Wherever people gather, some seem born from another place entirely. One uncle on the father’s side belonged to this strange circle. He carried a certain flavor of Valencia, yet that origin wasn’t visible from where he stood, and it was hard to pinpoint exactly where he was from. That ambiguity lent him a rare charm because in childhood the best luxury some kids could imagine was being a foreigner. There were few of them among their peers, but the children followed these visitors, copying their gestures, their manners, and even their way of speaking. They invented their own languages on the fly, crafting conversations in sounds they did not truly know and yet somehow understood. It felt like a secret treasure, a passport to places the daily world didn’t reveal.
“This is tor car espetros matañas”, a child would say to a close friend with solemn importance.
And the friend would reply with a straight face, “Anterior prasi ognívolas corripas.”
In those days there were no psychologists within reach, or at least none who could be afforded by the family. So the mother, shaken by how these conversations wandered through the kitchen and living room, took the child to the family doctor. The neighborhood physician was a familiar face, someone local who accepted a modest payment for emergencies and the ordinary care of a community.
The doctor placed his hands on the neck to feel the lymph nodes and listened with careful, deliberate attention. Then he asked a question in a tone that demanded a precise answer, a question that felt almost ceremonial in its gravity.
In front of the mother, the child answered with the same measured calm, giving a response that carried the weight of a practiced routine. The doctor noted the absence of physical illness and made a finding spoken in plain terms: there were no medical issues, only a peculiar attraction to a foreign profession, a sense of displacement that colored the child’s perception of self.
That verdict, spoken with clinical restraint, triggered a sharp reaction from the mother. The concern was palpable, a cry of disbelief about origins and belonging that echoed through the room. The response suggested that if the feelings came from another place, perhaps they would share the same patterns, but the doctor urged caution, pointing out that character was the true compass rather than geography.
Before leaving, the mother insisted on a practical step. She asked for vitamins to support the child, even though those nutrients proved expensive and hard to obtain. As they stood at the pharmacy counter and prepared to depart, the mother looked directly into the child’s eyes and asked whether this entire state of mind could be explained if the origin were not from the place they lived. The child looked back with a candid, frustrating honesty and admitted that no explanation could bridge the gap between origin and feeling.
That moment lingered like a hinge in time. The doctor stated a blunt truth as they walked away, a verdict that stuck with the family: the child appeared foolish only because the longing to be elsewhere overwhelmed the ordinary sense of place. The child internalized that remark, and it remained vivid in memory—an ordinary day turned inward, where the ache to be somewhere else persisted.
As years passed, the sense of being perpetually outside the current moment did not vanish. It matured into a quiet temperament, a lifelong inclination to observe the world from an angle that suggested there was always another room, another window, another voice waiting to be heard. The yearning to inhabit a place different from the one around the corner stayed with the person, not as a diagnosis but as a personal compass.
Even now, the sentiment persists in subtle ways. It surfaces in conversations about culture, in the way language is touched by distant accents, and in the slow, almost intimate act of listening to people tell their stories. The pull to understand how others live remains stronger than the impulse to anchor oneself firmly in one location. In that sense, the original impulse became a lifelong habit: a curious traveler inside a familiar body, forever exploring what could be if the scenery changed and identities shifted shapes with every step.
Through it all, the episode is remembered not as a caricature of illness but as a human moment when questions about origin and belonging briefly collided with a child’s innocent dreams. It stands as a quiet reminder that identity can be a tapestry woven from many threads, some visible, some barely felt, and that the longing to be somewhere else can carry with it a kind of light that illuminates who a person might become.
In the end, the memory exposes a fundamental truth: longing is not a flaw but a force that shapes perception, guiding choices and coloring the way a person perceives the world. It remains, a stubborn beacon that keeps the imagination alive and keeps the door to possibility ajar, even when the steps taken are only inward and the road is found inside.