This is the story of an ethereal woman named Bruma. Her parents named her this out of love for winter, and when she was born, amidst arches and deafening noises, the only sound that remained indelible was the cry of sorrow at seeing her deprived of her legs.
But she grew up in peace, without caring about what others saw as a defect. Sitting on her skeletal throne, she knew how to defend herself with sharp words, as only the cold of January can do.
Bruma loved to dance, and every time she wanted to do so, she knew that by closing her eyes, she could transport herself to any dimension. Dreaming was, for her, the key to opening that door that was inaccessible to many, too busy burning like dry wood in the fire of vain wealth.
Every time, she retraced the same oblique path until she reached the stairs that led her to the golden door. Once opened, she would walk for hours, savoring the scent of a fog with silver-copper filaments. Among the dilated notes of ancient refractions, her bones began to bend like drops of mercury traveling along a compressed hyperbola, only to dance lightly like the smoke of a voluptuous incense.
For years, she lived hungry for dreams, and sometimes she would return to the real world to catch her breath after a long dream-induced apnea. But after her thirtieth year, something broke. What she never imagined happened, and she became lost between the lines of a life without music. Her inner refuge unfortunately became an abandoned place for decades.
Bruma grew old without realizing it, in the dryness of materialism, and her favorite pastime became watching people from the window of her home, like a sad spectator in an empty cinema.
It took the final illness to awaken something in her. Knowing that she had little life left, something inside her inevitably exploded, and she remembered how happy she had been when she didn’t exist, when she could still dream.
For weeks, she tried to rediscover that path, but all attempts were in vain. Until, on a cold day in her last winter, her lungs, growing weaker, pointed her in a different direction.
She went outside and headed towards the neglected garden of her house, got out of her wheelchair, and for the first time, touched the earth with her hands. She smiled, and the sound of the rain echoed through her veins.
Suddenly, she found herself in the fog, and shortly after, an elderly lady and her young soul danced together like never before. And as these two halves intertwined in a timeless place, in the real world – or rather, for those who believe it to be real – a flock of black seagulls swears it saw an elderly lady transform into what is now known as “the nameless tree,” with its solemn silence observing the world without judgment, accepting every season as a caress from the universe.