Posts resume May 1st.
A record of the days before, during, and after my time in a Spanish town called Oviedo.
Anonymous asked: whatever tomfoolery goes on outside
burns my throat more than ever
punching foot and foot through glass
these wounds make you clever
chance comes down to only that
wails cast high don’t bring me down
take two now and call me later
i’m sure they will turn you around
money money is the kind we like
grime and spit to tactile response
you couldn’t bring it all back again
it’s okay just take a pause
i’m never sure what I’m trying to say
so i’ll interpret my sound surprise
one day soon we’ll go more than mute
so we can hear each other’s eyes
tie your shoes before you go
you won’t want to have loose ends
or another excuse to miss the sight
but maybe so, I guess that depends
So about a year ago, I received a few messages like this through a facebook application called Honesty Box, where I guess you can send messages anonymously. We sort of went back and forth and I never found out who it was. Are you the same person? What are you trying to tell me?
Nevermind. Just, thanks. This is nice.
I am very lucky for all of it. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. But, sometimes that seems to mean nothing at all. Multiple homes. I’ll have to leave some part of me here; some days, I already feel its absence, though I couldn’t say what it is. Maybe it’s nothing.
A PLACE YOU WILL WAIT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
Something I like about Oviedo is the design of the streets. Never once have I encountered a sharp turn. The crosswalks are placed far apart and inconveniently, so one usually has to walk past their destination in order to reach it. A born jaywalker, I am frustrated here by the intricate black metal gates that line some areas of the sidewalk; some areas only, as if to say I know what you’re thinking but I’m not going to let you. The concept of the roundabout is similar in that sometimes you have to make more than a full circle to pull off onto the street you want.
I see this translating into the culture. There is not so much focus on the destination. Some saturdays, friends and I will spend more time wandering the streets deciding which bar to go to than time we spend in actual bars. I find myself always ready before the rest of my family if we’re going out to a movie or for groceries; sitting on friend’s bed, my shoes tied, while they decide which jacket to wear. I seem to see crosswalks that, to the rest of the world, do not exist.
It was a long weekend, with Monday and Tuesday off as well. I took a bus to Santander, where my family was staying with the grandparents, as always. We were going to go to Bilbao, but when I arrived everyone seemed apathetic, so we stayed home. On tuesday my host mom took Sara, Mario and I to the beach in Somo, a city close by filled with light-brick summer apartments and graffiti-muralled Surfing Schools. The sea was cold, but the beach was filled with small tide pools, like wavy strings of blue beads. The sun lasted the whole, long weekend. It was beautiful, and I was happy, but it was a sort of empty, half-happiness that this whole time I have been trying to put down in writing, but either seems impossible to describe or not worth the effort. As I observe the world around me, a separate, newly language-less world is happening in my head; my attentions divided in two.
As of today, I have one hundred days left in Spain. I feel a certain way about this, but it is not sad or happy. I think it might be too soon for sad or happy. I feel older and smarter, but I’m not sure how. I feel like I know myself better, but part of me thinks that knowledge of self is impeding my ability to interact with and get the most out of my environment. Every day goes by so quickly. My time here feels like the long car rides we take to Santander most weekends. The names of small towns on white iron signs passing through my field of vision like small, hard clouds; the olive green and deep blue and leather-colored houses with their brown and red shingled roofs careening towards me and covered in flowers, slowing for a moment, then tumbling away. The time allotted forces me to observe and appreciate simultaneously. All my thoughts and opinions and likes and dislikes, only halfway finished, their tail ends streaming behind my like loose threads on a coat, and people ask me how my time here is going, and all I have is unnecessary detours, far-way crosswalks, sentences that trail off and away, like a beach I will only see once, trailing into the sea.
