What are you willing to keep alive?

My favourite bookstore closed yesterday.
I went to say goodbye to the space that has held so many discoveries, connections, learnings, stories.
The place where I discovered that I could write, and where my imagination began to open up again.
The place where I learned from a world‑renowned writer.
The place where I was seen again.
The place where someone told me, “you are beautiful.”

I will miss us so much.

My favourite bookstore closed yesterday.
And people kept coming in, asking the owner: “What happened? Are you alright?”
I had to smile inside myself.

It reminded me of a funeral.
The soul of the person —what we once knew as alive— is no longer there.
Life has passed, things have happened, we missed important moments, we lost contact.
And now we stand here, surprised by the death.
Could we have avoided it?
Maybe the power was never in our hands to change its destiny.

The owner had struggled to keep the space alive, because it mattered to him and to the community.
But the community was no longer there.
The space was battling against souvenir shops, restaurants, tourists, and empty houses.
A bookstore without a community is no longer a bookstore.

“What happened? Are you alright?”
Now he is.
He can move on and create another community in a place where the soil is ready for new seeds.

Accepting death is not easy.
Accepting that what —or who— we thought would always be there is actually fragile, is not easy.

Forever thankful to Literanta.
And to Abilio Estévez.
And to all my dear book‑lover friends.
Our oasis lives in my heart.

Spaces don’t disappear because they fail.

They disappear because we stopped showing up.

A bookstore, a friendship, a neighborhood, a dream — they all need presence, attention, and a living community around them.

Without that, even the most magical places fade.

Maybe this is the quiet invitation hidden inside every ending: to notice where we are no longer present, to recognize what we took for granted, to honour what once held us, and to choose — consciously — where we want to show up next.