Parallel Universes

The one you see here, with a smile as wide as the distance between Lithuania and Brazil, is my grandmother.
She is smiling with two colleagues at an ordinary lunch.
But today, this image carries a different weight.

I recently recovered many photos from her youth:
fragments frozen in time that I call treasures.

Someone clicked the shutter and, unknowingly, captured more than just a gesture:
they captured a burst of her soul on paper.

Holding this image in my hands is like peering through a crack into the past, into history.
A window through which I not only look… I also participate.

I am the one who decorates the scene with new colors,
the one who rewrites what has already been lived from the love that still endures.

Because it seems to me that her smile, which pursues me and dwells within me,
doesn't go with those brick walls.

I see her better under a leafy tree,
among colors, flowers, laughter, shared bread,
and the sun filtering through the leaves, warming her heart.

And if it is true that parallel universes exist,
I want to believe that in one of them, this scene is real.
That her laughter continues to echo in the air.
That I can hear it.
And that I, brush in hand,
have brought her back.