I have lost my spontaneity with my partner, my friends, my family, my job, the things I used to do because I liked them. I am reminded of this by the photo I see of a girl lying in bed next to her boyfriend. The scene is clear enough to detect that she is not wearing a shirt. The photo is blurry, she is laughing with a look of shame and boldness, and he is hiding. When was the last time we took a photo like that? Without thinking, because we let the moment surprise us and we said this yes, this we have to immortalize. When was the last time we let ourselves get carried away without thinking? Without gauging if it was a good time, if we had time not to think. When was the last time I let myself go playfully, unconsciously?

I'll get this off my chest soon. I'll say it plainly: I'm very good at separating the artist from the work. It's not a dilemma for me. I'm afraid of how comfortable contradictions feel inside me. It seems they've found a wide and comfortable place, where they don't fight. It has always happened to me: perhaps I lack morals and have an excess of hedonism. I am jealous of the things that give me pleasure. Pleasure takes precedence over common sense and allows me, in the solitude of my screen and my headphones, to consume artists I wouldn't dare to confess to publicly and others that I would, with a certain shame.

I would like to have a dog. And to feel that my life is not that important. Having an animal makes everything a little more relative and turns time into a more democratic unit of measurement. I would like to have a normal enough life to discover that everything I do, at the end of the day, has the same importance as weighing the 50 grams of food that my dog has to eat for dinner. I would like to be able to afford the luxury of insignificant things.

You don't have to be evicted to end up on the street. It is not necessary for a vulture fund to buy your house for you to lose it, it is enough not to be able to pay for it. You don't need the police to remove you from your home, your children can do it. You don't need force, but you do need violence, to leave a pensioner without a home. You don't have to be Maricarmen. You can also be María del Carmen.

I remember it like a hit on the radio, a little song you can't stop listening to: “How shy this girl is” or “Has the cat got her tongue?”. They were referring to me, in the third person singular. Never you, always her. Never addressed, always pointed at. They decided that I was shy before I even knew what that was. And from that moment on, I carried those six letters: ‘shy’, like a slab that reduced my existence and my possibilities. A very small little box, perfect for the size of a person who was still two years old. A script, too, that guided my sentences. A circumference within which I had to unfold my movements. A tone of voice. A pre-established way of being, which arrived before me and paved the way.

We are at the park. At the Estacions park in Palma, where small social ecosystems coexist with each other. Now, from where I wait for my bus departure time, I can observe one. It is the ecosystem of the people sitting around the multiple and enormous planters in charge of generating shade. Inside each one, four trees rise, connected by earth and air: their crowns caress and join into a single roof that shelters us all, and the branches tickle each other with lights and shadows, letting the air in. It is a late summer afternoon and since I sat under the shelter of this porch I have stopped huffing, sweating, and swearing. The city seems, for a moment, habitable.

My boyfriend and I don't have any hobbies in common. We don't have weekends for going hiking or mountain climbing, nor Wednesdays for salsa or bachata, nor evenings for yoga or mornings for cycling and specialty coffee. We don't have anything that binds us to each other like a subscription, an extracurricular activity that you've already paid for until next year. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. We are fond of each other, without intermediaries. A clean thing, which leaves no room for error, a blank voucher with random options: the last session of the day to go see the Sorogoyen film, a paddle surf excursion in Colònia de Sant Pere, an exhibition at the Toni Catany, a walk through Estanyol or a dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant in Palmanova.

My grandmother passed away suddenly. She started to break down without warning, in fact. But dying did not take so long. How much time do we need to die? At what point can we say that we are already dead? She was diagnosed with a type of dementia that in a few months reduced her to a thousandth of what she had been. Or so we would say from the outside, those of us who did not witness her evaporation on the front lines. My cousin Cristina, on the other hand, knew how to find her in the most unexpected corners of her personality – in a wink, for example – cornered by the minimal capacity for expression that was still available to her.

That chic who is this girl, look at her. I don't know her, but she is next to me on the beach, on the bus, or I read her articles online. She is no one in particular and she is all of them at once. She is a type of girl. She is the girl who, without any effort, makes you want to be like her. She's a woman who seems to have asked life for permission to create her. In return, it gave her this face with just enough personality not to stop being beautiful. I don't know if it's cool or is it that she has a beauty mark right above her upper lip, where I would have always liked to have one. With that beauty mark, it seems like the world has to be a little easier. Maybe it's that she has naturally rosy lips or large, almond-shaped eyes, as if they've never known mascara.

‘I wish I had the security of a straight white man’ is a phrase we’ve adopted in my group, and one we say more often than we’d like. We’re mostly gays and girls and we don’t have that many straight white male friends. Perhaps because of that, because we’re not used to it, we can quickly distinguish the overconfidence of some of them. They are gestures with which they show that the world loves them unconditionally, that they always land on their feet, that they don’t have to ask for permission or forgiveness, that they don’t have to question anything. It’s doing things without having thought about it at all, advice they assume you need, a comment or an unfinished sentence with which they expect you to make the effort to understand them, instead of them making the effort to explain themselves. It’s a feeling of impunity and immunity that is frightening. It’s audacity, in short. And I love them all the same, though, because they are my friends.

