We Were Young

We were young.
We were beautiful.
We laughed at everything
and at nothing too.

We were a melodious song on the wind.
We didn't worry about the future,
for we had it all figured out
in our minds,
built of pure fantasies.

Everything was so wonderful:
sitting with a group of friends,
spending endless hours there,
doing absolutely nothing,
beneath the branches of a beautiful Ficus tree.

There was nothing to do,
but we had the world under control.
In truth, we lived in complete chaos,
as vulnerable as a newborn turtle:
out of every 100, 99 siblings die.

Time passed,
and it filled our souls and skin with cracks.
If you can pay for a surgeon—one of the expensive ones—
you can fix that for a while,
until you start looking grotesque,
uglier than the natural elders of your age.

The ugliness caused by cracks in the skin
is irreversible.
You can only trade it for the ugliness of the scalpel and Botox.

The cracks in the soul, those can be healed.
They are healed with forgiveness,
with selective forgetting,
with love for humanity
and for nature.

But it's not easy.
You will need the optimism you had when we were young.
You will need to return to the Ficus tree
and believe once again that anything is possible.

We were young.
We were beautiful...