El nervio principal

In 1994, the year Mexico was shaken by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, a ten-year-old boy watched his world shatter forever. His mother left home, leaving behind a letter, a kiss, and an origami book. She would never return. From then on, silence settled over the family, and abandonment took on everyday forms: an emotionally absent father, more like a household object than a caring figure, and an older sister who preferred to escape into her adolescence. Alone and disoriented, the boy invented rituals to survive: he favored the left side of his body, tried to divide things into perfect halves, and folded paper figures again and again as if he could find an explanation in those folds. The days passed between the empty house and his imagination, fueled by "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, until, tired of the indifference and armed with a daring decision, he boarded a bus to cross the country in search of his mother. Years later, now an adult and withdrawn from the world, the narrator returns to those memories like someone unfolding an ancient origami, convinced that the truth lies hidden within them. But what he finds will not only change his memory, but will shatter everything he thought he knew about his family.