If a sister “wants to fly” in a Palomas narrative, she is not donning wings. She is likely a teenage girl on a rooftop, a woman leaving her marriage, or a psychiatric patient convinced she is lighter than air. The narrator—the brother—watches from below. That is the cruel geometry of the title: one looks up, the other looks down. The one on the ground feels guilt; the one in the air feels freedom, however brief. Let us reconstruct the hypothetical novel as a work of autofiction set in 1990s Catalonia.
That image—a boy clutching his sister’s earrings while she is carried away on a stretcher—is pure Palomas. It is the domestic surrealism of grief. Why do humans, especially adolescents, equate flight with escape? In 2009, the “Balloon Boy” hoax captivated America: a family claimed their six-year-old son had floated away in a homemade helium balloon. He was later found hiding in the attic. The public was outraged by the hoax, but no one asked: Why did the boy hide? Possibly because he wanted to disappear, not fly.
This viral poetic afterlife suggests that the title resonates because it captures a universal childhood terror: watching someone you love choose a form of leaving that looks like freedom but feels like abandonment. Alejandro Palomas has not written El día que mi hermana quiso volar . But perhaps he should. In an era where youth mental health is in freefall, where teenage girls are the subjects of crisis, and where siblings are the silent witnesses of family collapse, this book would be a necessary bruise. El dia que mi hermana quiso volar - Alejandro P...
Until then, the title remains a ghost. And we are Damián: standing on the balcony, watching, holding the earrings, hoping that the story we tell will be enough to keep her from jumping again. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or severe mental health issues, please contact a mental health professional or a crisis helpline in your area. In Spain, call 024 (Suicide Prevention Line), available 24/7.
A working-class apartment block in El Clot, Barcelona. August. The air is thick with the smell of fried fish and chlorine from rooftop water tanks. If a sister “wants to fly” in a
Given this, I have generated a that imagines this book as a lost or hypothetical modern fable. The article explores the themes the title evokes—sibling bonds, mental health, the desire for escape, and the danger of taking metaphors literally—placing it in the context of Alejandro Palomas’s real literary universe.
This dynamic mirrors real-life accounts of families dealing with psychosis or suicidality. The well sibling often grows up in a double bind: love the one who is falling, but never catch them. Palomas would explore this with his signature tool—. For example, Damián would remember that before Lucía climbed the railing, she asked him to hold her earrings. Gold hoops. “So they don’t get lost in the wind,” she said. And he holds them. Even after the fall, even after the ambulance, he still has the earrings in his sweaty palm. That is the cruel geometry of the title:
In El día que mi hermana quiso volar , Lucía’s flight wish is not a hoax. It is a psychotic symptom. Palomas, who has written poignantly about mental illness (the mother in Una madre is deeply depressed), would never romanticize the jump. He would show the aftermath: the wheelchair, the shame, the sister who no longer remembers wanting to fly, and the brother who will never forget.
Flight, in Palomas, is never a superpower. It is a cry for help.
But in the Palomas universe, survival is not the happy ending. The sister survives the fall (a tangle of laundry lines slows her down). She breaks her pelvis. In the hospital, she whispers: “You saw me fly, didn’t you, Damián?”
And he lies. He says yes.