Many lives. One me.

I look back and i can’t count how many times i’ve died.

I’m not talking about drama. I’m talking about the real thing: that moment when one version of you simply stops existing.

Without ceremony.

Without warning.

Sometimes in the middle of a sentence, sometimes in a dawn you never asked for.

Every major change in my life has brought a death with it. And i, naively, sometimes thought it was just a transition.

A phase.

Something that would pass.

But it doesn’t pass like that.

It passes through you.

With claws.

With blood.

There are versions of me I can barely remember now.

The girl in her twenties who left Portugal with a suitcase and an illusion of freedom.

The woman who learned to love in a foreign country and made it home.

The one who got married full of faith, the one who built a life brick by brick, the one who one day realised the house was standing but she was disappearing.

The mother.

The daughter.

The divorced woman.

The one who survived her father’s grief.

The one who fell in love when she shouldn’t have.

The one who survived that too.

There are many of them.

Sometimes they appear to me in dreams, or in a smell, in a song that suddenly plays and makes me stop in the middle of a corridor.

And I recognise them. They are mine. But I am no longer them.

The phoenix is a beautiful image, but no one talks about what happens before the fire.

The waiting. The weight of the ashes still warm.

Not knowing if this time there will truly be a rebirth or if this time there will only be destruction left behind.

I know what it is to burn.

I know what it is to lose myself so completely that I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise who was there. Not from lack of identity.

But because every transformation demands that something be given up.

A belief.

A relationship.

A role we wore so long it started to cling to our skin.

And the tears. God, the tears. The ones that fall in the bathroom so no one hears. The ones that come uninvited in the shower, in the car, in the middle of a conversation that has nothing to do with them.

The ones that are grief.

The ones that are rage.

The ones that are relief, from having carried too much for too long.

Every rebirth cost me a death.

And every death cost me a version of myself that, at the time, felt impossible to let go of.

But here I am.

With faint memories of who I was.

With scars that no longer shame me.

With a strange clarity that isn’t peace, it’s something else.

It’s knowing that I have already survived myself more than once.

That fire does not destroy me.

That ashes are always the beginning of something.

I don’t know how many more lives I will have.

But I know each one will ask me to die a little.

And I will.

And I will rise again every single time...