Rosinen

R for Rosinen (Raisins)

My cousin K. and I have always been very close, ever since I was
born.
She is six years older than me so that I spend most of my childhood
days following her around doing most of the things she would tell
me.
One time she took me out in my pushchair for a walk.
Suddenly it started to rain . She climbed up on my pushchair to attach
the rain fold to protect me from getting wet.
Because she was quite small she had to climb all the way up.
For no apparent reason the pushchair accelerated and before we knew we
went downhill.
Our little journey stopped abruptly as we hit a tree which turned over
the pushchair and released the both of us on to the floor. Luckily we
were all right.
Another time we were playing hide and seek at our grandma's
house.
The plan was to make ourselves invisible so that our granny could not
find us.
My cousin convinced me to go and hide on top of the pile of coal
downstairs in the basement which our granny used to heat the
house.
My grandma was furious when she found me sitting there covered in black
coal.
Later on , I was eleven years old, my cousin took me to an alternative
cinema which showed a soft erotic movie that night.
I don't know how we managed to get me in but I definitely enjoyed the
movie and it had left me inspired with an early nostalgia for aesthetic
erotica.
Afterwards we went to a gay cafe were I admired some very beautiful men
especially that one behind the bar who was serving me a hot chocolate.
I remained however puzzled as to why they would never want to take any
notice of me an aspiring woman.
That night I returned home after 11pm because we had missed the last
bus to my house.
We had to walk all the way to my house. My parents were
traumatised.
One morning I woke up at my cousins house with a strange pain in my
stomach.
I was 14 and all I remember was that wanted to go home and be on my
own.
I would sit in our front yard all afternoon, kneeling on the floor,
staring at the grass and flowers, in a deep conversation with
myself.
It was not until I went to the toilet that I realised I'd just had my
first day of period.
My cousin moved to Venezuela to follow her boyfriend just after the
Tschernobyl disaster.
We were spending our last day together at my house, taking pictures of
each other and talking on my balcony. It was an early summer day.
I was 16 and she was 21.
It nearly broke my heart when it was time to say goodbye.
From then on we were writing to each other on a regular basis with the
latest news from our lives.
I went to visit her for the first time the year after.
It was the first time that I'd been in a plane and my first time
abroad.
We spend a month together with her first born eight month old son and
her boyfriend, going on round trips into the country and visiting its
breathtaking coasts.
I came back a transformed and more grown up person and finished my
first relationship within days because I had changed.
In 1991 my cousin came to pay a last visit to the family with her
4-year old son, who at that stage was terminally ill with cancer, but
nobody knew.
It was in December when I accompanied her back to Venezuela.
Four days later her son died in her arms at home.
I was staying for two months. It was one of the hardest and at the same
time most beautiful times of my life.
We spend her birthday and Christmas in Caracas and left to stay on la
Isla Margarita for a week over my birthday and new year.
We spend hours swimming out into the sea and laying on a boat under the
sun giggling about old times.
I went for a romantic date by the beach until the Mosquitoes took
over.
We climbed on to the Avila, one of the mountains surrounding Caracas.
When we arrived in the middle of a jungle we found a small waterfall,
took a shower under it and suffered from a bad virus the following
morning.
We drove around in a jeep for bout three days and visited tiny islands
off the Caribbean coast, bumped into annoying tourists from our
country, and visited the medanos, large inland sand dunes and had sand
in every possible corner for days.
It was hard to leave her after all that.
A few years ago my cousin moved back to Germany with her Chilean
husband and two kids.
Last summer we all went to the German coast and spent day by the
beach.
I returned in a car with her and the kids, a girl and a boy of four and
six.
They were screaming for no apparent reason and crawled all over the
place inside the car. We had to stop several times on the way.
The whole journey took us three hours instead of one and a half.
It was nerve-wrecking!
Now that I've lived in England we speak on the phone all the time and
see each other about twice a year whenever I return to meet the
family.
With her, life has always been a bright experience full of love and
adventure.