The Sea Speaking at the Window

For more than 30 consecutive days, the writer has lived in the Tenerife house he chose in an effort to recover from asthma, the illness that shaped his childhood and once seemed like a constant warning of death.

He remembers asthma as a disease people often dismissed because its danger was not visible. For him, it was always serious. A cousin of the same age died from asthma, but his family hid the news because they feared it could trigger another relapse. He was the child who kept falling ill, living in a home organized around protecting him and searching for air.

“

That was the problem with asthma: everyone thought it was not such a big deal. Damn them. It was a big deal.

His mother called that sheltered existence a “redoma,” a sealed world beyond the street, where other children mocked him because coughing seemed foolish to them. Even after he left home, he continued looking across the island for a remedy that would last a lifetime and free him from the exhausting need to remain alert for the next attack.

Eventually, he found the house where the sea roars outside the window. Now he hears that sea as a reminder of the asthma he says he no longer has. He knows something happened to cure him, although he cannot give it a name.

“

I lived inside THE WARNING.