There once was a time
when you only stared.

You stared at people,
places,
things,
the sky,
the trees.

Mama and Papa wondered
what you thought
about all of this.

Then one day,
you started telling us.

First came your first words.
Your comical
three-word observations.

Followed by strong opinions,
preferences,
and deep conversations.

You only eat quinoa
when accompanied by peas
because “it’s yummier like this.”

You have a special cup for milk
and another one for tea.

Papa’s coffee
can’t touch these.

I guess.

Makes sense to me.

At first, your voice was low
when out in public.

“He is too scared,
too shy,”
some suggested.

But then you started getting louder,
louder,
and louder.

“He is too loud,”
those same people opined,
as if having an opinion
were mandatory.

You started singing
and greeting our neighbors.

Introducing yourself
to firefighters,
police officers,
and waiters.

You started shouting
with great joy
and screaming
when annoyed.

Shh here.
Shh there.

Sometimes,
the shh comes from me.

But then I remember
all that time you spent staring,
waiting for the moment
to finally start sharing.

So I take my shh back.

I let you continue.

My boy,
in this world,
many people will tell you
being good means being quiet.

I beg you
not to listen.

In a world full of people
staring at screens,
be the one who greets.

The one who sings.

The one who shouts
when the world feels unfair.

The one brave enough
to speak,
advocate,
or start a debate.

Voices exist
to carry what our chests
cannot hold.

And those blessed
with high-pitched voices
like yours
are meant to be bold.

Because, my boy,
there once was a day
when you could only stare.

You stared long enough.

It´s time to be heard.

I was five years old when I got my first diary. Twenty-eight years later, I’m still writing. These days, my thoughts live scattered across online platforms, phone notes, and physical notebooks I constantly misplace or forget about. Hence this attempt to create one consistent space.

When it comes to writing, I don’t really do moderation. The most uncomfortable parts of life are usually my favorite prompts. On our first date, my now-husband asked, “So, what do you write about?”

I broke the ice with a hammer.

“Mostly death, pain, solitude, love, life’s contrasts and contradictions,” I answered casually. To my surprise, he found my dark humor attractive. Honesty usually is attractive, when shared with the right people.

Which brings me back to the writing.

Putting my thoughts into words has always felt therapeutic. I use writing to make sense of the world around me, and the world inside me. Finishing a piece I’ve edited obsessively, over and over again, gives me something close to a runner’s high.

I need to write, and I’m only now returning to it after a long hiatus brought on by postpartum depression and the all-consuming early years of motherhood (more on that later).

Rewind. I’ve technically been “writing” for over ten years as a journalist, but writing about politics, finance, crime, and natural disasters on strict deadlines and in AP style is exactly what it sounds like. Those stories may carry my byline, but they were rarely mine in the way these pages are.

Maybe my layoff—along with the growing pile of unanswered job applications—was the universe’s less-than-subtle way of telling me, “If you want to write, just write.”

So this is me just writing.

It is also the first time in my life I’m sharing these kinds of pieces publicly, which makes me more hesitant than I’d like to admit. But I know one day I’m going to die, and this blog probably won’t make the list of regrets. Mortality is useful like that.

“You can read them when I die,” I always tell my husband whenever he asks to read my essays or poems. He is now my first and only paid subscriber.

While I figure out what shape this space will take, I hope you enjoy Letters From the In-Between as much as my mom secretly enjoyed reading my diary when I was in high school. “I got hooked. You’re such a good writer,” she told me after I caught her reading my painfully private teenage thoughts.

For both our sakes, I hope she was right.

Glad to have you here.

With love,
Carola

My grandma died one month ago.

She is no longer sitting on her front porch, watching cars and airplanes pass. We didn’t get to share one last laugh. I loved laughing with her. She had the darkest sense of humor.

She died. She is dead, but not entirely.

You see, in my family, we believe in eternal life. We believe in heaven, however outdated it might be these days to do so. When I was little, I used to imagine souls floating up into the sky. I still do. Objectively, around 60% of the human body is made of water, so even non-believers go up to the sky in the end. Science, right?

We called her Chochi, though her real name was María Soledad.

Soledad. Sol. Sun.

Every morning, I close my eyes and tilt my face up. She is the orange and the yellow now. She is the warmth. Energy, science tells us, never dies. The warmth of her hugs had to go somewhere.

“The cancer is back.”

When I left home at 17, I never gave much thought to the possibility of losing someone from far away. Death felt distant then, and it was.

