There’s a particular kind of reassurance I find in the old bars of Madrid: the shiny counters, the cold metal stools, the white marble floors… The liqueur bottles on display, the olives and bocadillos sitting behind the glass — unpretentious, unconcerned with aesthetics.

It feels like a scene from another time. Quite literally, another century. A time that reminds me of my childhood, of slower seasons, and of what I imagine as lo castizo: something raw and true to the local identity and way of life. A sign that not everything has yet been lost to post-postmodernity, to globalisation, or to the rising signs of mass tourism in the city.

Madrid has always been my anchor. It’s the place where I grew up—the place I always return to, no matter how far I go. And yet, something feels different this time around.

As I walk the streets I once called mine, they feel a little foreign. I notice the older shops in the centre slowly being replaced by souvenir stores, international franchises, and restaurants catering to visitors from elsewhere.

I catch myself mourning the city I used to know. As if I were losing the Madrid that lives in my memory.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with attachment.

I’ve lived so many different lives. My childhood was split between early years in Venezuela and several chapters in Madrid—our first neighbourhood, then the one my family still calls home. My adult life has unfolded across continents: university and postgrad years in the UK, teaching in China, a year in Australia drifting from coast to coast…

Through it all, Madrid remained my only constant. My quiet consolation that not everything must go. That some things do remain.

Most madrileños are attached, I’d say. Friends who leave, return. Traditions prevail. Ties run deep. The rhythm of the city is comforting and cyclical—its terrazas, its lively streets, its laid-back madness.

Living abroad, returning to Madrid has always felt like pressing pause on time. You live a life elsewhere, come back, and everything seems unchanged. Madrid was always the quiet centre of my orbit — familiar, still, like a photograph untouched by time.

But of course, things do change. And this year, the illusion finally cracked.

I remember the first time it hit me. It was New Year’s Eve, 2024 — the first one I’d spent in Madrid since 2017. I went for an aperitivo at the neighbourhood bar. The area where I live feels more like a village than a part of the capital. I bumped into people I hadn’t seen since high school: classmates, parents, childhood friends I’d lost touch with. And with over ten years on our shoulders, I saw it clearly. Time has gone by. For all of us.

Change and loss are universal human experiences, but for those of us who live in perpetual motion, they’re constant companions. Sometimes, that reality is overwhelming.

Because of my lifestyle, I’ve had to let go many times: of countries, homes, friendships, and versions of myself. But there’s a special kind of nostalgia in releasing the idea of constancy itself. It feels like losing the comfort of believing that not everything has to change, no matter how much I do.

The old bars, the echoes of my younger self in every familiar corner of the city—they all mirror this human desire to hold onto something in a world that will never stop changing.

Maybe it’s only natural for the old bars to give way to the new. Isn’t that what we call progress? Or is this simply me realising that I’m growing older, when yesterday it felt like I would be young forever?

Before I left for Australia, a friend gifted me a book by Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda. There’s a passage I’ve never forgotten. One of the characters foresees the end of his relationship with his lover and says: “It is terrifying to outlive what makes us soft. It is atrocious that life goes on afterwards.”

Madrid will keep evolving, and so will I.

As challenging as this truth is to accept, behind it lies the quiet grace of life: that permanence was never the promise, only movement.

Perhaps that’s what the city has been teaching me all along: that nothing is ever truly lost. It just moves, breathes, reconfigures itself. And somehow, it still carries its essence.

In the end, everything that fades leaves an imprint. It never completely disappears. The Madrid I remember will always live inside me. So will Scotland, China, the Great Barrier Reef, and Venezuela.

Love and gratitude are the gifts of grief and nostalgia.

Maybe I can learn to shift with the city—to accept and love things as they are, not as they were. To find beauty even through the cracks of change.

I can hold love for the past while making space for life to flow.

​Because letting go is never losing—it’s creating. Creating space for new stories, for tenderness to return, for life to keep unfolding in unexpected ways, even when my human mind resists it.

And in that reassurance, I find a certain kind of peace—one greater than the nostalgic sight of the old, unaesthetic bars of this decaying Madrid of mine.

Big love,

​

Gaby