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  "path": "/notes/2026/05/2026-05-14-where-absence-fits/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-14T14:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://paulopinto.xyz",
  "textContent": "When they take your children away, the inside of your face is always raw, even if outwardly you show only the odd wound, which may even bleed. Your face may smile, but inside it drains away into tears that carry thorns and cut your pores from within. You sweat trying to let that river of anguish out, the one that squeezes your heart every second.\n\nClick to expand\n\n_\n\nAt first, when you happen to cross paths with them on the street—your children—your chest tightens so much that your body becomes the entire universe, and your heart a planet, or rather a comet: wandering, disoriented, without direction or meaning. Until the moment of exhaustion comes, when you either let yourself fall asleep or you fade away. It’s a sleep that soothes the pain, cloaks you in a transparent mantle, and the tightness loses intensity, but it remains.\n\nFor that mantle to stop being so transparent, so that it no longer lets through the memory of a kiss or a caress, of a shout that shapes the word “Dad,” you need time—lots of time. And when the moment arrives that the mantle becomes opaque, you don’t recognize yourself. How could you have done that? Between the tightness and indifference, a sliver of hope still remained.\n\nNow you look at yourself like a monster in the mirror. In that moment you start to laugh, even play the joker; they recognize you as “the resident clown,” but the truth is you live in a make-believe world. You need that farce like blood that feeds your brain. You pretend your world is merely contingency because there is a world of possibilities that could be lived, and you reconfigure yourself. You are now an avatar of yourself, a performance of yourself. You simulate, dissemble, deceive and deceive yourself.\n\nSooner or later you realize that time—which wears and shapes everything—works slowly on the soul. And although what was broken isn’t healed, you learn to live with the cracks. The pain no longer screams; it whispers. And in the whisper there is sometimes music. It’s not joy, but it is some consolation, a distant echo of tenderness that still resonates in the body, as if the memory of the touch of a small hand, or a laugh from the back seat of the car, could still warm a cold night.\n\nThere are days when the sky changes, and with it the skin of memory changes too. There’s a breeze, a scent in the air, perhaps the sound of a bicycle in the distance—and everything returns. The scars reopen silently. It doesn’t hurt like before, but it hurts differently. It hurts deep, it hurts wide. It hurts as if a piece of you had been left in a forgotten photograph, in a school notebook with crooked letters that read “for my dad.”\n\nBut you don’t die from it. Or maybe you die a little, just enough so you live in another way. And you learn to find beauty where before you only saw absence: the sunset is no longer just the end of another day; it is also a light show seen at once in many places. And that sharing changes you. Silently. Almost imperceptibly. But it changes you. Life stops being a stage for pain and becomes a shelter. Imperfect, yes, but a shelter nonetheless. You begin to live for yourself, because you are left with yourself, and then you realize you are enough. Not by choice, but by necessity. And you discover that there is a kind of love there too. A love that endures without presence, that feeds on memory, that molds itself to the void and fills it with hope.\n\nAnd then, on certain days, you get up and there’s a breeze at your window. A breeze that sings to you and makes you sing along with it, softly. Or not even that. But you hear it. And what was once the silence of mourning becomes an attentiveness to life. You no longer expect reunions. But you love, always. Because loving is a way of being alive. And it’s on those days that music saves you. Yes, it saves you like an ancient spell, an enchantment that never forgot your soul. You let yourself be invaded by the sound and, suddenly, as if by a miracle, the world stops hurting. Because the pain turns into a warm, clean breeze. And for moments—just moments—everything that is broken is put back together, as if they sewed you from the inside with threads of light.\n\nThreads of light that still let tears fall, which keep time quietly, without noise. They are tears that order the pain to ask permission to exist in a world where everything sounds like beauty. Because when the music starts, reality transforms—not by lying, but by reinterpreting. And everything that seemed lost, ugly, irreversible becomes only part of a larger symphony, full of color and tenderness.\n\nMusic idealizes. It elevates. It creates worlds where embraces never break and glances never turn away. It’s as if each chord contained an “what if,” a new story with sweeter endings, mornings when they come back to the door, come in and say: “listen to this song, Dad.”\n\nIn that instant music permeates like skin, and everything is peace. And so you live. Because there is always one more song to discover, one more verse that speaks for you, one more harmony where you feel whole. Music is the place where there are no distances, no absences—where love does not need presence to be real.\n\nMusic is then the place where you live without an address, but where everyone fits, where even absence fits. In that absence, each musical note lights up the darkest corners of longing, cradleing memories with infinite tenderness, even when the heart bleeds in silence. And in that sonic embrace you discover that love—so vast and inexplicable—transcends physical presence, dances beyond time, and endures even when everything seems lost.\n\nAnd so, in the tempo of that unfinished symphony called life, you learn that being a father is not only a role to perform, but an essence that inhabits you, even when the stages are empty and the curtains closed. Because in the theater of existence, the most important applause is the one that echoes within you, coming from an invisible yet ever-present audience: your children, whom you carry in your soul like eternal notes of a song that never ends.\n\nAnd it is in that moment you realize: music is not just refuge, it is revelation. Each chord unfolds a truth; each silence between notes is a place where you keep the smiles you couldn’t watch grow. And even so—wounded, incomplete—you continue to dance this waltz with life, because you know that somewhere, sometime, your children are also dancing, also singing, also living. And in that dance, though apart from you, you have the hope that they move to the rhythm of the same love.\n\nAnd you are, forever, a father.",
  "title": "Where absence fits"
}