Apartment Barcelona
Sitting around with Fellice, lekker stoned, eating duck takeaways from last night, listening to Kids With Guns — Gorillaz. Fellice is from the Philippines, and she’s eating bran flakes with almond milk. She’s telling me a scandalous story about her best friend (her other best friend, not the one she grew up with, who’s a girl) who went from being bisexual, to heterosexual after she had her baby. Now they’re texting on the phone and this friend is with her ex-girl-crush, who (and get this!) she thinks is hot. Fellice wants to know if her friend is gonna “go back to that old life”. Every now and then she sends a voice note in Tagalog, the messages glittered with her trademark mischievous giggle. When she’s done slurping the last bit of milk from her spoon, she takes her empty bowl and my empty Tupperware to the kitchen — doing a little booty shake on her way. What a woman.
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Yesterday I made iced tea with honey, to beat the heat. Barcelona is incredibly hot in June, and the heat is intensified by the reflective stone sidewalks and urban sprawl. Out of the fridge, the cool glass slowly collects droplets of condensation, patterned with my hot fingers grasping the jar as I bring it to my parched lips. Mi amigo, el sol, est ́a muy caliente!
Fellice and I are foresters, and we’re in Barcelona for a summer internship, collecting inventory data in the forest surrounding the city. Each day we report to Diputacio de Barcelona, to go out into the field with the forest officer. Today, instead of the forest, we visited an ancient Benedictine monastery, called Parc Natural de Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac. To get to it, you have to walk up a path (which we were there to inspect) to the very top of La Mola, the summit of the rocky mountain massif, in Vall`es Occidental, Catalonia. The walk itself wasn’t too bad, nor too steep. It was a pleasant morning, obviously already hot around 9am, and we chatted away with our new colleagues in broken and slow Spanish. I told them hablo un poquito de español, pero no hablo Catalan, the last thing my brain needs now is trying to decipher a message in yet another language. There ought to be a word that exists specifically to describe the experience of standing in front of another human, who is trying to tell you something in a language that you simply do not understand. The noises are so ultimately foreign, and you can clearly see the emotions and hand gestures all conveying some information — but their message? Nada. A sort of primal feeling comes over you in these moments, pure confusion, your intellect truly staring into the abyss of missing information. I most often have to laugh at the phenomenon, other times it’s possible to come to an understanding with some pointing, or Google Translate.
We went out last night, Fellice and I. It was nice to have the company, to be able to buy a round for someone else, and feel that camaraderie. There’s something I’ve noticed about living alone in another city, always when I’ve come home. This something has been most stark in those moments after you’ve walked through the door, dropped your keys in the spot where keys go, plopped down on the (maybe) proverbial couch, and taken a big drunk sigh — home, finally, after a big night out — but alone. Regardless of the amount of people I spoke to tonight, connections I made, conversations I had, at the end of it all one crosses the threshold alone, solo, single. It feels relieving and overwhelmingly lonely all at once. I left a version of myself at the bar. We always leave at least one version of ourselves at the bar. That’s how you know you’ve had a good day. When there were many you’s drifting all over the place.
I read some of my writing to Fellice, who’s come back from the kitchen and is still texting her friends at the table, she listens and then says she doesn’t know how writers do it. Like they could just say ”it’s a good day”, but they say it in such a better way, that a good day becomes a really beautiful day. I wish these mellow moments could last forever, but the thing is there is no going slowly, when days are drifting by like yellow butterflies flashing in the sunlight.
