Last week, after leaving a cultural event in San Blas, Valencia, I walked past a skatepark that seemed almost deliberately forgotten. The event had taken place in a public museum, strangely disconnected from everything around it, while only a few streets away the city showed another face. The skatepark had ramps, rails, stairs, and walls, enough to show that somebody had once imagined this place as useful. Yet parts of it were covered with dirt and mud, as if nobody had cared about them for years. It was not beautiful or well maintained. Then came the boards hitting concrete, the wheels, the voices, the laughter. The sound made the contrast sharper. The place looked neglected, but the kids were not treating their lives as neglected.
What stayed with me was the seriousness with which they inhabited it. They skated, fell, tried again, watched one another, and laughed at mistakes. Boys and girls moved through the same place without turning that coexistence into a statement. Nobody needed to explain who belonged there. I do not romanticize this. These are children growing up in a country where poverty, uncertainty, broken infrastructure, and daily difficulty are not abstract subjects. They know that life can be hard. Yet for those hours, the important things were balance, movement, friendship, and the next attempt. That moved me more than the skatepark itself. Deprivation does not become beautiful because children can laugh inside it. What is beautiful, if anything, is their ability to create a small world of their own without pretending the larger one is easy.
Perhaps that is why the skateboards stayed with me. There was something quietly defiant in their ordinariness. A child on a skateboard cannot repair public infrastructure or change a country. But that child can claim a piece of the afternoon and become better at something simply because it feels good to learn. Adults tend to measure difficult lives through what is missing: money, security, opportunities, functioning institutions. Those absences matter, but they are not the whole story. People also build friendships, develop skills, and find pleasure wherever there is room for it. Watching those kids made me think about how much of adulthood is made from concerns they have not yet inherited: bills, status, political exhaustion, fear about the future, the constant calculation of what might go wrong. They had not disappeared; they simply were not in charge for a while.
It was equally moving to watch girls skate alongside boys without treating the difference between them as a rule. Children can sometimes refuse categories that adults have spent years teaching them to accept. They were not making an argument about gender or society. They were sharing a place, learning, competing, joking, and having fun. That does not erase the inequalities around them, and it would be dishonest to pretend everything is fine. But there is value in noticing what survives without turning survival into a sentimental story. Talent, curiosity, and friendship survive. So does the desire to learn something difficult for no practical reason at all. Maybe adulthood makes us suspicious of that pleasure because we become accustomed to interpreting life through problems. We see a neglected place and immediately think about everything that should be different. The kids saw the same place and found something they could do.
By the time I left, the skatepark was still worn, dirty, and poorly maintained, surrounded by a neighborhood carrying more hardship than anyone should have to normalize. Nothing had been repaired. Nothing had suddenly become fair. What changed was the way I understood the scene. The concrete was not much, but it was enough to practice, compete, make friends, and simply be young. I do not want to romanticize poverty or pretend resilience is a substitute for decent living conditions. It is not. Children deserve better spaces, better opportunities, and a life in which joy does not depend on what remains after everything else has failed. Still, there they were, skating anyway. That is what I will remember: not the poverty around them, but the fact that, for a few hours, it did not get the final word.
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.
