White canvas - eruri (english version)

White canvas

When you grow up you learn to love and to be loved.  You learn what love is, to read stories of princes and princesses falling in love.  You see your parents in love and your mother sits you on her lap and explains how they met or how she felt falling in love with your father.

But I grew up learning how to kill.

I had no mother reference, no father reference. My uncle taught me how to survive underground and I learned fast, that's why he left. Sometimes I blame myself for it, but over time I have learned to differentiate when someone wants your presence or when you are a nuisance, then I thought, I would have done the same as him. I starved to death, but I lived long enough to see the surface, a thing I could never afford to dream of. It was up there, under the blue sky and the wind, that I learned to love and be loved.

Describing love once you have gone through it is like talking about a painting, there are many shades, many ideas mixed together and no matter where you look at it, you will never quite understand it, you will never have a sure answer, just what you believe about it. In my case, my painting would start with red tonalities, with blood and hate. I hated him, I hated him so much that I thought I could kill him with my bare hands, that I would die on the spot if necessary. He saved me, he discovered the world to me. But I was like a mouse falling into a trap. He saved me to take me to hell itself. He was always smarter than anyone else, always one step ahead of everyone else and that led to his ruin. The first day I saw him he was chasing me around my ruined city. He was so well dressed and neat, it was almost a joke to see him in the midst of such poverty and obscurity. I found it insulting.I ended up on my knees in front of him after being defeated, I felt humiliated, but I remember I never stopped fighting, I never once looked down, and he liked that.I ended up spending the rest of the years at his side, and it wasn't until the day my friends died that I accepted Erwin Smith as a partner and friend. It sounds ironic, they died because of him and I understood. I saw his cause, I saw how his mind worked and I simply forgave him and decided that I would follow him until his last day. Erwin taught me many things, he taught me not to regret my decisions, not to doubt, and to keep fighting.

My painting would now be tinged with blue, the color of calm, but there would still be flecks of green, of guilt, a feeling that would never leave the canvas, a color that would follow from beginning to end. Guilt swirled in my head the days after joining Erwin's leadership, it was a betrayal of my late friends, or so I saw it. I sat next to him watching the stars, it was never uncomfortable, I lay and listened to his stories and his advice. And it was in those moments that I would crack open the facade I had and let him into my naked heart. I will never know why, I simply trusted him and his words and let myself heal in his hands. It was months of mental calm, of recovering and healing wounds. I never thanked him, but I felt grateful, and I felt loved, but by that time I didn't even know what the word meant.

I would end up painting my canvas red again, but this time red with love. Funny, how hate and love are so opposite but are expressed in the same hue.

Erwin always was, and is, someone I looked up to and was really proud to follow and to be able to call me his right-hand man and trusted partner. A trust that was built with years of mutual confidence and a couple of tears. Then the feeling started like someone who has a tummy ache. Unexpected and painful. I didn't know what was wrong with me, why I got nervous around him, why I noticed my sweaty hands, or why my gaze couldn't leave his face. I really thought I was sick, that I had a fever or the flu. I didn't know what love was, I never saw any of that, only death, crying, and poverty. Just as I didn't know how to extinguish it, I couldn't hide it or control it, and it wasn't hard to realize that. I came to hate this feeling that is now my favorite, I hated it because I had no answers for it. And once again, he taught me. I learned to the quality of his hands between mine, to notice his calluses and bruises against my palms. He taught me that blushing wasn't bad, and I felt like a little kid learning something basic, but he never laughed about it, he taught me as if we were on the same level and he was learning in the process. He may as well have been doing it too. He kissed the tips of my fingers, the back of my hand and the moles on my arm. He wrapped me in his arms and my head hid in his neck as if it were a lair separating me from the outside world, the real world. He kissed my cheeks, the tip of my nose and my forehead. He drew figures with his fingertips on my bare skin and created his own paint on it. Finally, he kissed me on the lips. 

And I understood what it was to love and to be loved.