The old house of me

In Portuguese, we say “sinto falta de quem eu era” – I miss who I used to be – as though mourning a nearby absence, a familiar echo of who we once were. But the truth runs deeper: transition doesn’t rob us; it dismembers us. Some parts are left along the way, others resist within, and many we didn’t even know existed until they bloomed beneath the new skin. There is a silent mourning in all of it, as if each choice were also a farewell. And perhaps it is. No one tells us that growing also means burying versions of ourselves.

I left parts of me in places I can never return to. In clothes that no longer fit, in gazes that no longer recognize me, in loves that only knew how to love what I appeared to be. Each loss has a name only I know. A photograph tucked away, an old laugh, a memory that now feels like it belongs to someone else. And yet, it was mine. All of it was. But it no longer is. And that is where the ache lives: not in what I lost, but in the fact that I needed to lose it in order to be whole.

Transition is this ritual without an altar, where the offering is one’s own skin, and faith is a hope grown weary of pretending. Sometimes I find myself again in new gestures, in words that finally make sense, in the steady silence of someone who no longer needs to perform. It is a slow beginning, with scars still raw, but also with smiles that owe nothing to anyone. Smiles that are mine. Whole. Present. Real.

I am no longer who I was; and yet, I am made of all of it. What was left behind is not a shame – it is a foundation. An old house, now empty, but where I learned to walk. And though I cannot go back, I can look from afar and give thanks. Because today, at last, I walk on my own two feet. Even if they sometimes tremble. Even if the road still frightens me.