“I’d arrest you if I had handcuffs
I’d arrest you if I had the time
I’d throw you down in the backseat
As if you committed a terrible crime”
“Handcuffs” by Brand New

I remember reflecting a bit on the idea of a thief. You see, the main concept of the thief in my writings is the idea that you are eternally guilty. Every finger pointed at you has a reason that’s fixated in truth, every conversation is a build up for the future court jury you’ll have to face. Kind of dramatic, but this is common with individuals that commit self-sabotage. It’s a pityful way of living, but it’s easy to be misread. You’re eternally guilty, but not eternally a victim, you see? With that I mean a victim of the fingers pointed at you; you’re not to be pitied that way. The idea of the thief is that you are the perpetrator, which means that to some extent everything said about you is true. I have to admit, it’s not an entirely awful way of living. The bad part is very rare to come if you don’t have OCD, so you live your life having this grounded belief that you’re always in the border of every relation. Not in the middle.

Now that I’ve explained the concept of the thief, I was trying to think when it all started with me. I’ll give you a few memories and I’ll walk with you through them as they fill my room tonight.

When I was… God, I can’t remember. I have very, VERY few memories from when I was a kid. But this one never escaped me. I must have been so small, I remember having trouble walking along this huge and beautiful airport with my tiny little legs alonside my tiny little mom. I think we were alone together, and she was very busy trying to do something while we had our baggages sitting in a corner. I was terribly hungry, but we were terribly poor. I said to her that I was so hungry my belly ached. She looked at me with a sad expression and said she couldn’t do anything about it in the moment. I was mildly irritated, of course. I was too young to understand you can’t always have what you want. But I would learn that lesson a few moments later. My mom was talking to someone in a payphone trying to fix whatever issue we were having at the airport, probably talking to some member of our family. I walked away from her for a bit. My mom was overprotective, so the problem must have been very big for her to not realize I was gone for a while. We were outside of the airport, but very close to its entrance, so I walked through that door. The airport was enormous, my legs were very small. I was a bit angry and upset, I kept walking forward. In the middle of the airport there was this huge… thingy that had a lot of candy in it. It was like a fountain without liquids, only pretty and solid candy. I kept staring at it. I remember that my guts started eating my heart alive, I didn’t know if it was because of the hunger or because of what I was thinking of doing. I picked a candy (it was just some gum) and ran with it back to my mom. I didn’t pay for it. I stole it because of my deep hunger. Not very bad, right? I seemed to be hyping you all up for something awful, I just stole a piece of gum as a very hungry and upset 4 year old. But then I came back to my mom. I was so hungry I couldn’t keep it to myself, so I just ate the gum there. I remember feeling so guilty, but it was a feeling I was yet to fully understand. Funny thing is, I was so scared of stealing that I accidentally picked the only candy that couldn’t fill me up. How funny is that? I chewed the gum while my mother was finishing her call. She ended it and saw me chewing. She asked me what I was chewing. I felt so sad. I said to her it was gum. She asked me, very worried, where did I get it. She probably thought I caught it from the ground or some stranger gave it to me. My guts were completely destroyed as I confessed to her I stole it. She was not mad, but it would take me many, many years to see her that sad. In my hateful way of thinking, I could say she was disappointed in me, but no. She was such a good person, the sadness she felt at that moment was entirely on her shoulders. She blamed herself for not having enough money to buy food to me, she blamed herself for putting me in such a lame situation. She told me not to do it ever again. Before the cancer, she could be very angry and demanding when she wanted to. She’d even hit us sometimes. But in this moment, she was profoundly sad. She didn’t need to lift a finger, I would never steal again. Even after her death, the thought of seeing her face like I saw it that day would haunt me forever. I never caused her much trouble before or after that, and she would always say how proud of us she was. It makes sense to talk about your titular thief and start when he actually was one. This is an idea of guilt, of living and making people proud and happy because they knew me. Being a person they can always remember with a smile, not with the world’s saddest frown.

