A Warning to Myself

This happened to me when I was 12 years old living in Brazil. I was spending vacations at our family farm along with my grandparents, uncle and aunt, brothers and sisters and cousins.

We had an enormous orchard there with guava, oranges, tangerines, avocados, cashews (yes those are a fruit and a nut trees) and mangos, ohh the fat juicy mangoes those were so good, specially the pink version (Manga Rosa).

With such a big playground, every afternoon about 8 or 10 of us would go out to play hide and seek in the trees. We would climb up as much as possible and stay quiet behind leafs.  The last one not found would win. This would go on our entire July vacations, which were, yes, our southern hemisphere winter vacations very mild weather and lots of fruit ready to eat.

As boys were a vast minority in the family we stayed in an outside bedroom. This was about 45 yards from the main house where the adults slept. I somehow never had a flashlight and walked in the dark, many times illuminated by the moonlight. The bathroom was about 20 yards way from the room and in the middle of the night it would be chilly so sometimes I didn’t want to walk that far and just relieved myself outside of my room to the side.

One night I was sleeping and I woke up really pressed to go. There was no way I could make the 20 yards so I ran to the side and peed there. When I turned back I saw this boy and it scared the hell out of me. He was staring at me. He put his index finger in his lips as to shush me. When he turned and the moonlight hit his face…it was me.  A couple of years older and with a terrible scar across my…his face. He spoke to me: “I have to tell you something. Tomorrow when you are playing hide and seek don’t climb on the big mango tree by the water reservoir, the water supply. If you do something terrible will happen. I have to go now”. He walked away into the darkness.

I went back to bed with my heart pounding. It took me hours to fall asleep. When I woke-up in the morning I decided that I had had a nightmare, a terrible one. I went about my day, riding the horse in the morning with everyone, having my café-com-leite (coffee and milk) and fresh bread with butter. We had lunch then hung out in the hammocks in the porch just playing. The nightmare now just a faraway thought.

When it was time for hide and seek. I was looking for a place and passed far away from the mango tree by the water supply, just in case. I went into the avocado tree, as high as I could get, maybe 50, 60 feet up. When I was up there I heard a huge crashing noise and a thud. I didn’t know what it was so I shouted: “Is everyone OK? I heard a very loud noise coming from the water supply structure”.  Everyone responded. I went down the avocado tree and walked towards the water supply. As I approached it I saw an enormous branch from the mango tree had collapsed on top of the water reservoir and cracked the concrete. I never revealed this story to anyone. Sometimes even decades later, I look into the mirror and say: “thank you”.

David Almeida

September 2015