Dónde puedo dejarlo

“I’ll die if you don’t come”: Mara’s friendly threat to Manu. Or so it’s written in one of their notebooks, a notebook that, some time later, will try to trace the meaning of those five words. It’s December 1989, the last summer of a period in the lives of two girls who have just turned eighteen. One, the one who calls, needs to escape. The other, the one who stays behind, doesn’t know that the meeting is a farewell and that from now on there will be a void, that memories will crowd her mind and wreak havoc, that time will shatter and her existence in this new scenario will be shaped by the conjecture of a presumed life. Hers, her friend’s, the lives of those around her: the world that is being left behind and the one she imagines hurtling forward. What do you do with what’s gone, how do you incorporate that void? What role does imagination play in the stories we tell ourselves? How many people are we, or can we become, if we insist on transforming into others?