(You got a face with a view)

(English below)

Un día, caminando de vuelta a casa sentí que el rostro se me caía. No en forma metafórica sino así, que la cara se me estaba cayendo como si un poco se me derritiera y otro poco estuviera desacomodada. Estaba pasando por mucho: tenía el corazón roto, mi perra de 14 años (a quien adoraba) acababa de morir y no me sobreponía del todo de un sismo que cimbró la ciudad y reacomodó mi perspectiva de familia y soledad y raíces. Dejé de reconocerme en el espejo, había cambiado tanto que lo que veía ahí en el reflejo no era lo que yo sentía estar siendo por dentro. En terapia entendí que estaba experimentando mi primera crisis. Sino hubiera sido por mi psicoanalista y haberme atrevido a decirle lo que me estaba pasandp, no estoy segura de dónde estaría ahora en mi vida.

Comencé a tomarme selfies por intuición, pensando que de alguna manera observarme desde la extrañeza podía ayudar en algo. Sí lo hizo. Yo, que en algún momento había tachado de superficial esa acción, ahora lo hacía a diario con una curiosidad enorme de observar mi rostro sin sentirlo mío. Y fui enamorándome a cada paso, de observar como por primera vez las facciones que había visto toda mi vida y ahora me parecían tan ajenas. La verdad, nunca me volví a reconocer. No fue un camino de regreso. En ninguna foto he dicho “ey, ahí estás” y más bien cada tanto vuelvo a desconocerme. Pero sí me habité. En cada fotografía. Me hice la promesa de aceptar que esa era yo aunque no pareciera. Y aprendí a ser este nuevo ser, al menos para mí, porque parecía que nadie más se daba cuenta del cambio. Un ser que, a partir de la curiosidad de observarse como si fuera alguien más, ha reforzado su sentido de identidad y de linaje. Un interés por los que me conforman ha llegado a mí, tal vez al entender que una nunca viene sola a este mundo. Lo que he logrado descifrar y aprender de esta cara es lo siguiente: los ojos que poseo vienen de mi madre, la nariz de mi padre y la sonrisa viene de mi abuela Antelma. Tengo seis lunares simétricos en las mejillas. Mi piel y mis ojeras al parecer cruzaron un mar junto con mi tatarabuela y mi cabello me lo trajo de Centroamérica mi bisabuelo. Este rostro guarda señales, mapas que me regalaron mis ancestros migrantes, que no fui capaz de entender hasta que llegaron a mí las ruinas, antes de la siguiente reconstrucción. Soy una combinación de amor y fronteras y distancias cruzadas. De valentía y esperanza. De quien decide que su hogar (por un rato o por siempre) será otro, distinto al lugar donde crecieron sus raíces. Yo sin saberlo siempre he seguido sus pasos y migro de casa cada tantos años. Sé que ya viene otro viaje. Lo puedo sentir con todo este ADN que anda inquieto y me cuenta de nuevos cielos que no conocemos y queremos tanto volver a ver.

(English)

I was walking back home one day when I felt my face was falling. Not in a figurative way, but in a genuine way. I felt that my face was falling. It felt like it was melting like it was out of place or hanging from a pin. I was going through a lot at that time: I was broken-hearted from a relationship that has lasted more than nine years, I had just put to sleep my beloved fourteen-year-old dog, Capicúa, whom I adored, and I was just trying to get over the trauma of an earthquake that had shaken mi city to the ground and changed my way of understanding life, family, loneliness and my sense of belonging entirely.
I completely stopped recognising myself in the mirror: I have changed so much through all that what I saw in my reflection didn’t correspond to how I was feeling inside me. I was doing therapy at that time, so I learned that I was experiencing a mental crisis. If it wasn’t for therapy and me summing up my forces to speak about it, I don’t know where I’ll be today.
I started taking selfies more as an impulse or intuition, thinking that if I could see myself from the otherness, it could help me come back to myself somehow. It did help. I had always considered taking selfies a superficial thing until now that I was doing it daily with a curiosity that grew so strong and so fast from staring at my face as if it wasn’t mine. I started to fall in love with it every step of the way. I was enchanted by being in the presence of these features as if it was my first time looking and them. These features I have seen all my life and now appeared so strange to me. Truth be told: Taking selfies wasn’t a way back to me. It was a discovery. A revelation. In any of the pictures taken, I found myself as the one I used to be. But I did inhabit myself. I made the promise that I will accept that the person in the photo was me even though it didn’t look like it. I learned to become this new being, although nobody seems to notice the changes.
Through the curiosity of observing me as if I was somebody else, I managed to create for myself a sense of belonging and lineage. A genuine interest grew strong, a desire of knowing who were the ones that shaped me, the ones that were now combined within my features. I understood at that moment that no one ever comes alone to this world.
What I have managed to figure out from my face and features is the following: the eyes come from my mother, the nose from my father, and the smile comes from my abuela Antelma. I have six symmetric birthmarks on my cheeks. My skin and eye circles seem to have crossed an entire ocean along with my great-great-grandmother from some part of the middle east, and my curly hair was brought back to me by my great grandfather from Centroamerica.
This face guards signs, treasure maps that my ancestors have given to me, and I was unable to read them and understand them until wreck and chaos (and the ruins it left behind) came to my encounter. I am an ensemble of courage, borders, and crossed destinies. A symphony of love and hope. From the ones that came before me and decided that home (for a while or forever) would be another place different from the one where their roots grew up strong. I have followed their steps without knowing it and have changed my home to different soils every so often. I see another move is coming my way. I can feel the waves inside me coming high and strong. And all my roots and bones (that belong to me, but to them too) are growing uneasy every day. They tell me stories in my dreams of new skies and seas that I don’t know yet, but they wish so hard to see again, along with me. Over and over.