There are words that move. Remolino spins.
Not in a polite, ballet kind of way—but chaotically, like a plastic bag caught in a courtyard gust, or a child who’s been told to calm down and instead becomes a typhoon of elbows and giggles. The word doesn’t walk into your vocabulary—it arrives, already dizzy, pulling chairs out of place.
Technically? Sure. It means a whirl. A swirl. A vortex. A little storm. But that’s like saying heartbreak is “a form of emotional disappointment.” It misses the point.
Remolino is what your stomach does when you see someone you thought you were done thinking about. It’s what happens inside your tea when you forget the spoon is still in there and tilt the cup. It’s the feeling of a memory being dragged out of its shallow grave by a smell, or a street, or an unexpected song.
It’s childish too. Ask any Spanish kid about a remolino, and they might show you the annoying cowlick that refuses to be combed down flat. The little whirl of hair—always just off-centre—that disobeys scissors, gel, and motherly threats. The kind that makes boys look permanently surprised and girls look like they slept funny.
There’s one in the back of my head, apparently. My aunt used to say it meant I was going to be “a difficult adult.” (I once bit a priest’s sleeve at a baptism, so maybe she was right.) That remolino was blamed for everything—bad dreams, tantrums, my obsession with standing in the rain.
Funny, isn’t it? A shape, repeating in nature, in tea, in hair, in weather—and in us.
Somewhere along the line, remolino also became the word for chaos. Not the theatrical, movie-scene kind. But the domestic, laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind. The “what even is this day” kind. My friend once sent me a voice note saying, “tengo un remolino en la cabeza” — there’s a whirlpool in my head. And I knew exactly what she meant. She had spilled coffee on her thesis, missed two buses, and dropped her keys into a drain. Remolino. Not disaster. Not tragedy. But the kind of disarray that almost makes you giggle as you reach breaking point.
It’s a generous word. It allows for movement. For things to be spinning and not broken. For confusion to be temporary. For the idea that things might settle again. That the tea will go still. That the child will fall asleep. That your thoughts, flung like socks around a messy room, might land in a drawer again one day.
Or maybe not.
Maybe remolino is there to remind us that not everything is meant to settle. That some things only make sense while turning. That our minds, like our hair, sometimes refuse to stay flat.
And thank God for that.
