Esperanza says that she likes to tell stories. She tells them every day, about the most ordinary events. Even as she is walking upstairs, she is telling the story of herself walking upstairs. She says that she is going to tell “a story about a girl who didn’t want to belong” and repeats the first lines of the first story in the book, describing her arrival in the house on Mango Street, and the places where she lived before this. She puts these words on paper to free herself from the ghosts of the past. One day she will leave, and people will ask where she went, not knowing that she has “gone away to come back” for the ones who cannot leave.