La Voz de Galicia – January 4, 2026 →
The day after tomorrow the holidays will be over, and just as they arrived, they will be gone. One Christmas more, one Christmas less… The rhythm of time during these weeks is something I still cannot fully grasp. It expands and contracts depending on the day and the circumstances. Sometimes it feels as though the moment has not yet come, and other times it passes so quickly that I’m not even sure I had time to digest it.
For those of us who live between two realities, two cities, or two countries; for those of us who have loved ones in a different place from where we reside, and yet are fortunate enough to spend the holidays with them, time seems to have a life of its own. In my case, in December, I counted the days, waiting for the moment I could hug my mother (and my sisters, and my nieces). The closer the day of departure approached, the longer the days seemed to stretch. And then suddenly January arrived, and as I pack my bag to return to that other parallel life, I realize that those eagerly awaited days passed so quickly and were so hectic that, even though I enjoyed truly beautiful moments with my family, it feels like only yesterday that I arrived at my mother’s house, full of excitement to spend time together, when in reality, the day after tomorrow I will leave in tears, with the sense that, no matter how much time I had, it was never enough.
Time does that. It stretches, it shrinks. The faster you want it to pass, the slower it moves; the slower you want it to flow, the faster it flies, like a sigh. I thought that after two decades of living in between, practicing this coming and going, I would have learned to master it, but the truth is that every day I become more aware that, over the years, this feeling does not improve…
