El Silencio

I found this on Tivives Beach, on the dark volcanic sand. A small plastic doll, headless, with a couple of dried leaves nearby that looked almost like they were keeping her company. Most of the time, when I photograph something, I don't think much about what it means until later. This was one of the few times I understood it while I was still standing there.

I thought about a girl, somewhere, who had once been given this doll. Someone loved her enough to buy her a toy, and for a while, that doll mattered. And then, at some point, it stopped mattering, and it ended up here, discarded, alone on the sand.

I'm about to turn 57. I don't think about my age often, but standing in front of that doll, I did. If you live long enough, eventually you get discarded too, not because you've stopped having value, but because of how you start being seen. There's a point where people look at you and measure what's left instead of what's still true. As if having more years behind you than ahead of you makes you less invested in life, in other people, in what's still coming. It doesn't. That's a lie society tells about age, not a fact about the person living it.

That's the difference between the doll and a person. The doll changed. It broke down, it aged, and that's why it ended up here. A person can be discarded the same way without actually changing at all, just because of how time makes them look from the outside.

That's what I saw in the silence around that doll. Not just abandonment, but the particular kind of quiet that comes after something stops being looked at the way it once was.