The Gravity of Goodbyes**
Barcelona, 09:04 AM
The Oaxaca email stares back at me from my screen, the cursor blinking like a hesitant heartbeat. Three weeks in Mexico—jungle waterfalls, Day of the Dead altars, the kind of assignment that would’ve had past-me slamming my laptop shut mid-sentence to pack. But now, my fingers hover over the keyboard, tracing the shape of a word I haven’t typed yet: Sí.
A moth bumps against the balcony light—the same one that’s been visiting since August. I’ve started calling it Polilla, much to Claudia’s amusement. “Naming pests now? Next you’ll knit it a sweater,” she’d groaned yesterday over churros. But there’s something about watching this small creature navigate the space between my geranium pots and the neighbor’s laundry line that feels... familiar.
Marcos texts: “Tienes cara de querer huir”—you look like you want to run. He’s not wrong. The itch is still there, that old instinct to turn departures into a reflex before anything (anyone) can pin me down. But when I passed the frutería earlier, Señor Ruiz pressed a pomegranate into my palm with a wink. “Para la chica que siempre mira los billetes de avión,” he said. For the girl always eyeing plane tickets. The fruit split open in my hands on the walk home, seeds scattering like tiny declarations.
Lina left another note under my door last night: “Si te vas, promete volver diferente.” If you go, promise to come back different. Not better, not wiser—just changed. It’s the same thing I used to demand of every journey, back when transformation felt like something I could control with a passport stamp.
The real evolution, I’m realizing, isn’t in choosing between staying and leaving—it’s in learning how to do both without betraying yourself. How to let a place keep loving you even when you’re not there to receive it.
I type the reply: “Acepto. Con condiciones.” I accept. With conditions.
The conditions are small, stubborn things:
— Someone must water Polilla’s favorite geranium
— I’ll FaceTime the zine team during their exhibition
— I’m bringing back chapulines for the abuela downstairs, who claims she’s unshockable
Aylin sends a voice note—just laughter and the clink of tea glasses. “Finalmente,” she sighs. Finally.
But this isn’t a regression. The Sofia who left Istanbul with nothing but a half-empty journal and a fear of commitment wouldn’t recognize the woman now calculating time zones to call the panadería on Three Kings’ Day.
Growth isn’t linear. Sometimes it’s a pomegranate offered by a grocer who’s memorized your tells. Sometimes it’s a moth that keeps returning to the same broken light. Sometimes it’s typing “Vuelvo el 25”—I return on the 25th—and realizing that for the first time, the promise feels lighter than the leaving.
—Sofia