It's very hot. Suspended dust. Heat and humidity. Another plane crosses the sky, cloudy and heavy. Heat like from an exhaust pipe. The Tramuntana is not visible from afar. So hot that you can't go outside. The ring road at five in the afternoon. You can't even breathe. The highway, at the height of the airport, at any time. According to the forecast, tomorrow will be even hotter. Two girls are arrested; they say they had a banner at their home with the slogan 'SOS Residents'. Heat and anguish in the street: we don't know where to put ourselves. Gasoline is going up and yet everything burns: fire on earth and fire in the sky. Orange sunsets, beautiful as a bad omen, as a point of disaster. It's too hot: what if we take shelter from the fan? It's already the end of the month and we don't have money to spend either. Heat like a pressure cooker, as if about to suffocate us, as if about to make thunder.

I wanted to know what the obsessions of my generation are (that is, I wanted to confirm my suspicions). And, for this reason, I went to look for those responsible for fossilizing them: the artists. Specifically, six. And if time and space were not limited, the list would be much longer. They are Anna Picornell, Lluïsa Febrer, Mariona Jaume, Miquel Mas, Josep Alorda, and Lluís Garau. In these conversations, with all of them, I tried the same thing: to know what they feel, to prospect their souls, and to discover what obsesses them. Because – when we are sincere – obsessions are the only thing that truly makes us vulnerable, that betrays us as we are, genuinely, from the subconscious and without morals. I wanted to extract them “with a dessert spoon”, as Lorena G. Maldonado says, what this generation of artists feels. And what turns out to make them mortal, like the rest of humanity, is the same doubt, intrusive and inopportune: why do we do what we do and if that is success.

Ladies, we've betrayed ourselves. I, honestly, I try. We had agreed that we wouldn't think about our bodies anymore. We were all in favor of this collective delirium together. What? Advertising because “if you start in June, with this bikini operation you'll be unrecognizable in July”? It doesn't affect me. Capri pants are back in fashion, pants in which, even if they're my size, my thighs will never fit? I couldn't care less. What? You say you've gained weight and you look terrible? After telling you you're gorgeous, I won't think about myself at all, nor will I ask myself if I should worry too.

I remember the exact pressure I had to apply to the button on my mother's car glove compartment for it to open. Also the wide and round shape, and the soft touch of the plastic when I operated it, making a soft, muffled, almost spongy click. I liked the pleasant sensation of that button and the power it gave me. It was the era when we had the black Peugeot 206. That is to say, it was the early 2000s and I, the sole co-pilot of our vessel.

Life and I sign a pact of plausibility every summer. Weekends become a wonderful fiction and I, a very unreliable narrator. I tell myself that reality is what happens under this murky, whitish sky, so close the sun shines, and not the day-to-day illuminated by fluorescents. For 48 hours, it seems reasonable to follow the natural rhythm of things: waking up when sleep ends, honoring lunch by dedicating the time it deserves to be cooked and eaten, not leaving the house until it feels good, swimming if it's hot, and having dinner with the last rays of light. Days have no pretensions, hours don't want to last more than 60 minutes, time is what it is. And I believe it.

The two girls I have in front of me are the ones who are the most well-behaved in the entire group of third graders in Primary school who are now surrounding me. They were the first to sit down, further away from the rest, as soon as they entered the carriage. They remain oblivious to what is happening in the background, to their classmates, who are jumping, shouting and fighting to get into the photo the teacher is taking of them. Occupying the minimum space of their seat and with their legs crossed, they hardly move, nor is their voice heard during the subway ride. But those of us who grew up with the phrase “You, look and be quiet” recognize each other. I look at them and they are quiet. I don't need words to discover their universe, hidden behind the mobile phone screen.

“I don’t have a free weekend until August”. You will have heard it or said it yourselves, as if a packed calendar were synonymous with good social and work health. We stuff ourselves with tasks and plans, myself included. And they reproach us for being too weak, for being victims of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), for being afraid of missing something, for seeming like we don’t know how to be alone, still, at home. How easy and reductive the world becomes when we have an acronym to define us. That’s it: we have FOMO, as quick and simple as saying it. Do we really only need four letters to crystallize the feeling of a whole generation?

There are weekswhen I ask ChatGPT why it's possible that I can't stop crying and if I should worry about it. And there are weeks when I listen to the dirtiest reggaeton on repeat, so confident that I see myself capable of posting a selfie in the bathroom mirror. But at no time am I aware that this feeling is the product of my hormones. Every month I feel cheated by myself: another time, I surprise myself, as if this same process had not repeated for almost 20 years. That's why, and for when I feel I can't trust myself, I have monitored what happens to my body and my mind in the 28 days of my menstrual cycle, according to my mobile app.

We met at a party. When Tito’s was still Tito’s (which makes me feel very old). It all started as good love stories begin: with two glances that met in the middle of the room. “What’s your name?”, “What are you studying?” and a kiss as a promise that I would look for him again. And I did. Some supernatural force wanted me to end up finding him on Facebook (which also makes me feel very old), just from the two questions I asked him.

The only daughter is having her birthday: one, specifically. And, with only a few days difference, my mother too. She's turning 55. I like that I fell into this coincidence, because it reminds me more than ever that without a unique mother there would have been no only daughter. I started writing more inwardly and less outwardly when I discovered that the world could be explained through the stories we keep within ourselves. And the story with my mother is one of them. The first one, I'd say. And perhaps, one day, it will also be the last. Because it's a story that never ends.