The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa

through a lot of moments, but what happens is that you stop noticing. I think that to truly know yourself you need to go back to your moments, analyze them, and accept them for what they are.
    My life is made up of moments and odors, and they are what make me what I am.

22
A way never to get angry
    Look for your point of no return
.
    —a radiologist with small ears and huge eyebrows who hypnotized us with his tone of voice and his stories
    I think that there’s nothing I hate more than getting angry: shouting, cursing, not being able to control myself.
    Sometimes in the hospital we cursed our fate; sometimes we got angry about it. A doctor (a radiologist who sometimes told us jokes when he was on duty) taught us how to control our moments of anger, to be capable of knowing our limits.
    He spoke to us about the “point of no return.” Once you’ve passed this point, you can’t avoid getting angry. It exists, it’s tangible, it’s physical; we can feel it and therefore we can control it.
    Our radiologist friend made us take a piece of paper andwrite down what it was we noticed before reaching this point, the levels of annoyance. What are they like? What do you notice when you feel that you can’t control your fury?
    It was a list of three or four points a bit like this:
    1. I notice that I’m annoyed by what the other person is saying.
    2. I start to notice that my anger is getting stronger.
    3. I’ve started to raise my voice; I notice that my anger is getting control of me. I start to lose control.
    4. I reach the point of no return.
    If there are three stages before you get to this point, then you will see, just before you reach it, just before you lose control and get angry, that the possibility of stopping exists. Maybe you’ll notice that just before the point of no return you move your hands a lot, or your voice shakes or you swear a lot. These are the effects you have to control.
    How? First of all by asking your partner, or your friend or one of your yellows, to use a key word when they see one of these symptoms. They should say “pistachio” or “United States.” Whatever it takes to make you realize that you are approaching the point. To begin with you don’t notice your points of no return; they go by so quickly that the line between one state and the next is almost invisible.
    When they’ve said the key word a few times you’ll find that you start to become capable of hearing it. This is when you have to turn off your anger, take a step back, because if you don’t reach that point then you’ll be able to controlyourself. Everything can be sorted out if you don’t get to that point.
    In the hospital I started to practice this; my key word was
tumor
. I’ve always liked giving a more positive spin to this word. Little by little I stopped getting annoyed. It worked, and I was overjoyed.
    As you get older your point of no return changes position. As the years go by and we get more experienced we get angry less often and our point of no return is further away. So it is important to look for it: Every year you need to search for it, find it, and not go past it.
    It’s good to get angry every now and then, but it’s not good to reach the point of no return.

23
The best way to know if you love someone
    Shut your eyes
.
    —Ignacio, a special one among the special ones
    This has to be one of the pieces of advice that fascinate me the most. On the third floor of the hospital there were special people, people unfairly known as the mentally handicapped. (I strongly believe that this phrase should be struck from the dictionary.)
    I think that they’re special people because they make you feel truly special. They are extremely innocent people who make everything simple and easy.
    Perhaps what I found most exciting about them was seeing how they solved their problems, especially how they found out whether they loved someone. I’ve always thought that the great problems in our society come from the fact