In the beginning, there was
land, hills, breathing steady air,
rain that carried me inward.
Still does.
Loosened into water,
I’ve never been disappointed by it.
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, occasionally, to prepare their lunch.
I remember my mother studying long hours.
She, my father, my brother, my grandpas
taught me the different types of freedom
we can ask for:
to see, to do, to choose,
to refuse to remain unfinished.
In the many versions of us we can reach,
rooted in duty, in a dream,
everything begins again with morning.
We are.
I felt most like myself under theatre lights,
in the rhythm of a game,
where being “weird” was permission.All that mattered was expression, its weight, its truth,
the practice of a craft,
the magnitude of a voice when heard,
and the brave one trying.
In my room, I sang to Nirvana, Hilary Duff, and The Beatles,
three doors opening to the same air.
Nights ended with a book open beside me,
half-read, half-dreamt,
as if the story could finish itself while I slept.
I kept the method.
I often wake up with a smile, conscious of it.
Some days bent under sheets,
shadowed by memories I couldn’t name,
yet they returned and transformed,
as if joy were older than sorrow.
I would summon the kind of rain only I could make,
to translate pains that kept growing.
The whispering books told me about the places I would go,
just before, just now.
I lived where nature moved, resisting, insisting.
I watched a root become meaning,
rise into the air,
soften what feels unbearable
into something bearably artistic,
still alive.
My room, a bed, a theatre,
each sheltered me enough to practise becoming.
Gladly: the same shelter.
Words carried into the hands of those who stay,
curious enough to understand,
stubborn enough to make more of it,
to make more out of anything.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 name,
while I cried straight away, hopeful.
I practised the scene they’d sent,
crying again as the script asked me to speak to a tree in the yard.
Then I sang before the judges,
and the other participants,
pretending to know enough,
as if enough is ever a thing.
After a travel mishap,
we still arrived before everyone else.
That editorial felt like The Library of Babel.
My mother knew what it meant.
They published us all in print.
We headed home.
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, maybe by choice, too.
Acting classes stayed.
Singing and dancing, half self-taught, half scavenged
from whatever lessons we could find,
kept the excitement alive.
At fourteen, walking on the beach, a woman stopped me.
Jazmín, model and TV host, named for the flower,
asked: “Can I speak with your parents?”
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, and I
travelled five hours each way for a single casting,
returning that night so I could be in school by morning.Susana, a fashion designer, supporting my shared purpose.
Carlos, going to 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 countryside girl in a place I’d never been,
excited to see cultures up close,
watching the dream turn physical,
admiring what life was placing in my hands.
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.
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 met me with shoots
that began at dawn
and ended under city lights.
Covers with my name
in languages 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 and nuances.
Each place altered my voice,
my bones,
my way of seeing.
Tube and bike rides.
Loud cities, day and night.
Amazement that refused to let me sleep.
Songs, drafts stacked in notebooks.
Stories that bend my heart
until the last sigh,
until 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 a different type of love.
Friends who stayed.
I had missed the smell of wet earth,
mud on trainers,
old buildings holding their breath,
history that doesn’t announce itself,
cafés with sticky tables,
irresistible chips, stories, pies.
I walk this city in trench coats.
I rarely use the umbrella I bought when I first moved here.
Rain is part of my system.
It doesn’t weigh me down, it wakes me.
I wait for the day I wear my favourite coat,
the one my grandmother stitched,
triple-pleated with chess buttons I adore,
as if she already knew
I’d be leaning into this part of 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 graft,
roots twisting into new sounds,
inequívoco.
My lungs feel better when I write,
when I dance,
when I drink creativity.
One thesis away from finishing Journalism.
Late assignments.
Pages full of crossings-out.
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
on 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 graffiti corner,
a wrong turn that still gives me something.
I watch the birds often.
I recognise the pigeons on my terrace,
and the many kinds of people who live here, too.
Now comes the crooked bloom,
the present flowering
with scars close enough to mark the path,
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 scary and exquisite.I love seeing people’s embrace,
when sudden air turns softer
just because someone smiled.
A book on a train has weight,
more than paper.
I find myself wondering, anyway,
about the person holding it:
their name,
what they love,
where they come from,
where they’re heading.
Friends laughing,
that pull to feel,
the pulse inside it,
the vibration in our moves.
A kiss that stops the rain for a second.
Your accent, and mine.Wishes we don’t even say out loud
while the fruit ripens.
It feeds.
It bruises.
It falls.Some are eaten right away.
Some get left there and spoil.
But everything returns to soil, eventually.
Each bruise leaves a seed somehow,
waiting in the deep end of the surface.
Poems in notebooks.
Drafts on flights,
closer to the edge of life,
closer to the hands of the ones who passed
and still insist on being near:
in an orchard,
in a card,
in a smell,
in the sensorial space of memory and remembrance.
A journalist.
A tent, the one we choose to tend every day.
And the fruit that doesn’t last forever.Nature keeps insisting on being.
What falls today becomes tomorrow’s seed.
This is what I make.
Take what holds.
It’ll grow,
again.