I built an opinion from TV reports while sitting on a comfortable couch, throwing out clever lines triggered by nothing more than a raised eyebrow.
Then I heard other people repeating the same rehearsed phrases, and it hit me, those thoughts weren’t mine. It hurt.
So I went quiet and started rebuilding.
I learned an opinion is never finished, and touching it is always painful, especially on mornings like this one, reading the brutal map of incarceration in Brazil, letting the discomfort do its work.
My non-digital skills in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon.
Where I was born, I learned to fish with a very special net. It was my digital net, cast into a virtual sea. Ten years learning, fishing, sometimes even teaching, enough stories to fill a small boat.
Then I realized I had been living on an island. So I took my little boat and rowed far across that sea. I found a massive continent, analog and real, sometimes surreal.
My boat made no sense in all that land. So I kept walking, looking for people to tell my stories to, but no one understood the way I fished.
I walked until I found a river, ready to show them. But my digital net didn’t work there, no electricity in sight.
I didn’t eat for a while. I got thinner. And I learned.
I learned to eat fruit.
And maybe that’s how I grew, switching nets, switching worlds, combing someone else’s hair on a rocky floor.