Mateo was nine years old, with a smile bright enough to chase away the darkest clouds in the neighborhood. He lived with his grandmother, Doña Clara, in a modest house with a tin roof that sang when it rained. They didn’t have much, but Mateo always said they were rich: they had rice, stories, and hugs.
Every afternoon, after helping his grandmother with errands, he’d sit on the porch with his notebook. It wasn’t just any notebook—it was his last one. The corners were worn, the pages stained with hope. In it, he wrote stories of worlds where no one went hungry, where children could fly, and grandmothers lived forever.
One day, Mateo didn’t come out to the porch. A fever had taken hold. Doña Clara, her tears falling without permission, found the notebook under his pillow. On the last page, written in shaky handwriting, it said:
“If one day I stop writing, it’s not because my stories are gone. It’s because I went to live inside them.”
Since then, Doña Clara reads one page every night, as if doing so could bring him back into her arms.