**The Cartography of Small Things**
Barcelona, 09:05 AM
The first of October arrives with a breeze that carries the scent of roasted chestnuts from Plaza Catalunya. I’m sitting on my usual bench in Ciutadella Park, notebook balanced on my knees, watching a toddler chase pigeons with the single-minded determination of a conquistador. His mother—exhausted, amused—catches my eye and rolls hers. “Cansado,” she mouths. Tired. I grin and raise my coffee in solidarity.
Last night, I dreamt in a language that wasn’t quite Spanish or Catalan, but something in between—words melting like turrón on my tongue. When I woke, the dream clung to me like the sticky residue of a Barcelona summer. It’s been six months since I stopped counting my time here in weeks, stopped referring to my flat as a “temporary base.”
The teens from the zine project have taken to leaving me notas—little scraps of paper tucked into my bag or slipped under my door. Yesterday’s read: “La Sofi, ¿por qué las sombras saben más que la luz?” Why do shadows know more than light? I found it pressed between the pages of my notebook, next to a receipt from the Moroccan spice shop where the owner now greets me with “Hola, hija.”
Aylin called this morning, her voice crackling through bad reception in Cappadocia. “You’re nesting,” she accused, half-laughing. “Next you’ll adopt one of those ugly Catalan sheepdogs.” (Unlikely. But I did pet one yesterday.)
What surprises me isn’t the staying—it’s the way this city has become a language I’m learning to speak with my hands. The barista who corrects my “un café” to “un tallat” without mockery. The way the old men playing petanca in the park now include me in their debates about Messi’s retirement. Even my photography is changing: fewer sweeping vistas, more intimate corners—the chip in my building’s stairwell where generations have scratched initials, the way afternoon light pools in the dent of Marcos’s left cheek when he laughs.
Claudia says this is what happens when you stop collecting places and start being collected by them. She left a voicemail last night: “Cuidado, nómada. Roots are sneaky.”
But I’m beginning to think roots aren’t anchors—they’re more like the mycelium networks I photographed in Montseny last spring: invisible threads that nourish without constraining. The woman who once measured her life in departures now finds poetry in the mundane: the rhythm of her neighborhood’s garbage truck schedule, the exact angle of autumn light through her kitchen window at 4:32 PM.
Growth, I’m learning, isn’t just about expanding outward. Sometimes it’s about deepening inward—letting a place map itself onto you, one cracked tile, one shared cortado, one untranslatable dream at a time.
—Sofia