Kneeling down, she let her fingertips glide over the bead’s curved surface, marveling at the intricate detail, only halfway conscious of the murmur of marketplace chattering around her. The beads were wooden, of various shapes and sizes, and hand-painted. Her eyes paused on an unfamiliar word painted in tiny black letters: gorrión. A quick mental search, hippocampus¹ struggling to locate a definition encoded long ago, brought up a depressing ‘no results’. She stood inert, mind blank, wondering. An audacious surge of confidence ran through her veins and she opened her lips to ask, the question forming before she had time to reassess.

There was a hoary tinge to the white locks of hair that fell past the woman’s shoulders, an image redolent of experience and insight, silvery streaks magically leading to the fountain of wisdom. When the owner of the tresses spoke, the words flowed effortlessly, that distinct and beautiful Argentine cadence spilling out, and the girl strained to focus on the meaning behind the words in lieu of the harmonious euphony. She felt ecstatic and overwhelmed, but rejected both sentiments, desperately trying to stay in the present, in the moment. 

And yet, it was too much; the woman’s melodic voice wound about her like snowflakes in a terrific blizzard, enveloping, distracting, encouraging her to concentrate on the pauses and blanks, the spaces amidst the imaginary precipitation: “Carlos Gardel, French Argentine Tango singer and songwriter… gorrión, a type of bird [sparrow]… profound sadness, melancholic nature of the lyrics…”. It was so easy to drift away; she must learn to control the hippocampus, that visceral ‘sea monster’ supposedly in command of her spatial navigation and long-term memory. For now, q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p and a long-overdue message to a dear friend would have to preserve this moment.

¹Hippocaampus: “named after its resemblance to the seahorse, from the Greek, ἱππόκαμπος, ‘seahorse’ from ἵππος hippos, ‘horse’ and κάμπος kampos, ‘sea monster’” (Wikipedia)