La Voz de Galicia – June 14, 2026 →
I found myself wondering these past few days which five or ten stories I will keep telling over and over in my old age. And why those stories, rather than others, are the ones that remain etched in memory. In fact, I already do it now, even though I am not old yet. I am aware that whenever I need to fill a moment with an anecdote, with something interesting, I tend to repeat three or four stories as if they were the most special or significant ones, when the truth is that perhaps they are simply the ones chosen out of convenience—the first that came to mind—and, rather than thinking any further, they are the stories I always repeat. Forty-five years of life, twenty-five years of a career in music, fifteen years in teaching, and twelve years of writing, reduced to at most ten anecdotes.
When I am with older people, especially my mother, and I sit and listen to them without interrupting, I often find myself noticing the different details in the many versions they tell of the same story. Sometimes I even write those details down. In my mother’s case, the same story, on the same day, can change its subject, its context, or the period in which it supposedly took place, without altering its essence. It is fascinating what our imagination does with the things that, for whatever reason, remain there, hovering in the background, waiting to be told, stretched, reshaped, and distorted, often without us being fully aware of what we are doing to them. Because most of us, every time we revisit a memory, end up modifying it unintentionally.
And what happens with the infinite memories we never narrate? Where are they hidden? Perhaps we should make a little more effort to remember those things that made us grow as people, so as to stop repeating those versions of ourselves that no longer represent anything…
