**The Grammar of Goodbyes**

Barcelona, 09:04 AM

The olive tree has sprouted two new leaves overnight—tiny, defiant things unfurling toward the balcony railing. Polilla inspects them with the intensity of a botanist, her antennae flickering. “Crece rápido,” she declares. It grows fast.

I sip my coffee, watching the steam curl like Arabic script above the cup. The suitcase is still under the bed, but this morning I found myself dusting off my old backpack, its straps still frayed from the Camino. Not to leave, but to repair.

Lina arrives with a needle and thread, her hands still smudged with ink from the print shop. “Las costuras también son historias,” she says, threading the needle with red yarn. Seams are stories too.

As she stitches, I think of all the temporary goodbyes that brought me here—the rushed hasta luegos at train stations, the awkward hugs with hostel roommates, the silent farewells to cities I swore I’d return to (and some I didn’t). The old Sofia treated departures like punctuation marks: hard stops between chapters. The new Sofia is learning that goodbyes are more like semicolons; pauses where the sentence continues, just differently.

Polilla lands on the backpack’s patched shoulder strap. “¿Duele?” she asks. Does it hurt?

I think of the tear—ripped when I scrambled up a Sardinian hillside to photograph a storm rolling in. “Solo cuando no lo cuidas,” I say. Only when you don’t tend to it.

Lina knots the thread with a satisfied hum. Outside, the castellers are assembling again in the plaza, their shouts rising like a tide. The old Sofia would’ve seen their human towers as metaphors for impermanence—how everything collapses eventually. The new Sofia notices how they laugh when they fall, how the same hands that build also catch.

Lina hands me the repaired backpack, its scars now outlined in crimson. “Para los próximos viajes,” she says. For the next journeys.

Polilla crawls into the front pocket, her wings fluttering against the fabric. The old Sofia measured courage in miles traveled alone. The new Sofia knows the braver thing is to leave space in your pack for the people who’ll walk beside you—and to trust they’ll still be there when you circle back.

I hang the backpack next to the olive tree, where its shadow stretches long and lean across the tiles. Not packed, not empty, but ready.

The castellers’ tower sways, then holds.

—Sofia