La Voz de Galicia – December 28, 2025 →
These Christmas days, sleeping at my mother’s house, in what used to be my room and my sisters’ room, I began thinking about that version of myself that stayed there, suspended in time, and that maybe no longer exists. Or perhaps it does exist, in the memory of others, but not in mine (forgetting comes quite naturally to me). On that bed, I suddenly felt a sense of quiet, although I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe because I realized I am no longer the same person who slept there as a child, or because I became aware of the path that led me to the person I am now. Or perhaps simply for revisiting that path: the path of mistakes, of learning, of growth, of good things, of bad things, of the things we leave behind, of the things we carry…
And even though I’m one of those people who enjoys Christmas, I also recognize that it’s a complex time, when we can’t always be where we want to be, or don’t always want to be where we are supposed to be. At my mother’s house, I thought about how hard it is to reconcile those conflicting feelings between what you want to do and what you have to do, or between who you were and who you are. That version of yourself lives in the memory of the things you left behind: in that closet, on that little bedside table, in that book, in that family photo. And it also lives in the people who, for whatever reason (time, distance, life), are also left behind, or who are still there but do not recognize this version of you… And in that space between who you were and who you are, you begin to question who you will become, and you hope that in ten or fifteen years you will also be able to see that the path you took—whatever it was (the one of pause, the one of change, the one of growth)—led you to become more generous, or a better person.
