Where am I?
Ah, yes, Madrid, Spain. I find myself repeating this in my head on a daily
basis because it doesn’t feel much different than my home. Sure, people speak a
different language here, a language that I am learning with impeccable speed
which is absolutely mind boggling because it’s almost like the three years of
Spanish in high school were for nothing, I could have just drove to Mexico, but everything feels the same. Or it
feels different… I feel like I’m in a time warp. I don’t feel like I’m living
six hours in the future, I feel like I am in a sock in someone’s drawer, but I
got pushed back into the crevice of the drawer and the dresser and the drawer
won’t close right, but it doesn’t bother the owner of the sock. And for some
reason I am okay with this. I feel like I am in a sock mostly because I have
had to smell more body odor here than I have ever before in my twenty years.
When you’re forced to press your body against a strangers because a stranger is
pressing their body against yours because there are too many bodies on the car
you have to tell yourself not to decode. Don’t decode the smell. Even if you
are positive that you smell someone’s unwashed underarm you need to promise
yourself never to decode it. It’s better this way. Sometimes, an elderly woman
will smile at me on the metro when I almost fall and it melts my heart. I
almost fall on the metro every day.
I’m falling
in love here. I can’t tell if it is because I’m in a different place and I’m
grasping at the air around me for something real, something English and
tangible, but I am falling in love. You think that you know people from afar. I
always think that I know people. I don’t know people.
I’m starting
to plan trips and I’m nervous that every single new place that I go will be
the same. It will be different, but it will not give me what is visible in my mind. I
want to feel like I’m across an ocean, but I keep forgetting that this is one
world with people that are all people. I keep forgetting that an ocean doesn’t
separate a world. Everything is more similar than I think it is. Everything is
more connected.
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." --Albert Einstein
