La Voz de Galicia – July 25, 2025 →
I don’t know when I stopped wanting to see, to hear. But for the past few years, I’ve been aware that when I hear shouting, or witness a conflict or an accident, I freeze—without quite knowing why. If the conflict is obvious, or the accident has just happened, I’m able to call emergency services or alert the appropriate person. But when I’m unsure whether the fear is real or imagined, I catch myself frozen, covering my ears like a little girl who can’t bear to hear the grown-ups shouting around her.
And it’s strange, because I grew up in a neighborhood—Os Viños in Ourense—where shouting and fights were part of daily life. I grew up waking in the middle of the night, trying to tell whether the voices coming from the street were cries of joy or of fear. And until not that long ago, I could tell the difference—I could act without hesitation. I could even fall back asleep after calling the police. But now, at 44, whenever I hear any kind of noise out of the ordinary, my mind spins into overdrive imagining the worst possible scenarios. To the point that, sometimes, when a group of people passes by on the street shouting joyfully, my body flinches at the thought that this euphoria might somehow spiral into sudden tragedy.
That’s what I was talking about the other day with Xan, when we were sitting on the sofa of our West Village apartment, on a night when a bit of breeze was finally coming in through the window, and I asked him to close it. “It’s nothing, Cris—they’re just celebrating,” he said. And I, with a look of fear, struggled to find the words to express the deep intensity with which I feel things now—and at the same time, the guilt I feel for not wanting to look at them.
