Shape of me

Porro playing somewhere in the background. A güepa cutting through the music. Bodies moving before anyone asks them to dance. Loud colours, patterned shirts, gold details, polished shoes, houses dressed for celebration, and people who never seemed afraid of being seen. Voices on top of voices, words swallowed halfway through, hands finishing what mouths started, and a room full of stories from the Colombian savannas. Corozal was hundreds of kilometres from Bogotá, but somehow it was always in the house. Between the noise, the dancing, the jokes, the silences and all those people carrying a story of their own, I learned early that there is always more happening than what is being said.

A pause before an answer. A look that lasts a second too long. Hands that move differently when the subject changes. The word someone avoids. The one they repeat. I notice those things before I notice the obvious ones. People are always saying more than what comes out of their mouths, and I have always been more interested in that part.

Everyone carries a shadow. Things we hide, soften or silence because difference is still easier to judge than to understand. I have always been drawn to what does not fit neatly. The strange, the contradictory, the unfinished, the person who refuses to become a template. I believe “I don’t know” is one of the most intelligent places to begin. Ignorance, to me, is pretending there is nothing left to learn. Maybe that is why I am interested in people who question the edges, break irrelevant rules and leave something behind instead of simply passing through.

I don’t follow curiosity in straight lines. A film can take me to architecture, a song to human behaviour, a bad product to a business idea, a conversation to something I need to read for the next three hours. I like falling into things I know nothing about and staying there until something connects. Sometimes it is useful. Sometimes it makes no sense at all. I don’t care. I am more interested in the collision between things than in keeping them where they belong.

I rarely look at something and leave it as it is. My head starts rebuilding it. A conversation becomes a scene. A frustration becomes a product. A broken experience becomes a system. A simple thought can become a business model, sometimes irrationally difficult, sometimes irrationally necessary. Even criticism works that way for me. I am rarely interested in what is wrong. I am interested in what else it could become. I imagine worlds, some made of stories, others of products, businesses, experiences or ideas, but what I build always has to pass through the same filter: my values.