I grew up and became a shadow of a person. I don’t know why, I was never really that interested in living, I guess. I liked to watch the world go by, but not really participate in it. So it took me a long, long time to develop a personality. For many years, I was unsure of what I was, but at first I thought for sure I would discover it in school. I remember crying for my mom every year I realized I wasn’t going to school yet because I saw my siblings getting ready to go and I would think that it was the coolest thing ever. I could also be less lonely, I guess. So I remember that in the first day of school, being a tiny bean of a person, I asked myself “Okay, I’m finally in school. I have to decide. Am I going to be a quiet nerd or a troublesome bully?” I swear to God, I must have been six years old and asked that to myself. The answer to the question came quick: I didn’t like the idea of upsetting or disappointing my mother, so I would try to be a well-learned person in school. Not getting into any troubles. I laugh trying to imagine what would’ve happened if I didn’t choose that. Well, anyway, the years passed and I was in my early teens. I tried my best to be a class clown. Before my depression in 2015, I was actually a very energetic child. I liked to run around with my friends and make them laugh. I loved to make people laugh. But I had this little… way of trying to make a joke sometimes. If I ever went to class before most of my classmates, I would pick a pencil case or a schoolbag of some friend of mine and I would hide it. I would have a bit of fun seeing them try to find their things and then would tell them where they were. We laughed, which is funny, because it wasn’t very funny. But I remember talking to some kid in my class and he was talking about a secret with a friend of mine. I came near and said I wanted to know about it. He said something along the lines of “I won’t tell you because you will for sure tell everyone”. He didn’t trusted me a bit. It should be nothing, but that made me so upset. I thought that I gave an impression of being trustworthy, of being a good friend. I think he eventually told me what it was, he was just teasing me. But I swore to myself to try and be the most trustworthy person I could be from that moment onward. I learned to appreciate people’s trust in me, and I would become so interested on knowing everything I could about all my friends. If you were good to me, I would like you to let me be a part of your life.

Now, another funny story. I remember I was very little when Michael Jackson died. I didn’t understand the concept of death very well, but he was very important in my childhood. We used to listen to him all the time in our house, we used to talk about him a lot. So he died and every person in the world was sad for a day. A few years later, I would discover the accusations that were saying he was a pedophile. But I discovered them in a funny and slightly biased way. This youtuber, big fan of his, was making a video on MJ and he kept affirming that there was a high chance that the accusations were false and manipulated by money-hungry fathers trying to get Michael’s money and the media’s attention with their children that went to Neverland. Look, I don’t know, man. I never watched Leaving Neverland and never actually tried to do a research about the accusations. But when I was younger a concept was introduced in my brain and it caused a big damage: What if you are accused of something awful and you can’t really prove you didn’t do it? Imagine having your whole career be destroyed by rumours like that. It was a nightmare for me to think about. I ended up having this obsession with keeping proofs of things. To this day I never deleted a conversation I had with someone, I always have them with me. The time I have to wait for a backup to end is WILD.

So many stories about guilt, but I hope you understand how all of this kind of helped me be a better person at the end of the day.

Well, the truth is, I don’t think you can be a good person if your motives come from such outer spaces. A good person isn’t a good person because of what people may think of them; they’re just a good person. My mom was a good person because she blamed herself at that time, but I was the one that stole the gum, still. The unchangeable hands of a thief. A good person is a good person between every moment where they feel angry and sad. When they do something bad, when they are angry and say something they shouldn’t have said. A good eye will spot those moments and will see as clear as day that the heart of that person is pure. I saw a few people like that in my life. The only one that’s still here is my grandmother. The others just went away. I can’t be a good person. I can’t be beautiful inside. So if someone thinks that I am and they change their mind, I think I feel that with a bigger pain. Even if it’s for something that’s wrong, they saw the thief, at last. Is it anyone’s fault? Is it because of the way I was raised? Does it matter where it all started? Truth is, I think I would be the same way if all of this was different. I would never be able to be a bully in school. Even if my mom died when I was 2 years old, I would still be a thief.

There’s a passage in these days, a path to a proof inside of an apple like a worm. Slithering in the cobblestone, you see the beautiful eye of the Sun of summer. The God of desire. It reflects from every being as if we’re all shining, until a hand catches the wind and stores it in its pocket. Gathering the sunlight like a bug, the hand waves with no shadow, warmer than the hug of a blanket. Scene starry-eyed, your vampire eyes catch the dance of the fingers like its blood was a river you’d happily drown. “I want to conquer the sunlight too”, you say. The cobblestone yells no sound of warning as you stretch your hand out of the trees to reach the hand of the summer. The lady escapes your grasp while looking at you, and you’re unsure if she hurts you more than she hurts herself. But your arm bathes in the stare of the Sun, out of the blanket of trees. Your skin becomes stone, colder than ice. As you petrify, you fail to see the face of the summer. Is it a friend? Is it your sister? Your mother? A lover? Is it someone you know? You join the cobblestone path with your body, as the sun reflects in all the woman mirror.

“It’s hard to be the better man
When you forget you’re tryin’
It’s hard to be the better man
When you’re still lying.”
“Handcuffs” by Brand New