The first chapter had ended with my shadow on the ground. Me, the camera, and that growing feeling that I had finally found something resembling a direction. Not a definitive answer—I gladly leave those to gurus, priests, and men drunk enough to believe they are sober—but at least a road along which I could keep walking...

The problem with postcards is that they always arrive afterward. After someone has swept away the dirty sand, hidden the empty bottles, moved the old man sitting awkwardly, and waited for the cloud to have the decency to get the fuck out of the way. Then come the blue sea, the palm leaning at precisely the right angle, a woman without cellulite walking along the waterline, and the usual promise from the catalog: come here, spend enough, and for seven days you can pretend your life is not the one you left at home...

How long can a man hold out against something larger than himself? A day? A lifetime? Long enough to convince himself that all that suffering means something? We were taught that those who fight eventually win. It is one of those tender lies we tell children so they can sleep while the house burns down. The truth is, some battles have no medals, witnesses, or happy endings. They have only flesh against iron, clenched teeth, and someone who keeps climbing even when there is nowhere left to arrive...

If there is a God of cats, he must have woken up that day with a peculiar sense of humor. He had taken that hungry little bastard and planted him outside the entrance to a supermarket. Not beside a dumpster. Not in an alley...

Even paradise eventually presents the bill and reminds you that you cannot spend the rest of your life suspended between two posts with a beer nearby and no immediate responsibilities. Or rather, you could. But it would require a particular talent, very little dignity, and probably a better passive income than mine. I left Isla Mujeres and returned to the road. The third chapter began in front of a sign...

The second chapter of this journey begins in a bed that was not mine. If you were expecting a ferry, a map, or the reassuring outline of some monument, I am sorry to disappoint you. Real journeys rarely obey the order prescribed by guidebooks. They get dirty with life, take detours, miss connections, and sometimes begin with clothes on the floor and two people who, until recently, knew almost nothing about each other. I had only just met her there. She had invited me into her home, and that night we did what two adults do when attraction moves faster than caution and neither feels any need to submit it to the judgment of a moral committee. It was a damn good fuck...

*Mexico, Chapter I — Playa del Carmen, Chichén Itzá, Valladolid* Some journeys end when you close your suitcase, hand over the keys, and board the plane with the vague feeling you left something in the hotel nightstand. And then there are the ones that never leave. For me, Mexico belongs to the second kind.

In summer, freedom keeps strict opening hours: crowds, umbrellas, and the ritual of people escaping work only to return punctually to the lives they needed to escape.

A music-video set becomes a cinematic tale of poker, counterfeit money, desire, and the price we place on ourselves when a promise looks real enough.

It doesn't take a fire to know that something inside you is burning. Sometimes a candle is enough. A small, upright, stubborn flame, standing there in the middle of the world's chaos with a dignity that we human beings, frankly, can only dream of. Bottles, glass, reflections, noise, half-lived lives, nights that ended badly and others that began even worse all around it. Yet it remains. Lit. Simple. Almost ridiculous in its fragility. And still alive...