“THE STORY HAS LOST MANY OF ITS DETAILS, AND I DON’T WANT TO INVENT WHAT I DON’T KNOW.” -Borges
I am finding myself taking the bus more. It’s harder and less satisfactory these days, finding the small and beautiful coincidences. The interesting birds. Every day I find a new, significant, and unglossable difference between myself and the people I am surrounded by. More often than not, these differences are ugly. It makes me sad, but I feel like I’ve given up on picking out the magic in my days here. It gets tiring. I hope this is just a break. Maybe it’s the rain. I hate taking shortcuts here. I’m tired of looking for meaning, but I don’t want to waste time. There are more good days, too. All last week it was sunny. On tuesday, I met a girl who just arrived from Miami and will be in Oviedo for the semester. On Thursday, I went to eat lunch at my friend Ayelen’s house. She lives in Colloto, a sort of suburb of my city. I love it there. It’s so loud in Oviedo. We hung out with some other friends in the park until it got too cold and dark. There are some cool kids here—they’re relaxed, and funny, and welcoming, and they like to have a good time. It’s not something to talk about in flowery language or expound upon. I think, in the big scheme of things, it’s not good friendships that I’m missing. I have some. It’s substantive conversations; complex feelings I can talk about and deal with every day. Because I didn’t have an outlet for all my worries about being from Michigan and in Spain, they just disappeared. Which is good. There’s a guy who teaches English class to my sister’s grade a few days a week. He’s from England and has been here since October. Today I went down to the teacher’s lounge so see if he was around; they told me to come back at sixth hour. So I went back, introduced myself, sat in on his class, and we talked for a bit afterwards. I think we’re going to get coffee or something next week. It was so bizarre to not think of jokes ahead of time, to be fully understood and fully understand. It felt so good. Now that I’ve toughed it out, it would be nice to have some English-speaking friends. So weird, to feel comfortable.
THINGS THAT I CALL MINE BUT AREN’T: My cousin Angel; My grandparent’s house; the Favada, a traditional dish of asturias.
THE QUAINTNESS OF LONELY
It should first be said that it is different when you’re not in a place you call home. When you are waiting for the arrival of something else. When there is an end point, when you can leave. I am obligation free here. This is not my home. Lonely is easy and indulgent under these conditions, when it doesn’t need to be dealt with because you’re sure of it’s ending. I think about hugs in airports and parks in my home town. I pass the time. And time helps, time passes me, time runs away quickly, down the rainy street, around the corner. Most days are fast.
Saturday was so sunny and warm I left my jacket at home. I walked up the street, into town. Plaza Fontan was warm and white, surrounded by old stone and blue shutters, the indoor fish market’s walls of aquamarine glass. The plane trees are still bare and lumpy, reaching out to each other, forming a strange web. Although I can’t picture these trees with their giant leaves, I realized that I had sat under one on a rainy afternoon in October. The trees are encircled by a low, black marble wall to sit on. I had just checked out East of Eden from the Library and as I sat I thought I heard two blonde girls speaking English. Everyone tells me the plane trees have huge leaves, big as people, but I just remember a green canopy.
I bought a basil plant for 2 euros, the same price as a pack of six leaves in El Corte Inglés. I bought two necklaces; a small, glassy tusk of pink coral capped by a series silver leaves and an elipse-shaped piece of agate, purple and gray and orange. The chain shines more than the rocks do. I bought an umbrella with a wooden handle and a Monet painting on it, circling around the top. Café Punto y Coma has a dark red awning and big tables and chairs made of wood. A street with no cars and no sidewalk. Two men in grey wool hats were playing the accordion. I went home and sat at my window, looked at the basil, ate some leaves with fresh cheese and tomato and olive oil. The sun made my face hot, in february. My slouch, reflected in the window. What do I do now.
THE PRADO
As I have mentioned before, my parents own an eighty-by-forty meter patch of land in the middle of a huge, basin-like valley in Sobarzo, a pueblo near that of my grandparents. We visited when I first arrived, back in September. Then, it was all waist high grass, grey-green and sharp. The sun, from the corner of sky it had already settled into for the winter, cast long shadows all day. The wind held you up if you leaned into it and kept the sky blindingly clear. Since then, the land has been measured and posts have been put up around the perimeter; the grass was cut and raked into the small hills. An herb garden was made way for. On friday, on our way out of Oviedo, darkening after a week of coat-less february sunshine and wind, we stopped and bought seven fruit-bearing trees. My host parents dug holes and planted trees Saturday morning, and in the evening my siblings and I went back with them to finish up. Sara and I leaned against a pile of dead grass and talked, depleting it by tearing handfuls off the top and throwing them into a smoking pile of stringy ash, a fire my host mom had started and we were to feed. The sun through the thick white smoke was blaring and orange. I wore borrowed boots the same color as the field had been back in September.
