Dear Carmen,

I have been thinking about forests lately.

And about water.

A forest makes us look through things. Water makes us look into them.

Perhaps that is why I kept returning to this painting.

The trees rise, but they also fall into the water. The forest continues downward in long lines, as if for a moment the earth had forgotten which way things were supposed to grow.

Nothing is completely revealed. A mountain appears between two trunks and disappears again. Light finds some leaves and leaves others behind.

And there is one small tree that caught it.

Everything around it remained almost in darkness, but for a moment, that tree became gold.

I kept thinking about it.

It had probably been green its entire life.

And then one afternoon, light convinced it otherwise.

Maybe we are like that too.

We spend years believing we know what we are, until something—or someone—touches us differently, and suddenly we discover a color that had been there all along.

Perhaps that is what I wanted to give you, Carmen.

Not a landscape.

A place where the forest can become water, where darkness can hide something beautiful and where, every once in a while, a little piece of light finds its tree.

Camila