matilde tomat

There were no healthy models of movement around me growing up. Safety in my family meant staying still: sitting, drinking, smoking, numbing. Fixed bodies. Stationary presences. Sedentary. I was raised by people who anchored themselves to the sofa as if the world outside might swallow them whole. I absorbed that atmosphere like a climate. And I did something extraordinary with it, still: all my movement went inward.

This is my truth: standards are standards. Integrity is not optional. Education should not bend for sentiment or convenience. It should teach resilience, accountability, stamina, the capacity to find solutions for yourself: how to live, truly live, fully, as an adult with a brain in your head and blood in your veins. You learn not by comfort, but by facing the field, by navigating the terrain, by figuring out how to get from A to B, and not whining because the path is hard.

Returning to my land this October, I wanted to inhabit it differently. I didn’t want to be swallowed by the pace of visits or the old magnetic pull of familiarity. I wanted to carve out time that was deliberately mine; pauses between encounters, small pockets of solitude amid the density of return. Seeing friends I hadn’t seen in years carried its own tenderness, but also a recognition of distance: we have all shifted slightly on our axes.