Whenever someone in your family dies you have the opportunity to inherit something. From my grandmother, I got an old voice recorder that still used cassettes. I remember pretending to have a radio show. I had a microphone that didn’t work, and I went back and forth, recording. The batteries always ran out fast. Every day, before going to school, I wrote down questions for the day. I was no more than 8 years old and, sometimes, the questions were things I heard adults say from TV shows that my brothers watched or from books I read. The background songs on my show were from a local station and sometimes they were interrupted by the same radio commercials. At the end of the day I always said goodbye to those who listened to me, who were only me and my aunty. I usually spent all my evenings at her place. I ended up thinking that my radio program was just for her. I loved having her full attention. I could hear her laugh from the distance when she was listening to my show. Some days she would rewind the tape and laughed as if she had heard it for the first time, and that made me record her laughter. I was important to her and she made me see it. In June 2006, she died along with my entire show. A month after her death, my father arrived with a box full of the cassettes of all my recordings that she had saved. I was very hurt and I was only 11 years old. I pulled each of the black ribbons and threw them in the trash. I regret so much that I did that. Sometimes I just want to hear her loud and contagious laugh again.
