Neither Here Nor There

Last night I played football. Nothing special: a friend I made here, a group of dads from school, a pitch, an hour stolen from the week. I’ve done it thousands of times. But somewhere between a goal and a sprint, something I didn’t expect came over me, a strong urge to cry. Not because of the game. Because I knew that moment might never happen again.

I kept running. I don’t think anyone noticed.

After nine years in Barcelona, we’re moving back to Argentina.

There are reasons. Some can be told, and others are personal, intimate, the kind that stay at home. I won’t list them here. It’s enough to say the decision is ours, that we thought about it a lot, and that we believe it’s the right one.

And it still hurts.

Leaving by choice

There’s something strange about leaving because you chose to. When you leave because you have no other option, anger helps: you have something to push against. When you leave because you decided to, there’s no one to blame, and the grief is all yours. You say goodbye to a place where you were happy once, or a few times, knowing nobody made you go.

I’m not even sure this is going back. The word sounds like a return, like closing a circle, and I don’t know that it is. It could be a destination or it could be a stopover. I don’t know, and for now I have to learn to live with not knowing.

I think about that game, and about so many other small things from these years, the ones that never show up in a photo. I suspect some of them will stay in my heart like a rose, with the thorn stuck in my soul forever.

The one who returns

They say you go back home. But the one who goes back isn’t the one who left. Nine years change the way you talk, the way you look at things, the way you measure them. There, I’ll be the one who lived abroad. Here, no matter how much I built, I was always the one who came from somewhere else.

That’s the part I find hardest to name. It’s not that I’m losing a place. It’s that I already know that neither there nor here will I ever be the same again.

With the ground moving

And all of this is happening while the world turns 180 degrees in a few months. I think we’re entering a change that will challenge almost every established paradigm, in every field. There’s latent geopolitical tension, markets shaken from every direction, and a context where it gets harder and harder to separate the wheat from the chaff: information from opinion, the real from the post-real.

Moving to another continent is already a lot. Doing it while the ground is moving for everyone is something else. You pick a direction without knowing what the map will look like when you get there.

What goes unsaid

And there’s a part that doesn’t get told. Adults with kids sometimes have to swallow these things. Not out of pride or to look strong, but because someone has to hold the project together, and because on the other side there’s someone smaller who needs to see that the new thing is a joy. Because it is.

So the uncertainty stays inside. It isn’t said, it isn’t let out. You just keep going.

Maybe that’s why it hit me on the pitch. Running, sweating, guard down, in one of the few places where, for a while, I wasn’t being the adult.

Whatever comes

So here I am, with my soul split between the joy of a new project and the sadness of leaving a place where we built so much.

In a world as unstable as a sandcastle, you go. You keep moving forward. Ready for the worst, wishing for the best, and waiting for whatever comes.