Tears of Amber

by Sofía Segovia

children never learn as much as in the first three years of life. They learn, they live, but they never remember having learned or lived.

After years of relative peace in the war, in the blink of an eye, her life had been reduced to that: to understanding that the only treasure worth anything is life.

Winter is not a good time to die, but in that winter that was so dark, so long that it clawed back any promise of spring, nor was it a good time to live.

She kept it all to herself; she kept the tears—all of them—to herself, because she had to protect everyone: she was the mother with the weight of the world on her shoulders. You mustn’t leave anything for later, she told herself on May 7, as she’d tell herself every daybreak. And she came out from her cocoon as she’d do every morning of the rest of her life. Despite the cold. Despite the pain.

He didn’t know which steps were harder: the ones he’d taken without knowing what lay ahead or the ones he took now, aware of what awaited beyond the trees.

Sorrow was what had drained her vitality more than anything. Some heartbreak installs itself in the body to feed on the soul:

Literature transmits an incontrovertible, condensed experience from generation to generation. Thus, literature becomes the living memory of a nation. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I believe that the history of any place belongs to us all, and the lessons inherent in it are for everyone. We must learn the lessons. We mustn’t be blind to what has happened or is happening in other places or to other peoples, regardless of the distance in time, geography, or language. Social problems go beyond borders. The sores of the human race, these running sores that cover the globe, don’t stop at red or blue lines drawn on the map. —Victor Hugo, about Les Misérables, in a letter to his editor