In the beginning, there was land—
hills breathing steady air,
rain that carried me inward;
it still does.
Loosened into water, I’ve never been disappointed.
I lived in the sweet noise of hellos around town,
and the sudden quiet that followed.
My parents ran from one job to another,
teaching me what carrying a purpose looked like-
enough to begin carrying mine,and to occasionally prepare their lunch.
I remember how my mother studied long hours.
She, my father, brother and grandpas
taught me what different types offreedom we could all ask for:
to choose, to refuse, to remain unfinished.
In the many versions of us we can reach—
rooted in duty, in a dream—
all of them beginning again with every morning.
None should settle too soon, yet, we should followthe magnet that's our heart.
I felt most like myself under theatre lights,
in the rhythm of a game,
where being “weird” was a kind of permission.
All that mattered was expression—its weight, its truth,the practice of a craft, the magnitude of a voice when listened.
In my room, I sang to Nirvana,Hilary Duff,
The Beatles—
three doors leading to the same freedom.
Nights ended with a book open beside me,
half-read, half-dreamt,
as if the story could finish itself while I slept.I took that as a method I kept implementing.
I often woke with a smile.
Some days it bent under shadows—
shadowed by cruelties I couldn’t name,
but it always returned,
as if joy were older than sorrow.I would summon the kind of rain only I could make,
to translate certain pains that grew older.
Those books, whispered about the many places I would go,
just before, just now.
I watched how nature moved—
how a thought takes root,
how it rises into air,
how it softens what is unbearable
into something bearably artistic.
My room, a bed, a theatre,
each gave me shelter enough to practice becoming.Gladly, as the same type of shelter,
words can be carried into the hands of those who stay to listen.
I was nine when we sent that manila envelope to Buenos Aires:
photos a local photographer had taken,
and a cassette with a song I recorded in my bedroom.
Weeks later, I was one of a hundred invited to audition.
When the call came, my mother turned white at the sound of my nameand I cried straight away, hopefull.
I practised the scene they’d sent—
crying to a tree in the yard—
then sang before the judges,and the other participants,
without hesitation.After a travel mishap,
we still arrived before everyone else.This editorial felt like The Library of Babel.
My mother knew what it meant for me.
They published us all.We headed home.
I was certain this was only the beginning.
Trips to the capital became part of the calendar.
I did well at school,
so skipping classes was possible.
Handball—my bruised-legged sport—had to go.
Volleyball, swimming too.
Acting classes stayed.
Singing and dancing—
half self-taught, half scavenged from any lessons I could find—
kept the hope alive.
At fourteen, walking on the beach,
a woman stopped me. A model, a TV host, named like a beautuful flower.
“Can I speak with your parents?” she asked.Two weeks later, we were in Buenos Aires again,
visiting agencies.
I signed with Love Management.
Friends from those first years
are still the closest I have.
Some weeks, my grandmother, grandfather sometimes and I,
traveled five hours each way for a single casting,
returning that night so I could be in school by morning.
She was a fashion designer, purely going for my shared purpose.He was going for meetings, always making it work.
My family hadn’t planned for this life,
but they carried it with me.
My first flight was to Bolivia,
for a national campaign.
Cameras met me at the store for the presentation.
I was a girl in a place I’d never been,
and it would not be the last.
Those trips didn’t just open the world to me;
they opened it to my family.
I was the first to fly,
but not the last.Freedom, as we all learned, is contagious.
And it depends on us to keep planting it.
Branches grow toward light—
slow, deliberate, certain.
They can also reach across borders.
I walked into rooms with a portfolio in a book,
later, an iPad,
a comp card in hand,
and always the same questions:
What can I make here?
What’s to learn?
Openness granted me
with shoots that began at dawn
and ended under city lights.
Covers with my name
in a language I was still learning to speak.
The last-minute plan.
The ready-to-fly bag.
I absorbed cities like textiles, like perfumes, like languages:
their rhythm, their gestures, their silences,
their untranslatable expressions.
Each place altered my voice,
my bones,
my way of seeing.
Tube and bike rides,loud cities day and night,
amazement that didn't wanted me to sleep at times.
Songs I write, as drafts stacked in notebooks
stories that bend my heart
until that last sigh, before yours, once I let them go.
Every departure returned me to the same soil:
my family’s love and effort,
their dreams running parallel to mine.
They are the ground that keeps each branch alive—
the root beneath all I am, all I will.Between departures and returns,
depth.In London, I found love.
Friends who became family.How I had missed the smell of wet earth—
mud on trainers,
the beauty of old buildings,the trace of history,
cafés with sticky tables,
Irresistible stories and pies.
I walk this city in trench coats.
I rarely use the umbrella I bought
when I first moved here.
Rain is a part of me.
It doesn’t weigh me down, it wakes me.I wait for the day I wear my favourite coat,
that my grandmother stitched,
triple-pleated with chess buttons—
as if she already knew
I’d be learning the game.
A season measured
by the day I wear it
to write in a museum.
Every morning: mate.
Sometimes bitter, sometimes cold.
The taste of home,
a guide, a partner,
while Argentine voices hum through podcasts.
Other languages layered on top—
a clumsy grafting,
roots twisting into new sounds,
inequivoco.
My lungs feel better when I write,
when I dance,
when I drink creativity.
One class away from finishing Journalism.
Late assignments,
pages full of crossings-out,
but almost there.
Roots steady,
branches stretching forward
into the future I’ve begun to call fruit.
Madrid lingers:
three short films,
a voice cracked open by rehearsal,
friends in Barcelona who still hold me.
Paris lingers:
cakes sunken in the middle,
paint that smeared,
applause that bruised my palms at the window
in lockdown nights.
All of these places
left me balanced and off-balance at once.
Rooted and restless.
Every walk becomes part of the work—
a gallery, a corner,
a wrong turn that still gives me something.I watch the birds often.
The pigeons I recognize
at my window.
The diverse people who live here too.
I am ready to expand.
To work and collaborate more.
To publish what is blooming—
even the crooked lines,
even the unfinished.
Now comes the bloom—
the present flowering
with scars close enough to mark the path,
but far enough not to block what’s next.
Awareness, acceptance, willingness—
to keep branching,
to keep flourishing,
to keep living for everything
that makes life exquisite.People embrace.
Love shows up everywhere —
in the streets,
in the air that suddenly feels softer
just because someone smiled.There’s the weight of a book on a train.
There’s watching someone and wondering their name.
Friends laughing.
That pull to feel.
A kiss that stops the rain for a second.
Your accent.
Ours.
Mine.
Wishes we don’t even say out loud.Fruit ripens.
It feeds.
It bruises.
It falls.
Some is eaten right away.
Some gets left there and spoils.
But everything goes back to the soil, eventually.
And every bruise—somehow—leaves a seed.Poems in notebooks.
Drafts.
Flights.
An orchard.
A journalist.
A tent — the one I choose to take care of every day.Fruit doesn’t last forever.
Nature keeps insisting on being.
What falls today becomes tomorrow’s seed.This is what I can offer.
Take whatever helps you.It’ll grow again.