Portugal: the remeder 14

19.06.2026
14. Day 14: everything comes to an end.


Today is the penultimate day of my stay in Izeda. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Spain, and I’m not returning like the prodigal son eager for a reunion. On the contrary, it’s a feeling of anguish, of fear, of returning to a reality that reopens old wounds. 


They say it’s a feeling many travelers experience, and it would be interesting to study our auras in such cases. Probably, and especially when your trip wasn’t imposed or your experience was unpleasant, a drop in energy levels is observed. No one, or almost no one, can live in an eternal utopia because it would cease to be one and become something else entirely. Nothing lasts forever.

Returning to the rented house in Ponferrada will be like a wildfire that, in a few hours, devastates a landscape that has taken years to build. I will have found some medicine for the pain, but it won’t have disappeared and will return when the medication wears off, because we haven’t addressed the essential issue: recognizing and acting against the root cause. It’s like the candy in the shop window.



Portugal has proven, for the second time, to be a shoulder to lean on, a balm for the wound, a redeemer. It lives at a different pace, savors life, and doesn’t waste it, resigned to the idea that nothing can be fixed, nothing can be reversed. The Portuguese, in general, form a bridge from their Lusitanian lands to France, a bridge to the real Europe in which Spain is the unruly, haughty, boastful one, consumed by envy. Spain doesn’t figure into the plans of many Europeans, except perhaps for a trip. It’s not all negative, of course; we are supportive, empathetic, brave, and receptive people, and this is harder to find in Europe. Proximity, having been part of a crossroads of civilizations, makes us capable of understanding differences. The question is whether it’s worth it, whether the positive aspects outweigh the negative, and above all, whether the sense of belonging that runs in our DNA is truly compelling. We have all, when far away, felt a distressing call, a feeling of insecurity outside the place where we belong, because there lies the invisible diary of who we are, of who we were.


I went out into the garden and sat down to contemplate, on a pleasant spring day, the gift that life offered me. A few minutes of respite before returning to assisted breathing. Beside me, sadness and disillusionment; before me, destiny, which, someone said: nothing lasts forever. 


And if that’s true, rebellion replied, must I amputate my gangrenous leg? So great is your cruelty that you turn beauty into ugliness, joy into sorrow, the child into an old man, and the splendid rose into withered petals. There is something perverse about life; many call it a lesson, a learning experience, but that doesn’t diminish its great dose of rudeness, mockery, sarcasm, sadism, and self-satisfaction with the power of the ephemeral. It is difficult to bear that weight, that constant sorrow of the passage of life in this world. I don’t aspire to eternity in such circumstances; to live is synonymous with surviving all the trials, the obstacles, and the barriers that appear along the way. Never letting my guard down, always on alert, in the constant struggle of Teresa of Ávila, the tug-of-war… 


But one day the rope breaks, because in the fragility of the human being there is also an ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. And so we become fugitives, defying the tyrannical power of Saturn and his clocks, his manuals of conduct, his rigidity, and his coldness. Fleeing doesn’t guarantee success; desertion is impossible. Under his protective paternal halo, he envelops you and reminds you who you truly are: the persona, not the creator.

But your comforting mother takes you in her arms and dries your deep tears. Thank you, Izeda.

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