Beneath the noise of the city, I walked the center of Valencia and felt as if time had deliberately stopped at its most merciless hour. Poverty here is not hidden in alleyways or tucked behind closed doors, it is sprawled openly on the sidewalks, confronting anyone willing to look. A man sleeping on the ground clutches his dog as if it were his last thread to dignity. His sneakers are torn, his body is folded into the concrete, and still, some would call this scene “moving” or “poetic.” But I cannot, and I will not. There is nothing noble in being forced to sleep on a street, nothing “inspiring” about sharing scraps of warmth with a stray animal. To portray this as resilience is to betray the truth. Poverty is not art. It is a wound, untreated and reopened each day.
Crossing through these streets is like walking through a time machine, except instead of nostalgia it delivers a sharp reminder of how little has changed in decades. The rain falls, and a man with an umbrella pushes a cart filled with plastic containers, his hands stiff, his clothes soaked. There is no romance here, no beauty in sacrifice, only survival. He is not a symbol of strength but of how people bend and break under weight they never asked to carry. Around him buses screech, vendors shout, graffiti shouts rebellion, and still the faces of those around me are distant, weary, almost resigned. The city breathes exhaustion, and I breathe it with them. I refuse to pretend that this is normal. I refuse to let my eyes adjust to decay as if it were scenery.
During these walks I keep asking myself questions that hover without answers. How many years can a society recycle the same struggles and still expect its people to endure? Why do we accept as background noise what should set alarms ringing inside our hearts? I do not speak names, I do not point fingers, because the guilty are too many and the cycle of blame too tired. But deep down I know the cruelty is deliberate, because there is enough wealth in this world to ensure no one sleeps on a sidewalk, no one pushes a cart under the rain, no one hides hunger behind a forced smile. And yet, every step reminds me we have made a collective choice to spoil everything that could offer dignity.
Every time I walk here, I also see my own reflection. I think of the small cruces I carry, the debts, the obligations, the endless struggle to keep balance in a life that feels increasingly fragile. But when I compare my own weight to the ones I witness in these streets, my complaints feel hollow. I return home to a roof, a bed, and the illusion of stability, while others remain out there negotiating with concrete floors, hunger, and indifference. These walks force me to confront the uncomfortable truth that poverty is not an abstraction for me to observe, it is a mirror of what could happen to anyone when the line between surviving and falling disappears. And perhaps that is why it unsettles me so deeply: it strips away the illusion that we are safe from it.
Sometimes I think about the world we could have built, the one where dignity is not a privilege but a foundation. We are capable of feeding everyone, of sheltering everyone, of letting people walk without fear or humiliation. Yet what I see around me is evidence of how little we want to face ourselves. We choose to glorify struggle instead of eliminating it, to romanticize poverty instead of eradicating it. These photographs I took are not trophies or testimonies of strength, they are fragments of a reality too heavy to ignore. My words are not decoration but resistance, a refusal to soften what should stay raw. Poverty is not cool. It is not noble. It is not a lesson. It is simply the cruel evidence of how far we have let humanity fall.
