own, unintelligible to strangers, an object of study that would make linguists delirious in their theses.
It was a birthday or a party or just a meet of friends. But the reason doesn’t matter, whatever. The photo captured in a past moment becomes present forever, that joy registered for posterity. I imagine that their daughters and or granddaughters will one day look at the photo and say delighted: look! How beautiful!
The girls in the photo have already returned to their lives, to their daily lives, to their work, to their children. The difficult moments come and go as they have always come for everyone in this uncertain, chaotic, and wonderful life. Nothing guarantees that the smiles will last forever, no, nobody guarantees anything in this life, except at this very moment when I smile as I write and watch life pulsating in these beautiful and happy faces. But for the difficult moments, there will be plenty of tight hugs, clasped hands, and tenderness, the blessed tenderness without which I cannot live.
