Free The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa Page B

your whole self is in agreement with what you are thinking, and this encourages you and gives you energy.
    Being tired makes us sweeter. So many good ideas don’t seem so good the next morning; so often the things we decide in the night fail to take place. I think that tiredness makes us less animal and more human, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
    While I was in the hospital I made all my important decisions in these watches of the night, before falling asleep. I loved waking up at that time, when the whole hospital would be asleep, including the nurses; it was as if the whole placebelonged to me. I planned my life, worked on my dreams, and aspired to do everything.
    When I left the hospital I went back to doing this. I trusted a great deal in the middle of the night. Also, I’m sure that when someone invents a drug that stops you from needing to sleep, the middle of the night will be the time for a new meal: the REM.
    The REM will be even more important than lunch or tea. You’ll have REMs with people who are special, people who, like you, believe in this time of the day. When the moment comes I hope I’ll be ready.

21
The power of the first time
    “Moments” are our greatest treasure. They are what we are
.
    —a teacher who gave us lessons and spoke more about moments than math, because he thought that we’d forget about the math but the moments remain
    He always started by saying, “There’s nothing like a good moment. A moment is a piece of life we’ve all lived through.”
    I’m a big fan of moments, I’d say even more of a fan than that teacher (sometimes the pupil can be better than the master), because there was a time when I lost them. Moments occur most in childhood and adolescence. But everybody’s life is full of moments.
    There was a time while I was in the hospital when I stopped having moments; well, maybe that’s not entirely true, but I exchanged them for other types of moment. Hospitalmoments, which I share with other people who’ve lived in hospitals.
    “Moments” can be defined as things that one day you do for the first time and which mark you, because they stay with you.
    For example, here’s a triple moment connected to transport:
    1. There’s the first day that you and a friend left school together. The first time that you went out of school at the same time, talking about stuff. We’ve all experienced this moment: walking along with someone and then separating at some given point. It’s a way of feeling adult. It’s magic, a moment from when you were seven or eight years old.
    2. Years later, approaching sixteen, you have another moment connected with going home. You don’t walk home; you want to catch your first taxi. You go with a friend, you look for a taxi, you don’t find one, you curse the ones that don’t stop. It’s another moment of maturity, of feeling yourself growing older.
    3. And finally a day when you’re about nineteen and you’ve got a car and you take a friend (maybe the same friend from the two previous moments) back to his house. And you sit with this friend talking in the car until the small hours. Another moment.
    I think that there’s nothing in life that I like more than looking for moments. After discovering them, after thatteacher showed us what they were, I started to collect them. In the hospital, the moments I already had helped me to keep going. They happen at such a young age that they form the essence of your life. Every year I remember two or three moments and I feel good; I feel happy at this reencounter.
    People sometimes forget that we are the fruit of what we live through in our childhood and our adolescence; we are the product of many moments. And sometimes we close the door to them when we should have it always open.
    For a few years my moments were slightly strange: the first time my leg was amputated, the first time I lost a lung. But they were moments nonetheless.
    And even when you are an adult, you live