I write these pieces in my journal after my calls with my family, because my heart still hurts after all this time and words turn ink into medicine. 

The violence of translating 

Arriving in New York with the illusion of some dubbed movie from my childhood. It seems like a dream, one of those so fictitious that you can shed a tear from the passenger seat. I'm going to be a writer in a country whose language is stuck in my mouth and in my hands. It sounds like a joke. But words, I kid myself at the landing point, fight every barrier and bring any emotion to any heart. And now, with my feet on New York soil the words melt between my fingers before they reach any recipient. I burn everything I write. The artistic process of the foreigner is destructive. I destroy myself in this instant with each letter, with each lost feeling. Because whoever reads it is left with a handful of ashes that they pick up out of pity. Before they could have been flowers, those words on my tongue. But they burn so violently so inevitably, when I change them and mold them and trick them. To be something they are not, a language that does not belong to me. 

As I read this in its new English form, I cannot recognize who it was originally from. And I put this as the first of my essays even if it was written the last. So the others read as translations and not who they were originally made to be. 

To my shadow 

I live looking for pieces of my memories in every corner. That which has been lost in the sea, as if it had fallen from the window of the plane. Answers dissolved in time, discarded in the distance. I look for them in people, in songs, in words, in blank sheets of paper and in the ink of my pencil. I live chasing the shadow of who I was before I left my country, as if she would tell me the truth about life. I often think that she is my friend, that she accompanies me in what terrifies me and embraces me in comfort, that she listens to me and understands me in a language that no one around me understands. But the shadow betrays me without any malice, she does not know who I am and I do not recognize her. We live not only on different continents but realities so far apart that we seem almost complete strangers. She stayed in the Arabian Sea the first time I said goodbye to my family, she fell almost unnoticed and was left swimming in the limbo of happy memories of a childhood between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pyrenean mountains. My shadow remained at fifteen and stopped accompanying me.

In the sea 

The horizon of the ocean merges with the sky in an embrace so eternal that it fills my heart with hope. Because from the shore my eyes do not distinguish who is the sea that embraces the sky itself. The Mediterranean of my childhood, the little piece of Valencia, calm as our songs, soft as our voices, clear as the sky at dawn. The little piece that I carry with me wherever I go, and appears in front of my eyes in each of the seas I see. In the tireless waves of the Salvadoran Pacific and the colors of the sunsets of the Indian Southwest. They all embrace the sky in the same way. I love where I am and I love how I have arrived, but at sea I can return to my little piece of home in Valencia. Only if I squint enough to see the line that joins the sky and the sea, which is drawn the same all over the world. 

Oroneta where are you 

Remembering our stories with my sister today I remembered my childhood love for spring. Today I saw her return in lilac-colored buds among the wet grass. Spring that is born and dies, in a process that takes me with it. As a child I loved the young flowers in the ravine behind my house. Yellow specks that from afar looked like a messy drawing. Below a drawing of yellow dots up on the blue canvas, little black dots in all directions in all directions. Swallows coming from distant lands. As a child, those lands seemed to me almost like fantastic worlds. I was afraid they would fly so far away, I thought. That I would never do it was a lie. What was always true was that none of them fly alone. Yesterday I watched Duck Season, and the pizza delivery guy character, completely stoned, looks at the picture of the ducks in the house and tells the kids about the V of their flight. If one gets tired, the next ones take over. If an older one doesn't hold up, two others lead the way. My father's last message to me before boarding my flight to Mumbai said: Remember that migratory birds are not alone, they have each other. In the moments before boarding for New York, he told me something different: Migratory birds always return to the nest. It has been 4 years since I left home. But if one thing is true, it is that I carry that little piece of land with yellow flowers, orange and olive trees, and that sky of swallows in my heart. Returning to the nest sometimes, when you can't fly an ocean, means giving words the form of memories. 

My words in Valencian mean a world to me. In English, they try.