The other night I had a singular dream: I
was in Tokyo, and I was lost. I did not remember the name of the hotel where I
was staying with my partner, and the streets I walked were unfamiliar to me.
Suddenly, I saw a woman doing repairs on a ladder and asked her for help; she
immediately got down and started walking with me through the nearby streets to
see if I could locate myself. So the hours went by, and I was more lost than
ever, until the woman told me that she could no longer do anything for me. The
thought of my partner crossed my mind, and I told myself that he was surely
wondering about me. Desperate, I continued walking through that unknown city
until, in an open house, I heard a boy speak in Spanish with an Argentine
accent. I hurried over to him and told him that my hotel was near a large fish
market, and asked him if he knew of one. He didn’t and suggested that I go to
the Argentine consulate in Tokyo; he would take me there. Luckily he didn't
have to since, at that precise moment, I woke up. Upon awakening, I felt an intense feeling of
relief. Needless to say, one thing is to get lost in Rome and another in Tokyo.
But what is the meaning of this strange
dream? I asked myself. Although I was in Tokyo many years ago, it is not a
city that lingers in my thoughts and I don't feel like visiting it again. To me, getting lost in an unfamiliar city is almost the same as being alone in the
city in which we live, but that is not our city. It is a city that is not
familiar to our soul. As the years go by, our feelings and our gaze turn to our
beginnings: the house where we lived, the school we attended, and those friends
who participated in our first years of life as if they were our siblings. But
above all we remember the city where we were born: its cobbled streets, its
lilac jacaranda trees, its cafes always open, and its multicolored buses. It
is with deep nostalgia that we recall the place where our existence began. With
the dream I understood that, when I left that city, I left the warmth of my
family’s house to start my own journey. I also understood that we come to this earth
to become who we really are, and we must do so without help. That is why not
even the figure on the ladder managed to give me a hand.
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