La Voz de Galicia – July 23, 2021 →
The dream has been recurring for a year. Some things change, but in the end, it’s always the same. Sometimes I am lost in the middle of the woods and paths leading me to the same place from which I want to escape appear before me. I run, scream, sweat, become anguished–but nothing, I can’t manage to leave the place. At other times, I know the area–a place where I work or used to work–but the doors to access it are closed, I am incapable of crossing the threshold. I push, scream, and beat the doors with my hands and feet, but nothing–I can’t manage to get in. The dream, whatever its context, always ends in the same way: I can’t manage to reach the place I am supposed to be.
These days, when I read the news about the restrictions related to this fifth wave of the pandemic, I thought that in some way we were all in this dream where we cannot arrive at the place we were told (or we imagined) we would be at this point in time. I thought about the owner of the tapas bar who saw that a botellón (binge drinking on the street) that had been going on for years in front of his place was still being held despite his being forced to close his bar. I thought about the owner of the country home for rent who thought she could have a good summer, but now finds that half the reservations have been cancelled. I thought about the small businesspeople, and the spaces for rent, and the time they will take to open their doors again…
Getting up from the bed, trying to forget that in tonight’s dream I had not been able to leave the place where I was, I thought about that very fashionable word nowadays– resilience–and about how to learn to practice it. Given the way we are going, we have no choice but to adapt to the fact that there is still a long way to go before we can say that we were able to get out of this.
