THE SEAGULLS DON'T SING ANYMORE

  I spent three hours writing a chronicle on Valpraíso, but I closed Word in a hurry without saving the file... More than five dense pages, lost. The bones of the trade for those who trust in machines. Before you know it, it's over! And now I almost started another chronicle on paper.

The truth is that I should have written more while I was traveling... Coulda, woulda, shoulda... But it's what I always say: first we live, then we write. I took small notes and great pitures, but no real record of what I thought, of what I felt, in the end, it was all just stored in my memory...

She said, as if years had passed, but it's only been a few months since I returned, so wait a minute. I still have a lot to say!

In my land, there are palm trees, where the thrush sings, as the poet used to say. As for the seagulls, they don't sing anymore. The truth is that I had never even heard the seagulls sing. I used to hear those sounds in the images of beaches and ports in foreign films, but I never heard anything like it here in Rio, nor did I know what seagulls sounded like specifically. In real life, the few seagulls I saw were just part of the landscape. Nothing much to notice, but that's when traveling, leaving the usual place, takes on meaning. Something perfectly common and defined for me, a seagull, changed its meaning completely on this trip. And it also changed its name.

In Valparaíso, seagulls are like a separate population. In the air or on the beaches, there they are, always talking and singing and even in small groups chatting as if they were catching up on gossip, like in the middle of a square. I saw seagulls laughing and talking and shouting everywhere. They command the scene. Every morning I woke up to go to work and looked out the huge window of my hostel room: there they were. On rooftops and streets and flying over the port. Gliding and talking, sometimes shouting... Dominating everything.

Gaviotas, as they say in Spanish, a spelling that I like much more than the Brazilian one, by the way, which we say Gaivotas. I had never understood the fascination of ornithologists. In fact, I read a wonderful book that contained stories of incredible characters, but what caught my attention the most was the fact that the protagonist's father was an ornithologist and that if he hadn't been, none of the book would have happened. But what makes someone fascinated by the behavior of birds, you know? For me it was very strange. Today I can explain. They are as interesting, if not more so, than people. The language, behavior, and relationships between birds are absolutely complex and very curious. I would listen to their conversations and laugh along with them without even understanding the joke. Seagulls are fascinating

In the dunes of Concon, seagulls have crowned themselves as queens of everything. After twenty minutes of a crazy climb with my two legs, I arrived at the top and had one of the most incredible views of my life as I watched seagulls playing by simply opening their wings and being carried away by the wind. Without moving a single feather, without thinking, without even worrying about what would happen, they simply opened their wings and the wind carried them away.

There I understood that I should do the same...

At the top of the Dunes of Concon, the wind makes everything fly. Your fears, your thoughts, your notion of what time is, of what life is. I flew too.

It was my first international trip alone, and it was there that I realized that there were still many mountains and horizons, many flights and many birds to observe. I just had to open my wings and let the wind carry me away, too.

The world is big and I have a lot to see, but I never forget where I came from. The place where the seagulls glide in silence.

Maybe here they are just thinking...