Love Inside a Hollow

Theirs was a love aged by time. A love overgrown with the mossy vegetation of forgetting, like those soaked stones along the side of the road.

He clung like a magnet to his complementary other half; back when in their youth, the days seemed brighter and you could smell the flowers from far away.

Why did that gentle delirium end… he wondered?

Why did his heart wrinkle like paper, like the rest of his skin?

They walked hand in hand, embraced each other in the wind, kissed so many times… They shared the most sublime memories: he gave her that bonsai with heart-shaped foliage and she made it bloom the color of her joy.

Life passed the way it always does when you look back, like a gale, and by the time they realized it, their love had already turned rainy and then became exhaustion. They stopped loving each other slowly.

They had buried their love together, one midday, to dig it up when necessary—they thought: so it could rest a while, it was so tired.

They put it in a safe place, far from the noise, laid out like a hollow, buried next to a tree.

But they never found the tree again, though sometimes they looked. They were never sure if it was the tree that remained in the plains or the one that grew beside the volcano. There was an immense one on the riverbanks, there was another tree broken by the whip of lightning, but none kept beside it that precious treasure: that buried cave, the burrow of that hibernating love.

And so the years passed, searching for the imposing imagined tree, trying to excavate their feelings, but they only found rusted memories, like buried nails. They never noticed that the tree they sought had always been beside them, hidden in the bonsai, blooming like a heart, inside their chest.