Stream of consciousness

So we had to write a "Reflection" on our time here in Madrid. Since I had other things to do (and it's not like this would be graded anyway) I just turned in a last-minute, stream-of-consciousness thing. I just re-read it, though, and although it's silly I thought some of you might enjoy it, and it saves me the trouble of having to write a "farewell to Madrid" blog entry.



“Keep in touch,” I was instructed. “I want to live vicariously through you, I want to know everything. Start a blog, write me postcards, keep a journal, tell me your stories!” Friends, family, family of friends, friends of family, strangers I barely knew - the people changed, but the requests didn’t. Share it with me. So I downloaded Skype, I quadrupled my Facebook use, I started running four chat programs simultaneously and updated my address book all with the intention of sharing this experience that, as I was promised over and over in countless iterations, would change my life and how I see the world forever.

And I wrote the emails, the blog entries and the postcards and I sent them out into the world, carrying snippets of a story here, unfinished adventures there, half-remembered and even less described. But I felt guilty clicking “post,” I rued the bland and unseasoned words I scrawled on the back of a picture of some nameless cathedral. My descriptions were inadequate - how to explain the echo of my footfalls through room after room full of cool marble and gilt mirrors, the dust and the dappled sun and the damp grass under the shade of an anonymous statue? How to convey the history that hides in every dark stairwell and through every gate, lurking in the corners of cathedrals and behind the frames of masterpieces? They follow you home - the whispers, the reminders and the nods to century upon century of history, of greatness and glory and war, the shivery brush of the ghosts of saints, crusaders and martyrs who slip through fences and out windows, chasing shadows and nipping at your heels. They’re benign but still dangerous, enticing and ever-present; they seep into your pores and tangle in your hair, and at this point I’m not sure if they’re something I can wash away with New York tap water or bleach out with California sunshine.

What I do know is that the stories I don’t tell are the ones I’ll jealously guard, years later, stories so everyday and commonplace they verge on unremarkable, not worth the energy it would take to write them down. They are non-stories, really: listening to a street performer in a dusky plaza with the fragile stem of a wineglass cool between my fingers and olive pits folded into my napkin, or standing at a corner as the sun sets and long shadows fall like distance markers across a crowded street, or eavesdropping on the one-sided conversation between two teenagers riding the night bus home from Bilbao, he cocky and laconic with too much hairgel and too little personality, she vibrantly edged with plastic jewelry and lacquered turquoise nails, eyes lined and lips painted. Among all the tapas and metro tickets and single-serving packets of sugar, what will I remember? Will I close my eyes and slip through time with a whiff of electrically-charged air, the feeling of lingering thunderheads damply suspended above me, heavy on the back of my neck - will I glide through and find my memories vibrant and unclouded, with a tangible weight and texture? Or will I sit and softly turn the whole experience over as a faded and blurry photograph? Will these memories be the ones that rest, quietly and neatly contained in a wooden frame, set upon a bookshelf to look at, occasionally, to talk about at dinner parties and dust off for family members, but ones I eventually let slide into the shadows?

When you travel, tripping up stairs and flirting with museums, you see the world; later, you take elements of what you see and you build on them, you update your blurry perceptions of reality into enhanced and overexposed snapshots until they’re vibrantly distracting and more real than the life you left back home. When you travel and then you stay, however, you lose little pieces of yourself, the parts you aren’t careful with or think you don’t care about. I abandoned my harried and frantic New York walk - head down, don’t look at the faces, dodge the cigarette, blend into these grey sidewalks and grey buildings punctuated with shots of graffiti, those rhythmic tattoos of harshly misted color - somewhere along the wide open Paseo del Prado; I left my Californian pseudo-vegetarianism perched on an empty barstool in Café Segre. Over these past four months I have peeled away layer upon thin layer of my New York shell and left it scattered and blown across this city, crinkly and translucent like fragile curls of onion skin, twisted and dry. I hadn’t thought it would be so easy, shedding my skin, leaving myself unnaturally open and defenseless, but Madrid is not as acridly harsh and does not require it.

I’m keeping the maps hidden in the palms of my hands, though, the life lines and heart lines that once traced Broadway, Avenue A, Houston, Amsterdam painted over by Alcalá, Jerónimo, Fuencarral, the concentric circles and spirals etched on my fingertips that stood for Madison Square, Battery Park, Turtle Pond now marking Recoletos, Santa Ana, Cibeles. I know that new skin will grow over these, in a thin film of reintegration at first, and then in thicker layers of time, blurry and clouded with new information and memories like frosted glass. I know that eventually Madrid will hide under my skin, buried within my palms next to Paris, Manhattan and San Francisco. For now, though, I hoard the soft, comforting gusts of security and familiarity that blow my way in this city as I wait for my bus to carry me down streets with names that are second nature to me, now, names that slide easily over on my tongue and linger like feathery pastry. It’s not something I can keep, or adequately convey across an ocean or even replicate in any other place, but for now it’s mine, it’s Madrid and it’s more real here than anything else.