Hard to pronounce, an hour away from school, and tucked away in a mountain’s embrace on the outskirts of Vienna was my home; a home known to the locals as simply In Schiffeln 55b. It is the homiest home I’ve ever had. It was three floors with a chilly wine Keller under the ground, and a huge sloping backyard that seemed like it belonged in The Secret Garden. I was only six years old and most wouldn’t remember a house from so far back in their childhood, yet this is the house that immediately comes to mind when I think of home.

Though only a year and a half went by in that old house, it experienced more life than it had in hundreds of years. It saw my first bike ride, my first few teeth lost, the first time we saw real snow fall, our first Christmas away from our family in Mexico, and the first time I tried to write a story in English. It heard my brothers and I fighting over...

The summer of my sixth year of life, my parents whisked me and my brothers to a place that had not existed beforehand in my mind; a country so large and foreign to my eyes, filled with people speaking gibberish and eating strange concoctions and walking on unfamiliar cobblestone streets. We had arrived in Vienna, Austria; a place where I would fulfill all my childhood whims and fancies for three years. I too, as all people who visit the beautiful city, soon became entranced with the ravishing splendour the city had to offer.

Of all the seasons and months in this enchanted land, winter was by far the most magical; with the delicate snowflakes creating plush layers of white on the roofs of the houses as precisely as Van Gogh himself, and all the eye could see in the horizon was the smoke from the chimneys leaving curling traces in the gray sky. The children, wrapped up in layers of...

My name in English is sharp. It’s strong. Sometimes the first syllable gets lost in the other letters’ thirst for power, making people think I’m Gina. Or Virginia. I am neither of those, I tell them. I am Regina.

In Spanish my name is soft and feathery. It’s draped chiffon. The ‘r’s are rolled and the ‘g’ is whispered. Like the first fall of snow; my name can be silken and quietly melodic, or bitter and piercingly raw. Either way, it’s a confident name; not for the meek and quiet. Regina is a name that radiates the glow of ages, as it comes from Latin times, and means Queen. My actual name is Maria, but Regina is more unique, more regal, and I think is a title worth striving to uphold. I rather think the Spanish pronunciation suits me better, but I will always have the intensity and strength from the English one.

I would never change my name. Whether I grew into it, or it grew into me...