As the years passed, life carried me farther away. It grew busier. My desire to explore the world consumed nearly all my corporate PTO. I worked holidays because that was the only way a young TV reporter could gain experience anchoring. We would always have Christmas next year—that is what I told myself for five years. Then came COVID. I got married, changed careers, became pregnant, and, eventually, moved overseas.

Life. Excuses.

“The cancer is back. It’s terminal. The doctor gave her a few weeks, maybe days,” my mother said over the phone.

It was in that moment, as I prepared to pick up my son from school, an ocean away from the people who made me, that I fully understood the true cost of distance.

Suddenly, being in Spain felt wrong. I took a plane home a few days after that phone call. By the time I arrived, Chochi was already fighting a battle her doctors had initially advised her not to fight.

A few weeks later, she was gone.

“You have pregnant eyes.”

It had been more than six months since I had last seen her. The guilt crept in slowly when I saw the fearless woman she had always been unable to outrun what was already coming for her. But guilt is useless. Chochi would have agreed. She despised those who practiced self-pity almost as much as she despised lazy people, so I rejected that feeling as soon as it appeared.

“Crying won’t get you anywhere,” she used to say. “We come to this world to suffer, work, and die.” Her life motto.

Somewhere inside me, I know she understood why I left. I would also like to believe I made her proud—proud of the life I built, the same life that, in many ways, pulled us apart. She got to see me on TV a few times, and she displayed the souvenirs I brought home from my trips in her living room.

She loved my husband, and she adored our son. Chochi actually predicted his arrival. “You have pregnant eyes,” she said knowingly during one of my trips back home. Josep and I laughed it off, only to find out a few weeks later that Joan was already on his way.

The last time I saw her before her terminal diagnosis was the day I told her we were moving to Spain. “You will be very happy there,” she assured us. She told us it was the best decision we could make and gave us her blessing.

The strength that’s not optional

As I process the grief of her passing, I find strength in the strange symmetry of our lives. She, too, left home as a teenager. She, too, uprooted her life, moved to another country, and managed to make a home wherever the universe carried her.

The beautiful burden of being an immigrant and a mother. The quiet trials. The unspoken fears. The strength that’s not optional, and the rough edges it creates. I always wondered why she wasn’t like the other grandmas, the soft, cookie-cutter ones. I get it now.

As a child, I never really saw the strong force of nature that Chochi was. She was simply my very short, very hot-tempered grandmother whom I loved dearly. Ordinary in the way children believe the people who hold their worlds together are ordinary. Now, I see she was everything but.

The moment before never

“I am so proud to be your granddaughter. I love you. Thank you for everything.”

Those were the last words I managed to say to her before the tears choked me. She responded with a small nod and a smile. Her brown eyes, tinged with the blue of age, held a mixture of peace and resignation. Our matriarch was leaving us before our eyes.

I walked away knowing I would never speak to her again. Never—what a strong word. We use it so lightly. But when the moment before never arrives, it chokes you.

The next time I saw her, she was in her casket, wearing her favorite green dress, red lipstick, and a black Spanish mantilla. I had gifted her the mantilla a few years earlier, after returning from a trip to Toledo, thinking she could wear it on a special occasion. I never imagined that the special occasion would be her funeral.

“She looks too beautiful.”

Before Chochi died, she told my grandfather she did not want an open casket funeral.

But he respectfully disobeyed.

“We can’t close the casket, she looks too beautiful,” he said. And she did, she looked like a Mexican queen. Papa Beto, a man of faith, peeked into my grandma’s casket many last times to pray over her body. “Mi viejita,” he whispered. He loved her so much, as much as she loved him, so I’m pretty sure Chochi forgave him.

“Mama, why do you say Chochi is in the sky if she’s still here?” my 4-year-old asked, while we were both kneeling in front of her.

I explained that souls and bodies separate when our time on Earth comes to an end. I tried, too, to explain DNA—how Chochi would live on through us, and through those who come after us. For some reason, I find comfort in connecting religious beliefs to scientific principles.

My son accepted my answer without fully understanding and kissed the casket—the art of letting go, exemplified.

Thousands of flowers filled the small chapel where she lay for three days before her burial. Those same flowers accompanied her body to the grave, where my grandfather had already reserved a spot right next to hers.

“Close your eyes.”

On our flight back to Spain, as the plane rose into the clouds, my son kept looking for Chochi in the sky. “Why can’t I see her?” he asked. “Some things you can only see with your heart, when you close your eyes,” I responded, surprised at how poetic my response was.

He accepted my answer once again. His innocence made me smile. And as I looked out the window, I found myself smiling at the clouds—smiling at Chochi. And I imagined her smiling back.

My grandmother died one month ago.

And somehow, she is still here.