What's Happening Lately

When I arrived in the United Kingdom I had 50 euros in my pocket and I walked up to a stand run by three rather striking girls and exchanged it for 40 pounds. I always like the feel of a new crisp currency in my wallet. I look at the artwork and examine the coins I will fumble with later. It is exciting, like when a plane flies over a city and nothing makes sense yet but you know it will. Four days later at a different airport, I again had 40 pounds in my pocket and received 50 euros from an older woman not nearly as striking or pleasant, and this was the beginning and end of my visa run off mainland Europe.

My mother came to Spain, and it was her first time overseas, and that is where the fluid line began. It is special to be around someone during this time, and I remember often getting off a plane in Melbourne, feeling different air, the accents of people on the streets, the changed orientation of the stars at night, and the realization that entire little world's exist that we would not have known about or give a single thought to before. This is what traveling does the first time, and still the many times after, but never quite as profound as the first, and I was lucky to be there to witness it in another.

In Spain she met the family I had lived with for all this time, and teared up when they said goodbye. We watched a soccer game and she wore a red scarf that would later be defined by the little family who had made up and filled so full the last few months. We went to Granada and walked around the Alhambra, those haunting towers at night, the beautiful gardens during the day. It is a place that keeps you mesmerized and quiet. I stumbled across a beautiful poem one night in a dimly lit square, surrounded by balconies and draped in vines.

Y vosotros dormís siempre,
Y la muerte está lejana.

Then it was on to Toledo, that old mid-evil slow moving town built above the river and filled with shops selling old armor and axes and swords. Then walking out into the countryside, higher and higher for a better view of Don Quixote's la Mancha. Then back on a train up to Madrid to say goodbye.

And then I had days to myself in Madrid that were not really to myself because I was in a very large cheap hostel full of very large personalities that grew larger when they drank. People drank because they were in Madrid for its parties. There were pub crawls every night and people stumbling into the rooms every morning before the sun was out and there were large bathrooms with many showers and odd smells. You felt dirtier after those bathrooms than you did before, but Madrid was good too. I saw the best artwork I had ever seen at the Prado. Picasso and Goya and the rest were close enough to touch. Under Hemingway's advice again, I went to a Madrid bullfight in its beautiful plaza. I went alone and sat up front and talked bullfighting with the old Spanish man who had been going the past thirty years. The young Spanish girl behind me also was impressive with her knowledge and her tenacity, yelling at people for standing and other people for other things I did not quite get. It was as edge of your seat as I'd seen, especially when the third matador was gored and rushed off to an ambulance.

And then, for the first time in six months, it was all behind me. A plane took me out of the Iberian Peninsula and into Manchester and a train took me across to Liverpool. What a strange transition that is, when a country speaking your first language natively feels as foreign as one that doesn't speak your language at all. I was upon first instinct talking to taxi drivers and sandwich makers and people in the street in words they did not understand. And then a few additional things messed with my head, that I imagine will still cause me to put my face in my palms in shame for quite some time. I will remember walking down the rainy streets of Liverpool hand in hand with a girl from Seville, laughing and switching in and out of languages with great happiness. But life still has its moments of excess unfortunately, and the entire thing it retrospect feels something like a regression. That's vague, I know, but I can't write about these things anymore after thinking about it too much. It's not something to plead about out loud. It is something to man up and fix about yourself.

Later it all still hurt, going up in the plane and watching the buildings of Liverpool I came to know falling away in the clouds. I could follow the streets up from the cathedral and see where she was, probably sleeping, though maybe stirring in bed as the world lightened outside. Later there were more clouds and ocean and nothing and then I was in Barcelona around people who never knew a damn thing about me in Liverpool. As the heat returns along the roads in Catalonia, a hope a few other things return with it.