Author: Veronica Vega

I don’t doubt a visit the family planning clinic can restore a couple’s hopeful outlook on life, but, once they step out of this clinic, this couple is going to need much more than hope to build a future for their child.

Every time I see plane-lights trailing across the night’s sky, I imagine it is Antoine de Saint Exupery, the author of the “The Little Prince”, travelling on the back of a comet, looking down at this old world and reflecting on how little humanity has changed since his disappearance from the physical universe.

The air has been filled with strange vibrations these past days, there’s a murmur among people who live on the ground floors of tenement buildings in the neighborhood of Alamar, people who have expanded their homes into the common areas surrounding these buildings.

After watching the film “One Night” by the British director Lucy Mulloy, I’ve made three resolutions for the future: I won’t be so willing to jump on a bandwagon. I will doubt the verdicts of juries. I will distrust dynamic rhythms, “natural” acting and fidelity to raw reality.

That the pangs of nostalgia can deceive us, painting our memories of the past with bright colors, is a feeling I had for the first time some years ago, while reading a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As I’ve grown older I have become slightly more suspicious of any romantic perception of the past.

Sexual offenses seem to be one of the world’s thorny issues today. I am constantly reading of gang-rapes involving a woman, a teenager or a little girl, about victims who commit suicide and even about rapists who publicly boast of their crime.

I am terrified by competitions. As a kid, the mention of any competition in gym class was enough to give me cold sweats. If, by chance, I start watching one of those reality shows from abroad, where amateur performers are catapulted to stardom (or into the worst of depressions) overnight, I also get cold sweats.

I must confess I feel a profound aversion towards hospitals and polyclinics. This is not only because of the physical pain, misdiagnoses, indifference or mistreatment I have experienced in these, but also because of the association my mind invariably makes between these places and the time spent in waiting rooms.

The media have always dictated the fashions and had an influence on the tastes of young people. However, the question that arises for me at the moment is how much happiness can really be derived from consuming more and more materials that distort the dimensions of the real in order to be attractive. And when we return to the real world?

A while ago, someone I think highly of said to me: “Yeah, that student (Eliecer Avila) had the courage to ask those questions to (National Assembly President) Ricardo Alarcon, making the official look ridiculous, and the student himself even became a popular figure. But what did he achieve with all that? Today he can’t work in his field and all the doors are closed to him in this country.”