I was born in the Canary Islands, a child of salt wind and volcanic bone, but I grew up in the United States, learning early how a body can belong to two places and still feel exiled from both. Not long ago I slipped back across the ocean, returning not to a city or a country but to a kind of nowhere, a small corner of the Atlantic where the world feels quieter and the sky remembers my name. Out here the days move differently. The sea is a constant witness. I live half inside memory and half inside the wind that keeps erasing it.

People think distance is escape, but it is really a kind of unveiling. I learned that when I unpacked my life on this little island cliff and found that the versions of myself I had outrun were waiting for me, patient as shadows. On the days when the gloom presses too close, when the old ghosts tap their fingers against my ribs, I put on my lipstick like armor. A small ritual, a red shield, a reminder that even in the melancholy haze I am still choosing to appear, to speak, to take up space.

I have always been a woman stitched from borders, from departures, from the soft ache of wanting to belong somewhere without disappearing into it. Now I live in the in-between, on an island surrounded by water that knows more secrets than any priest, and somehow this is where I feel most real. Out here I am neither the girl I was nor the woman I was expected to become. I am simply the one who survived, who writes, who paints her mouth red against the gray days and calls it courage.