This is not a dream

There are roads your feet recognize, even if your mind has erased them.
It’s not déjà vu. It’s your soul whispering: “You came back for a reason.”

This is not a dream.
Or maybe it is…
It’s the story of a road that knew me before I knew myself,
and of the moment when time stopped being a line and became an echo.

There are paths you don’t remember walking,
and yet your feet step on them with a familiarity that unsettles.

At some point along the way, time stopped behaving like a line
and began to fold like damp paper.
Everything becomes simultaneous:
the first time I died,
the last time I said goodbye,
eternity trapped in a blink of dust on the windshield.

I saw a stone structure, a cross crowning the silence.
I didn’t pray. It wasn’t necessary.
The stone recognized me.
It knew I had been there before, with another name, another voice.
Perhaps in another body.
Perhaps as a shadow.
Or as wind.

The Virgin behind the glass watched me with the tenderness reserved for repeat visitors.
The image did not bless, it remembered.
As if to say:
“You have fled from here in another life.
This time, stay a little longer.”

The Gremlin and the motorcycle rested under a light that wasn’t from the sun, but from memory.
I sat at the edge of the road the way ghosts sit:
weightless, yet dense with history.

And for an instant I understood that the soul does not travel with maps or clocks:
it drags itself toward the moments where something burned —love, fear, or joy—
and returns there,
not out of nostalgia for the place,
but because of time’s wound.

I remembered then that souls don’t return as punishment,
but because of invisible agreements.
Because they left a word unfinished,
a farewell unclosed,
a promise still trembling on the line of the horizon.

All of this happened at an undefined point between sea and sky,
between what I was and what I will be.
No one saw it.
No one documented it.
But I lived it.
Or maybe I’m dreaming it from another incarnation.

What matters is not whether it’s real.
What matters is that, for a few minutes,
time stopped to say hello.

And though the road went on,
I stayed there a little while,
in that fold of time,
like someone who leaves a part of themselves behind so as not to forget.

Photography by Alejandro Iván De León Leal