Pablo Espinoza Lafuente's poem remembers childhood as a stretch of small, stubborn disobedience, and then watches that energy drain away into adulthood. The speaker and a companion ("we") look back at games played in a garden and courtyard: sitting in a bathtub with a glass, letting soup go cold, sticking out a tongue, leaping from a window. The title, "The way we see things," names the real subject. These scenes matter because of how children look at the world, turning a leftover afternoon into something grander. Growing up changes that vision.
The poem's first image shows this well. The children missed an outing, so they make their own substitute: a garden bathtub stands in for the pool, and they "claim" the chlorine's favor, as if declaring ownership of a pleasure they never actually had. Water then runs through the whole poem. The abandoned soup becomes another pool, where flies "sail" and flip "with a synchronized swim." The image is funny and a little revolting, since the fats "exhale" like something alive. It is also exactly how a child's mind works: the dinner table has become a swimming gala. Rebellion here has nothing to do with grand gestures. It means refusing to finish your soup, and seeing something beautiful in the refusal.
The form suits this memory. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the stanzas vary in length. Early on, the lines are strung together with participles: "Wetting," "feeling," "Abandoning," "flipping," "Taking," "Jumping." Because these verbs never settle into a past tense, the childhood scenes seem to hang in a continuous present, the way memories do when they arrive in a rush. The anaphora of "'til the fats exhale, / 'til the flies sail" slows the rhythm as though the speaker is watching the soup go off. Then come the short, isolated lines that break the flow: "Anyone could be a rebel at that age." The tone is dry, almost shrugging, and it gently deflates the whole catalogue. Maybe these rebellions were never as special as they felt. Or maybe the shrug is the adult's way of protecting himself from tenderness.
"No one understood what 'Anticretico' meant" is the most puzzling line, and the poem gives no explanation. Judging by the way it sounds, it is a piece of grown-up jargon that children repeat for its strangeness rather than its sense. It stands for a world of adult words and rules passing over their heads. The single word "Remember?" then turns directly to the companion, and the poem becomes an act of shared memory. The clothes rack scene follows, full of odd, physical details: shirts hung by the neckline, running "through a blanket or a smock," lifting "the face with closed eyes." These read like games, possibly dressing up or running into the wind, though the poem never says so. What it conveys is bodily freedom and trust, the confidence of someone who closes their eyes and expects the world to hold.
The turn arrives with a lone "Then," and the language changes at once. "Growing up lessened our time in the courtyard." The verbs are now finite and heavy, and there is "a rage to scale down everything," which could mean anger at how small the world has become, or an urge to shrink everything to a manageable size. Even the bus journey home is something they "preferred," a slower, less adventurous choice than the old running and jumping.
The ending ties the poem together. The children once left soup untouched until the flies arrived. The adults wash their clothes and leave them outside "all night long, all day long" and then, after a pause, "and one more night." That last line, set apart, works like a sigh or a punchline. It echoes the earlier neglect, but the feeling has changed. The soup was left alone on purpose, as a gesture of defiance. The laundry is forgotten out of tiredness or indifference, and the cleansing water of the pool, bathtub and soup has become a chore. The poem suggests that the same act of leaving things be can be play in childhood and weariness later on.
That is why the poem lingers. It treats childhood fondly but without sentimentality, and it lets a single quiet image of wet clothes in the dark say what growing up costs.