I did not plan to think about nostalgia that afternoon. I had a few hours free while working in Valencia, so I ended up near a skate park and started watching people ride. There were the usual things: boards hitting concrete, failed tricks, quick recoveries, music coming from a Bluetooth speaker and the concentration people get when they are trying something they care about. Then I noticed a group of girls skating. They were practicing, jumping obstacles, falling, laughing, getting back up, and trying again. Some were good. What caught my attention was not that they were girls doing something unusual. It was how naturally they occupied the space, and how familiar that scene suddenly felt to me. There was no performance to impress anybody, just people enjoying themselves and taking the next trick seriously in their own way.
I grew up around skate culture, so I have never really understood the stereotype that reduces it to bored kids, punks, troublemakers, or people hanging around with nothing better to do. Skateboarding has always been bigger than that. It is a movement, but it is also a social language. You show up with a board, watch somebody land a trick, try it yourself, fail, laugh about it, and eventually somebody cheers when you get it right. There is music, friendship, competition. I recognized all of that in the park that afternoon. The technology had changed, but the basic ritual had not.
Maybe that is why seeing those girls stayed with me. Skateboarding is still a space where men and boys are the majority, so women and girls can become more noticeable by being there. I do not mean that as some dramatic statement about discrimination, I was just noticing how good it felt to see them taking risks, learning tricks, falling on concrete, and laughing about mistakes. They were not there to represent anything. They were skaters. Some were better than others, just like everybody else, and that was precisely what made it interesting. They were not asking for permission to belong to the scene. They already belonged there.
At 34, nostalgia is unavoidable, although I have never been interested in turning it into a dramatic story about how everything was better when I was young. Things change, people grow up, technology changes, and the way we experience everything is different now. Social media has also made visibility feel important. Sometimes it seems as if having followers, views, or likes has become a requirement for proving that something happened at all. Yet there were those kids at the skate park, doing something that did not need an audience beyond the people around them. They were playing music, talking nonsense, practicing, falling, getting better, and enjoying themselves. Watching them reminded me that not everything needs to become content before it can matter.
That is what I took from that afternoon. I did not discover a lesson about skateboarding, and I am not interested in romanticizing it as a culture from another time. What I liked was seeing continuity where I expected to find distance. The clothes change, the boards change, the technology changes, and every generation brings something of its own, but the basic impulse remains: gather somewhere, ride, fall, laugh, try again, and spend time with people who understand why you came. And now, among those familiar elements, there are girls skating harder, taking up space, improving, competing, and enjoying themselves without needing the moment to become symbolic. They can skate as hard as anyone. Honestly, I am glad I got to see it.