I arrived in Mallorca clutching my mother's hand, a panicked five-year-old fleeing the chaos of apartheid South Africa. I left seven years later, taller and browner, still terrified but better at hiding it. What happened between those two moments—between the gold coin my father pressed into my palm at our reunion and the final ride down the winding road away from Son Vida—shaped everything that came after.
These were the years when I learned that paradise could be jerry-built, that home wasn't a place but a feeling, and that the people you love most can simultaneously save and destroy you. Mallorca gave me my first taste of freedom: the pine forests behind Campo de Rosas, the blue shock of the Mediterranean, the intoxicating roar of a Bultaco Chispa beneath me as I carved through those golf course paths like I owned the world. It also gave me my first education in loss—watching my mother's face grow gaunt with despair, feeling my father's attention drift toward younger, more convenient affections, learning that even the most beautiful places can't hold a family together when the center refuses to hold.
The island became my classroom in the essential contradictions of childhood. I built forts and kissed girls while my parents' marriage crumbled around me. I mixed chemicals with reckless abandon, dove for octopus, and nearly electrocuted myself on faulty wiring—all while Spanish became my second language and the Mediterranean sun burned itself into my bones. I formed a motorbike gang, discovered the ancient art of rebellion, and learned that loyalty sometimes means choosing the person who's breaking over the one who's already broken.
These chapters chronicle the sweet, savage education of a boy caught between languages, between parents, between the intoxicating freedom of childhood and the approaching weight of understanding. They're about the peculiar grace of finding yourself in a place that was never quite meant to be home, and the brutal mathematics of having to choose between the life you've built and the people you love.
In the end, Mallorca taught me that growing up is mostly about learning to carry contradictions: that you can love a place and leave it, that freedom and fear often wear the same face, and that the moments that feel like endings are usually just another kind of beginning. The island gave me stories and scars in equal measure, a handful of perfect days, and the knowledge that some things—no matter how beautiful, no matter how hard you fight to keep them—are only meant to be temporary.
What follows is the story of those seven years, told from the perspective of the boy who lived them and the man who's still trying to understand what they meant.