Witness

Hey, it's Sunday Morning.

Long ago, one Sunday morning, I was sitting in my favorite chair, reading.

My daughter came over, like she had many times before, and climbed onto my lap. I kept reading. I pointed to the sentences—how they connected, how they moved together. I was lost in the architecture of it.

She looked up at me and said,

"You read like a writer, papa."

She was young. Too young, I thought, to see what I couldn't yet see in myself.

And she said it in English. My language of correction. My language of surveillance.

Every sentence I spoke in English carried a question: Do I belong here? Every sentence I wrote felt like a test. Every word, a chance to betray myself.

But my daughter wasn't asking me to prove anything. She was simply naming what she saw.

In the language that had always demanded proof, she offered witness.

In English, every mistake can feel like evidence of who you are, not just what you did.

"I messed up" becomes "I am a mess." "I don't understand" becomes "I am stupid."

English made me the actor in my own undoing. I broke my arm. I forgot. I lost it.

Every mistake starts to sound like identity.

Spanish never did that to me.

In Spanish, my arm breaks on me. Se me rompió el brazo. Not "I broke my arm"—the arm broke.

Things get lost on their own. Se me perdió la llave. Not "I lost the key"—the key lost itself. You remain whole, even when things around you fall apart.

That isn't just grammar. That's mercy.

That morning, my daughter saw me inhabiting English. She saw someone who could move inside it. Someone who understood its rhythm, its structure, its craft.

She saw something I hadn't yet allowed myself to claim.

But my love for words didn't begin that morning. It had been growing quietly for years: feeling Rilke's heart aches, tracing Neruda's line breaks, returning again and again to Don Quijote.

Still, I let syntax stand between me and the page. Every word a risk. Every sentence a test.

What I didn't need was more mastery. I needed a witness.

Someone who could name what was already there, without asking me to prove it first.

And maybe that's true for all of us. We don't need a second language to find grace. We need someone to see us the way my daughter saw me that morning, already worthy of being in the room.

See you next Sunday.