Oma Mimi was born in The Hague in 1926. She got married to Joao, my grandfather, in 1952. He was in Lima, and she was still in the Netherlands, so they performed the ceremony at distance. Shortly after she would move to Peru.

I remember going every Sunday to visit her with my parents. She had divorced Joao and lived in a small apartment in the district of Surco. I remember drinking tea there, trying to always mild down the bitter taste with endless spoonfuls of sugar. Petuti was her cat, and I can’t remember much about him, years after, though, when we got our own cat we also named him Petuti. Mimi left for the Netherlands in 1990, she couldn’t deal with the terrible situation of the country at that time. I was five years old, and I clearly remember that the day I went to say goodbye she gave me a huge box full of random Legos. I wouldn’t see her again until 2005.

During my childhood I would occasionally talk to her on the phone. Sometimes, photos of her and my dutch family would arrive with someone that had gone to Europe or was visiting Peru. One day, me and my brother received a teddy bear she had herself knitted with yarn. I kept that teddy bear in my bed until, at the age of 20, when I moved to Barcelona to study. I think of my life from that point to the one where I am now, and I see lights that shine intermittently like one who sees the landscape pass by on a car driving through the night, some of that light has made it to these pages I hope. I never really thought about the bear in those years, like all those things I left behind and forgot to remember. Fourteen years have gone by. Then.

I left Barcelona and came to Rotterdam last year. I now live near my dutch family, and to be more precise, in my aunts house. The day I arrived there, as she was showing me the room in which I was going to stay, she pointed towards an old wooden chest, “that was Mimi’s” she said. I then saw the intermittent light of the road. They moved faster and faster to the point that it would start waving like a luminous drone, but quiet, and light, and spacious, moving with me as I approached the chest. When I opened it, I saw the teddy bear.

Rotterdam 2021