Today, Tuesday, March 3, 2026, I found myself doing something that was not on any to-do list: entering a second-hand bookstore just to “kill ten minutes.” I know, that kind of white lie that one tells oneself to avoid recognizing that, deep down, one is looking for a place where the world does not demand performance from one another.

The bookstore was almost empty. The air had that unmistakable smell of tired paper, a mixture of dust, old ink and the patience of things that do not compete for attention. On a low shelf, as if someone had placed it on purpose for a person who doesn't feel completely adult to see, a volume of Mafalda appeared. The cover was a little worn in one corner; the spine, bleached by the sun of some window; the price, written in pencil, as if it were still negotiable.

I took it with the delicacy with which one takes something fragile and familiar at the same time. And it was a minimal detail—a coffee stain on the first page, oval, like a brown moon—that hit me: that comic had already been accompanied. Someone read it while waiting for something. A train, a call, a move, a piece of news. In that stain was the trace of a real life, not the ordered life of the photos, but the life that leaves traces because it happens in a hurry.

I sat on the stool in the hallway (which seemed to be placed there for guilt: “if you sit down, you accept that you came to stay”). I opened it at random and Mafalda appeared with her face of eternal suspicion, that expression that is not exactly anger or sadness: it is lucidity with baby teeth.

Sometimes we forget that comics are not a “minor genre.” It is an art of cutting: in a few frames the world has to fit, or at least a version of the world that makes us laugh and, in the same movement, swallow the knot. A good comic is a small door: you enter through a panel and leave through a question.

Mafalda was always that for me: a question with bangs.

The first time I read it, as a child, I liked it because it was funny. I laughed at soup as if soup were the ultimate enemy of childhood. I laughed at Manolito because he was brute and businessman, as if the world was divided into “the sensitive ones” and “those who count coins.” I laughed at Susanita because she wanted to get married and have children, as if that were a joke and not, also, a form of fear.

Today I read it differently: I no longer laugh “at them”, I laugh “with them”, and that changes everything.

Because growing up is starting to recognize that each character has a secret reason. Felipe is not just a dreamer: he is anxiety disguised as imagination. Manolito is not just ambition: it is the need to control something when everything else is unstable. Susanita is not just superficiality: it is desperation to secure a place in a world that requires you to quickly choose who you are going to be. Freedom, so small, is not just an idea: it is that inner voice that screams at you “don't get used to it” when everyone around you has already gotten used to it.

And Mafalda… Mafalda is the midpoint between tenderness and indignation. That mixture that, if you lose it, you become cynical. And if you have too much, you become unbearable.

I turned the pages and noticed something else: the edges were underlined with a pen in two or three panels. Underlining a comic seems sacrilege, but it is also a statement: “this wasn't just a joke to me.” One of the marked lines said something about the world, about the absurdity of adults and their ability to complicate the obvious. I stayed for a while looking at that underlining like someone looking at a stranger's signature on a city wall.

I thought about the moment Quino decided to stop drawing the strip. Not because of a lack of ideas, but – they say – because of fatigue, because of the political climate, because of the intuition that some things, if they are stretched, become a caricature of themselves. There is a rare wisdom in finishing on time. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do with a work is to leave it safe from repetition.

There, with the book open, I understood that I have been trying the opposite for years: stretching stages. Stretch friendships that have already changed languages. Stretching works that became “correct” but not alive. Stretch habits because they give the illusion of stability. Stretch youth as if youth were a contract and not a state of mind.

And yet, the comic was teaching me a very simple lesson: life is not sustained by stretching; It is sustained by small decisions.

The coffee stain repeated it to me: someone read these pages in the middle of something. In the middle of a wait. In the middle of any day. Greatness was not in “having time”, but in stealing a corner from time.

Today we talk about “disconnecting” as if it were a product. Retreats are sold, methods are sold, breathing apps are sold. But there is an older, more humble disconnect: sitting down with a comic and allowing a drawn girl to discuss the world with you.

There is a scene—which I don't need to remember exactly to feel true—in which Mafalda looks at the globe. That globe is, for me, one of the most powerful objects in comics: a world that fits on a table and yet weighs too much. As a child I thought the world was big; As an adult, sometimes I feel that it is too small: everything comes quickly, everything is outrageous quickly, everything is commented on quickly. Information does not travel: it runs over you.

And there the comic once again becomes a refuge and mirror. Refuge because it gives you back the human rhythm: a vignette, another vignette, a silence between frames. Mirror because it reminds you that problems were not born yesterday. They change clothes, they change hashtags, they change vocabulary, but they remain the same: war, inequality, fear, desire to belong, hunger for meaning.

While reading, I surprised myself by doing an intimate, almost ridiculous inventory: —It's been a long time since I've been indignant without posing. —It's been a long time since I laughed without justifying it. —It's been a long time since I talked to someone without looking at the clock.

And in the middle of those questions the most uncomfortable one appeared: when was the last time I defended an idea because I believed it was fair, and not because it was convenient for me?

Mafalda has that ability: she corners you without shouting. It leaves you laughing and, right behind it, a small truth that you can't spit out.

I closed the book and opened it again at the end, like someone checking if a place is still there before saying goodbye. Then I saw something else: the seal of a library on an inside page, now almost erased. That volume had circulated. It passed from hand to hand as things that are still useful pass. I was moved by imagining several different people reading the same paintings and each feeling that the cartoon spoke “to them.”

That's the most collective thing I know: a shared intimacy.

I bought the volume. Not because I thought I was going to read it every day, but because I wanted to take physical proof that thought can also be portable. In the bag, the book weighed little. In the head, it weighed just enough.

When we left, the city was the same as before: cars, rush, screens. But I walked with a different speed, as if each traffic light could be a vignette and each corner had its ending.

I like to think that the comic—this comic—didn't give me answers. He gave me something better: he gave me back the right to ask simple questions, the kind that seem childish and for that very reason are dangerous. Questions like: “Is what I do making me more human or just more efficient?”

Maybe adulthood isn't about stopping reading comics. Perhaps adulthood is reading them and admitting, without shame, that an ink girl can remind you of what you were about to forget: that the world is not fixed only with great speeches, but with the daily courage of not swallowing the soup when the soup is injustice disguised as custom.