Now that we have everything (so much, it hurts)

PalmaI don't need to make a list of 'things I'm grateful for today' to know what are the three or four things that matter to me, that make me happy. What would be the point of being grateful for them if, to be aware of them, I had to do journaling? I'd be pretty screwed. I wouldn't want to write them down either. When you write, it's as if you unburden yourself a bit of things, as if you release yourself from them. Why would I do it? Putting it in writing would be to distance myself a bit, to place them on a surface and materialize them, to see them outside of myself, to excise them from myself. And I already do that enough.

I dedicate little time to letting the good things that happen to me soak in. I am not permeable enough to good moments. The inertia of the days surrounds me with a speed that makes everything slide off my surface. I'm a bit centrifuged by life, so fast that everything that approaches me is spat out. Without taking my eyes off the lines of the road, one after the other, passing at the same rhythm, hypnotized, anesthetized.

Letting things overwhelm you requires dedication. And I don't have much of it. First, I have to be receptive to it, at rest. Then, I have to convince myself that it will require a part of my time. You can't feel it in a hurry. I have to know that I'll need a while to let myself go and another while to recover. And, finally, I have to commit to treasuring it – not wasting it – and installing it in some corner of my subconscious.

I avoid all these steps more often than I can afford to. Until, one day, while I'm driving, a song comes on that immerses me in the process without warning. Barry B comes on, unexpected and treacherous, and unleashes many things, so many that it even gives me goosebumps. It's the chords (and a bit of the lyrics) ofInfancia mal calibrada: “I'm looking for a knife / I'm looking for you / Or something to pierce me / And make me feel / I see my reflection in the water / What has become of me? / The traumatized gaze / The soul of an unhappy person”.

Whatever it is, it has struck a chord, the button that opens floodgates I didn't expect. Emotions are light, they always arrive first and pierce me; and memories, sound, creating a burst. I feel transparent. Like water. Viscera in motion, rummaged. I feel everything so much it bothers me, like when they poke your body from the inside and you feel the contact of your own body from within. I feel emotions through the organs, beating.

All good things pile up as suddenly as nausea, made vomit. And I can no longer stop asking myself when we will stop being so young, when life will stop being so full of good things, when we will start to miss more than celebrate. Perhaps we will never be as happy as now. Or maybe. But I feel that now we have everything. And being aware of it hurts me. Perhaps more than not having almost anything will hurt us.

I am a cheat, a fugitive, trying to escape this pledge of being happy. A coward, too, because secretly I resist letting myself go for complete enjoyment. I have a secret and it is that I know that mirror emotions exist: gratitude and fear, for example. I enjoy to the fullest being aware of the imminent disappearance. It is unbearable to enjoy to the utmost, as unbearable as an open wound when it heals.

This is what I feel. What I remember takes other forms. Forms that make me so happy that they hurt me. It is the mental photo of my father and me, sitting on the terrace of Cala Canta, once again, as always, for more than 20 years. It is my boyfriend and me, in the middle of nowhere, for hours, without signal, under the sun, in the sea, deciding to go home just because it has gotten dark. It is the best concert with my best friends – the ones I had always wanted to have –, who we don't want to end ever and, for this reason, we improvise going out on a working Monday. For this and because we are back in Barcelona all together, after so long. We are here and we are not aware of it. We haven't even had to calculate the years since we were last in that club. We entered and recovered the spirits we left there, bittersweet, happy, tired.

This is what I remember, with caution: I don't know how much time is left before our memories start to be different. For now, we still have everything. We have so much that this pledge is worth it.