I wrote a while ago (in Spanish) that some emotions are domestic, while other emotions are wild. It’s not a matter of intensity, it’s a matter of whether you can let the emotions loose in a room and still survive them. I wrote back then that nostalgia belongs to the category of wild emotions. It’s a tiger. I wrote back then that the way to survive a wild emotion is to keep it in a carefully locked cage. You put a dam around the water or else you are drowned, and a wave crushes all your bones. From time to time the tiger gets out, the levee breaks, and everything is blue and salty and rainy for a while. And for a while, the people, the places you miss, are also very beautiful, with the kind of beauty that breaks your heart.

That kind of beauty is a form of truth, revealed to us by our love for somewhere, or someone. The streets of Montreal or Barcelona are pretty, to me, but the streets of Mexico, the memory of them, could make me cry. Because I don’t know Montreal’s truth, and I don’t love Montreal, but I know Mexico, and little corners of Mexico also know me, and I understand their beauty, and that beauty was mine, and it colored my memories, so it colors who I am. There’s the plain street in the working-class neighborhood where my mom lives, for example. There is nothing pretty about the houses, which were built without an architect and painted in a pale pink, or a bright green, not because it was a good design decision, but because it was someone’s favorite color. There’s the beauty of painting your house your favorite color, regardless of whether the color looks “good”, or “matches” anything. There’s the beauty in all the little official and unofficial commerce, that grows wild and without permits or regulations. Every other house offers something you may buy. It may be just a cardboard box filled with cheap candy, for the kids in the neighborhood. If you know the street, you get all kinds of food treasures: every day after 6 pm for example and only during the elotes season(I must call them elotes because they have nothing to do with the yellow sweet things people in Canada call “corn”), you can go to a specific house on the street, and buy an elote covered with crema, cheese and salsa valentina. There’s the beauty in the deliciousness of that treat. There’s the bigger beauty in the ability of Mexicans to invent ways to survive, which is the reason why working class neighborhoods are filled with people selling handmade tortillas, peeled mangos on a stick, offering haircuts, mending your old dresses, your old shoes. In a different street, in Morelia, around 7 pm you can go into a house through the metal door of a garage and get freshly baked sweet bread (its better to say in Spanish: pan dulce), and bolillos. I have no words to describe the beauty of a freshly baked bolillo, still warm. There’s the beauty of the hand painted signs for the little neighborhood stores, usually named after a person you love (a mom, a daughter), “Abarrotes Jaqueline”, “Tortillería Esmeralda”, but there are also more specific names like “La goma loca (the crazy eraser)” for a store that sells school supplies. There’s the beauty of the rickety sounds of rickety trucks that go round and round selling things, buying things. In a world overwhelmed by technology and sophistication and social media and smartphones,  I feel hopeful witnessing the stubborn anachronism of these trucks, using the scratchy recording of a song to sell their fruit, their bread,  or the recording of a child reciting metal appliances you may have in your house, and they may buy. The world is moving fast on someone else’s big agendas, so I find comfort in the old worlds that resist, the worlds that belong just to the people in a neighborhood. There’s the constant sound of children playing, moving across the street like a murmuration of birds, chasing a ball, chasing each other. There´s the beauty of the mountains beyond the flat roofs and water tanks and electric wires, that bloom in a sudden green once the rain season starts. There´s the beauty in the way everything everywhere turns green, as soon as the rain season starts, and there’s the smell of dust finally tamed by the rain. This is a modest, unoriginal street, like a million others in Mexico, not even very old, or very quaint. But I know its beauty, and that beauty breaks my heart when my nostalgia escapes the cage. I write about this street I miss, instead of the people I miss, because I don’t want to get too sad.

To write about the people without aching too much I must go about them indirectly. Describe my mom’s chicken soup, instead of my mom, the mountain my dad climbs every morning, instead of my dad, the way the world looks from the roof of the house where my sister lives and where we can sit and drink sweet nescafé in hot milk, instead of my sister. To love someone who is far away demands a degree of sadness. You must make your peace with the sadness, somehow, which is like making peace with a tiger.

The world is always many worlds, depending on your mood, your history, because the world is partially a creation of each beholder’s eyes. For some people the streets of Montreal or Barcelona are as beautiful as the streets of Mexico are to me, and the beauty of those other cities escapes me because it’s beyond my history and out of my depth. I knew only the surface of Montreal, while I know the heart and the soul of Mexico, or some of its many hearts, some of its many souls, the ones that nurtured me, and were (are) truly mine. Nostalgia is tough but it reveals a kind of beauty that maybe is lost on the ones who don’t have to miss people, or a place. Distance doesn’t make these places or people blurry; it makes them crisp, filled with detail and clarity. Our brain polishes the colors, the smells, the temperature of the air, the way things look in the morning, in the afternoon, when it rains, when it’s cold, when the sun burns the back of our necks at noon, the slight slant in someone’s walk, the rhythm and changes in their voice when they are worried, when they are happy. Our nostalgia works like a magnifying glass over the places and the people we miss, and, infused as they are already by our love for them, we see them under a romantic light. They may never be as beautiful as they are to us, looking at them through a forced distance and our sore heart. We don’t have time to get frustrated by the problems and the dangers and the ugly parts of the places we miss, so we are constantly overwhelmed just by their beauty, the same way we are swept away by the beauty of an unpolluted dream.