Jesús and Maite sent us to a bar up the road to buy beers and soda. We walked up the smooth, slim, black road and into town. I heard someone playing music loudly. We approached the bar, a tan building with a dark red roof and white bars in front of the windows, the door open, a rusty Jeep parked outside. As we got closer we realized the music was actually men singing in the bar. Mario went inside to buy the drinks and Sara and I sat on a white marble ledge skirting the building. The men, all older, were singing beautifully and heartily, a love song to Cantabria, the region we were in. The bar had turquoise walls and a white floor, and after the road in front of it the land dipped and expanded seemingly forever. Two magpies chased eachother in the sky over the hill. The sun was setting, and we were being sung to. As they finished, I thought, this is a nice moment. Someone in the bar yelled “¡Sí Señor!”. Someone else yelled “¡Viva Cantabria!”. We walked back to our parents, Mario skipping through the field ahead of us, waving one arm over his head, a plastic bag full of San Miguel and Fanta in the other. He’s twelve years old.
Sara and I spread out a bright blue windbreaker and resumed our post behind the small mountain of pale grass. Maite came over and we told her about the men in the bar. I said it was beautiful, the singing and the bar and the valley and the pink sky and the birds, all at once. Sara laughed, said I was always seeing something poetic, always pointing out birds. Maite said, “It’s good. She’s an observer”. I liked that. Being here has taught me to simply look and absorb. There doesn’t always need to be a response or an elaboration. Just a record.
minicosm asked: hey sorry it's taken me so long to write back, life is insanely busy for me in fact things are radically different from the letter i wrote to you. please and thank you and apologies and love. hope all is well and continues to be productive and all that you get out of it you put in (sense? sometimes i have none).
stay free!
no worries. I hope you can de-stress! Things are always so different “from when you wrote the letter”, but that’s what I like about them; they only really apply to the moment when they were written.
TAKE OUT THE THROES THAT I THREW IN MY HEAD
On January thirty-first, I was in the middle. I had been in Asturias for 141 days, and had 141 days left. Now, February, I officially have been here for more time than I have left. I have spent far too much time worrying about my clothes and my accent and my sense of humor. I am so obsessed with doing something wrong that I did nothing. The past week has been hard. I got strep throat but toughed it out in school, bringing home a mountain of tissues and embarrassment. That is over. I am running out of time; the halfway mark passed before I could even realize it. The whole weekend has been sunny.
Today we went to Cudillero and Castañeras, the home of the Playa del Silencio on the Austurian coast. I cannot believe I’ve been here for five months and had no idea of this place’s existence. Cudillero is a beautiful, whitewashed, narrow-path town, with pastel-colored restaurants and cafés on the water and a stone tower at it’s highest point, which you get to through the mountain-side labyrinth of houses, separated only by thin stone paths, the sun shining on the their matte white and blue faces; red roofs sprouting with grass so rich and green you want to eat it. The sea is green and blue with shocks of sharp black stone jutting through the foam. The lighthouse is an actual house, burnt orange, surrounded by palm trees.
The coastal mountain roads are smooth and black and winding, often halfway up a mountain; and endless thick of trees to one side, a huge, sweeping valley to the other. There are no guardrails, and you are so high up. We stopped in a pueblo on the way to Castañeras to eat in a sun-filled room with pale yellow walls and soft white tablecloths. We ate sunny-side-up eggs, sautéed onions and green peppers, chorizo, french fries in brava sauce, pork chops, goat cheese, beer-battered cod, fresh greek-style yogurt and honey, wine, and coffee.
Castañeras is at the end of the world. The road is for one car going one way. The houses with cows in the front yard give way to huge fields, thick and green-gold. The sun is always low. The air almost rings with the sea it has in it. The sheep pay no attention, head down the golden hill into the dark forest. The hike to the beach is down a mountain, grassy everywhere but the path, which could fit a car but would surely puncture the tires.
La Playa del Silencio we visited in the evening. I have never been anywhere so arresting. We stood and stood.
