Friends, today is February 14, Valentine's Day, so I would love to tell you about an experience of mine, in particular, and a poem by the great cumanes-Venezuelan writer, Andrés Eloy Blanco, that comes as a ring to the finger. You have probably read this poem before and I have told you about this experience on other occasions, so you probably know who and what I am going to talk about. Yes, I'm going to tell you about my first love and how there are trains that pass only once in a lifetime.

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But before we get to that part of the story, let's talk about the young, almost girlish Nancy. I'm a woman who had the good or bad luck to grow up surrounded by beautiful women, with whom I could not compete in beauty, so I had to use other attributes to get attention. So I not only studied, read, but also became an excellent joke teller (a skill, by the way, that I have lost). In short, since I was young I was admired and sought after by young and not so young people, who not only admired my physique but also praised my intellectual qualities. Points for them and points for me.

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The detail is that a person always doubts, if he has several options. If he has only one option, he chooses it and that's it. On the other hand, when someone has the possibility to choose among many things, he can afford to think, to look at it well, to weigh, to compare, all the alternatives to supposedly "decide better". In love and in almost everything in life it is like that. In my case, having many admirers, I had the opportunity, although it sounds boastful, to reject some boys who came up to me and declared their love. It was not vanity. On the one hand, it was the indecision of not knowing who was the best of them all, and on the other hand, perhaps the most valid argument in my favor, I did not fall in love with any of them.

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My line of rejected admirers made me famous as an iron woman, unconquerable and without a soul. A reputation that I enjoyed to a certain extent, since I knew that there are things that are returned, and falling out of love is one of them. So when I visited a Venezuelan town called Valle de la Pascua in 1995, I knew for sure where my heart was. In that year I met my first love. They say that the world goes around a lot, but what it is for you, it awaits you, and that is what I felt: that this man, life had reserved him for me. In two words: I fell in love.

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When that boy asked me to be his girlfriend, I didn't hesitate and immediately said yes. I remember that with that love I knew what it was like to live on a cloud, to have butterflies in your stomach, to cry with joy, to not feel like eating and very especially, to feel that another person is your other half. Although it sounds corny now, with that boy I lived one of the best years of my youth. But one February 14, coincidentally, what would have been the best news for a woman, for me was the worst: the boy asked me to marry him. At that moment, I was finishing my career and I had already been offered a good job. A marriage with that boy, at that time, meant not only stopping studying, but also moving to another city, since he lived six hours away from the city where I live. So I said no.

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One of the things I remember from that February 14 is that I told him, wrapped in my vanity, that I was too young to get married, that he was my first boyfriend, that I knew nothing about life and that he should wait. So I told him: wait for me. Wait for me to graduate, wait for me to settle down and then come back and we'll get married. The boy left and never came back. I even graduated and got a good job, but the boy never came back.

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The famous Venezuelan writer, considered the town's poet, Andrés Eloy Blanco has a poem entitled "A Florinda en invierno" that goes like this:

To the young man who spoke to you of love
you said yesterday, Florinda, to come back,
because in your hands you had flowers left over
to make fun of Spring.

Autumn is here: bed and blankets
gave you in his leaf-stripping the vine
and the man who told you about love came
and again you said: -Wait.

And now you wait, remote viewing,
gray countryside, broken palisade,
without heat the posthumous sprout

who left you the truncated vine,
because when love comes in the fall,
if we let him go, he'll never come back.

This poem talks about how a woman always says no to love because she is still young, because she has admirers and opportunities, or as the lyrical voice says, because "in her hands there were flowers left over to laugh at the spring". However, time passes and when she is old (autumn), love returns and she, believing she has her whole life ahead of her and the beauty of before (spring), says to her again: "Wait". But that's where she makes the big mistake and life begins to take its toll, because as the poetic voice says: "when love comes in autumn, if we let it go, it never comes back."

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There is a saying that life is full of opportunities, that you just have to be in the right place at the right time, so that you don't miss them; but there is also a phrase that says that there are trains that pass only once in a lifetime and that if we let them go, we get stuck on the platform. Love is not a dish to be eaten cold, nor is it something to be left for later. We tend to believe that life is eternal and there are ages when we cannot leave a "I love you" for tomorrow or a "I love you" for later. If love is knocking at your door, open it. Nice Valentine's Day.

UNTIL THE NEXT READING, FRIENDS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

https://www.poeticous.com/andres-eloy-blanco/a-florinda-en-invierno?locale=es