It’s easy to forget, sometimes.
When it’s just the two of us, walking or talking or sitting somewhere ordinary, it feels level. Balanced. Like we’re both operating on the same footing.
Then we step into the village.
That’s when it becomes obvious.
We hadn’t planned anything special. Just a walk, a coffee, maybe bread on the way back. The kind of loose plan that suits Pampaneira because it doesn’t ask much of the day.
Within thirty seconds, someone said her name.
Not loudly. Not formally. Just dropped into the air as if it had always been there.
She answered without stopping.
Then someone else. A nod. A smile. A brief exchange that skipped past explanation and landed somewhere I couldn’t quite reach. I walked half a step behind, not excluded exactly, just unnecessary.
It kept happening.
A woman leaned out of a doorway and asked Carmen about her mother. A man near the square mentioned something that had happened last winter. Someone else made a joke that required no context. Carmen laughed in the right place, replied in the right rhythm, and moved on.
I smiled. I nodded. I existed politely.
It wasn’t uncomfortable at first. Just noticeable.
There’s a difference between living somewhere and belonging to it, and the village makes that distinction quietly but firmly. Carmen belongs. She carries invisible threads with her. Family, history, shared memory. Things that don’t announce themselves but hold weight.
I know the layout now. I know which streets slope more than they look. I know where the uneven stone is that tries to trip you every time. I know who opens early and who never does.
But Carmen knows people.
At the café, the waiter greeted her before we sat down. Asked something that wasn’t about coffee. She answered with a shrug and a sentence that clearly referenced something old. I ordered when he finally looked at me, like a man being added to a conversation already in progress.
I watched her hands when she talked. Relaxed. Familiar. No effort spent choosing words or checking reactions.
It struck me that I’ve spent a lot of time here learning how to exist without being noticed. Carmen has spent her life being known.
Walking back, she stopped to check on someone I hadn’t seen before. They spoke for a minute. Maybe two. It wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t planned. It just needed doing.
I stood nearby, looking at the mountains, pretending not to listen. Not because I shouldn’t, but because I couldn’t follow all of it anyway.
I realised then that part of what unsettles me isn’t that Carmen fits here so easily.
It’s that she doesn’t need me to.
When I first moved here, everything felt provisional. Temporary. As if the village was watching, waiting to see whether I’d last long enough to be worth remembering. Even now, there’s a sense of being tolerated rather than absorbed.
Carmen doesn’t have that layer.
She’s not performing belonging. She’s not translating herself. She doesn’t pause to explain who she is.
The village already knows.
Later, back at the house, she commented on something small. The cupboard door. The light. A sound the building makes when the wind shifts. Not criticism. Recognition.
You always hear that at night, she said.
I nodded, slightly surprised she’d noticed. Slightly more surprised that she’d been hearing it longer than I had, even though I live there.
That’s the thing.
I moved here and built a life around the place. Carmen grew up with it humming in the background.
None of this is a problem. It just is.
But it changes the shape of things in my head.
I used to think settling here was about time. Enough days, enough routines, enough small interactions stacked up until something clicked.
Now I’m not so sure.
Maybe some places don’t fully open to you. Maybe they just make room.
And maybe being with someone who belongs doesn’t lessen you, but it does force you to see where you stand.
The village hasn’t changed. Carmen hasn’t changed.
I’m the one adjusting.
Learning that being here isn’t always about fitting in. Sometimes it’s about knowing where you don’t, and being alright with that.
We walked back inside as the afternoon cooled. The same streets. The same stones. The same quiet attention.
Carmen at ease.
Me still finding my edges.
Both of us exactly where we are.