Memory
I must have been six years old when I experienced an intense imaginary friendship with a girl roughly of the same age. On the window of my room at the time, facing Allende street, I used to breathe on one of the glass panes. And I would draw a door with my finger… With my imagination, I would go out through that door, with great joy and urgency, and cross the entire field I could see until I reached a milk store called PINZÓN… And through the “O” in PINZÓN I would walk in and go down hastily to the center of the Earth, where my “imaginary friend” would wait for me.
I don’t recall what she looked like. But I do know she was joyful, she laughed a lot. In silence. She was graceful and danced as if she were weightless. I followed her every movement and told her, while she danced, about my secret problems. Which ones? I don’t remember. But from my voice she knew all about me. When I came back to the window, I returned through the same door drawn on the glass. When? How long had I spent with “her”? I don’t know. Maybe a second, maybe thousands of years… I was happy.
I would erase the “door” with my hand and it would “disappear.” I would run with my secret and my joy to the remotest corner of my house, and always in the same place, under a cedron tree, I would shout and laugh. Amazed to be alone with my immense happiness and such a vivid recollection of this girl. Thirty-four years have passed since I lived that magical friendship, and every time I remember it, it comes alive and grows more and more inside my world.
PINZÓN, 1950. Frida Kahlo
This text is taken from a couple of pages in the diary Frida Kahlo wrote during the last decade of her life. This story is from 1950, a year Kahlo spent in hospital. The Two Fridas is one of her most famous paintings. It is a double self-portrait in which one Frida carries a victorian dress and the other a traditional tehuana outfit.