Everywhere

La Voz de Galicia – August 22, 2025 →

Wanting to be everywhere. That is my dilemma. If I’m at my mother’s house, I want to be with her, but I also want to be at my own home with Xan, or at my house alone. If I spend time with one of my sisters, I think I’d also like to spend time with the others, so I try to gather them all together, and end up spending time with none… The same thing happens when I have to go somewhere for a social or professional commitment. I want to be there, but I also want not to go, or to be somewhere else… and it goes on like that constantly. I thought that with age I would be able to put this feeling aside. But I think the only thing I’ve managed to do is make it worse, because I still haven’t accepted that each person is as they are, and that perhaps my way of being in the world is this: wanting to be and not be at the same time in any place.

I have noted a quote I heard from the actor Christopher Walken in a documentary about Roger Moore, in which he said, “To some degree or not, we all invent ourselves. We decide somewhere who we would like to be.” And I thought about that quote these past few days when I found myself imagining where and how my old age would be. Perhaps because I just turned forty-five, or because I am aware that I live several lives at once: the one here, the one there, the one in the middle… all of them different, and all of them mine. But that old age is suddenly more present than ever, and it leads me to reflect on this restless life I have invented, which has been changing over the years, the one that gives me the feeling of having the freedom to be in many places, of being the master of my own decisions; when the reality is that no matter how much I try, I will never be where I want to be, or where I think I would like to be…