balletfina's Journal

on comings and goings.
the problem is such, i'm coming to realize, that the two of which are becoming irrevocabley confused. i don't know where the travel starts and the domestic picks up. i find it difficult to explain the nauseau invoked by the custom's agents well intentioned "welcome home."

this is all leading to a very ungrateful sounding monologue. i don't have much of a defense for this.

this last trip was on borrowed money and time as usual. I arrived in spain after 2 days of travel and was picked up at the Granada airport by very same people that were so difficult for me to leave in july. the first night was quiet. a couple of glasses of wine in a bar populated by gypsies and spanish truck drivers. some failed attempts to prove that i haven't forgotten a great deal of my spanish since my departure. the already begun gnawing anxiety about leaving that never allows me to enjoy these moments the way i'd like to.

the next day i woke late in rafa's messy home. it gave me a strange satisfaction that he's done very little in the way of home improvement since i have been gone. the scattered papers, tools, and piles of clothing gave me the sense that he'd been missing me. even if on a superficial level.

we spent the day in classic spanish fashion. eating fruit, drinking cafe con leche, bumping into acquaintances on the street. making plans for dinner.

the interjection that i must make at this point is one of emotional perspective. the last year, or perhaps more, i have teetered on this precipice between liberation and ruin that i hope i will someday be able to attribute to a passing phase of my age. my friends who have a secret new-age streak attribute this to the astrological phenomena of the "saturn return." at home, at school, at work (especially at work), in relationships (especially, esPECIALLY in relationships) i rest am resting on a precarious peace that i feel i could spoil with just one wrong move. like between me and the precipice lies a simple clumsy manuever, the style of which i happen to be known for.

this pre-existing condition, one which i'm starting to wonder might be more than just a phase, leads me to breaking down into an unceasing flood for seemingly inexplicable reasons. which is just what i did at the dinner party held in my honor. between the rioja and the necessary release of all pride in learning a language, my tears sufficiently embarrased me into removing myself from the party and putting myself to bed.

i am fortunate that rafael is well aquainted and angelically patient with my childish sensitive streak, and made the necessary social repairs the next day a little less akward.

the day following we woke early and put ourselves in the van, drove south past the strip-mall style developements of malaga (where europes unimaginative retire to leather themselves on golf courses and dine at newly constructed lunch buffets), drove past gibraltar's monkeys and fog, and drove onto a recklessly driven ferry that harbored and spat me out into a place different than any i'd ever seen before.

i consider myself a traveler. it is something that has been increasingly prioritized in my life for the past five years. i took the nomadic tendencies inherited from my fractured family and awarded them a passport. and since that day when i started traveling in earnest, travelling because i meant it, travelling because i had to, i've been in 23 countries and new things are beginning to shape in my mind. connections between history and color. the smells of myth and belief. the curious patterns produced when on this loom when the threads become knotted throught the refusal of the new truths to weave in neatly with the old.

despite this tendency of mine towards feeling more at ease in foreign places than in the life i've constructed for myself here "at home," arriving that afternoon in tangiers produced in me more of an inner debate than perhaps any country i have visited thus far. i still am unable to identify exactly what transpired. it wasn't the obvious physical strangeness of the people, nor the architecture (which is not unlike that of andalucia). it was something a little darker. perhaps not in a negative light, just strange to a woman raised in an america of streetlight curfews and movie theatre popcorn and track meets. there is this sense, upon immediate entry, that there are very few parallels to be drawn between your life and 'theirs' i will make it very clear, at this point, that i do not seek to deny neither the obvious or the subtle bonds that link humanity and culture. but in my view, for better or worse, it looks differently, it smells differently, and it is founded on things both beautiful and terrifying.

we drove for days. through small towns that fade into the rusty landscape that surrounds them. towns painted white and blue to reflect the sounds of the muezzins through the key shaped corridors. towns of rock and stone and wire. Safi, Essaoira, Errachidia, Oazzerzate, Marrakech, Fes, Chef Chaowan.

the first two days i spent immersed in examining what it means to be a woman in such a country. and finally came to the conclusion that my experience and my history preclude me from ever truly understanding what benefits or reason this seperation of worlds between male and female (in my limited view) might hold. after these days i let it go and watched the sea move to the desert and then to the mountains. my brain went a little bit quieter on the long stretches of concrete, broken only by breaks for mint tea (berber whiskey, they are fond of calling it) or searches for a relatively tolerable bathroom in cities of men in pointed robes.

after seven days i was sorry to leave this land of pomegranates and stray cats and waving children.

i had very little time in spain to prepare for my departure, and most of it was heavily shadowed by the folded itinerary in the outer pocket of my travelling bag. more this departure than even before, my ties to granada and to spain and to the language and to my dear friends (who joined me in the hours before my flight to share wine and traditional flamenco christmas songs) make me wonder if perhaps something got confused in the travel details. is my home really seattle? it's been years since i stayed far away long enough to feel like i was ready to return.

this is the time for me to clarify. i am truly blessed where i am. i have a nice home. a job that almost pays for it. i'm about to graduate from college. i've got friends that would, and have, do anything for me. but the day i became me, somewhere after closing myself into my room for years with books, somewhere after fearing the effects and perceptions of my uncovential past and trying to stencil myself into the scenery, i decided that being average was what most frightened me. and i don't want to sit still. i cannot sit still.

i got on a plane on the 23rd. i was drunk and had been crying. i was wearing borrowed tennis shoes and a barcelona soccer scarf. i made it to london at 1 am, where a combination of lack of water and abundance of wine led me to fainting in the line at Gatwick customs. i caught a bus to heathrow, where i spent the next 10 hours searching for a place to lie down and something to think about besides leaving.
Heathrow-Chicago.
Chicago-Seattle.
Seattle- metro bus 174 to downtown.

i arrived on a public bus, populated by the kinds of white people who take up two seats, eat supersize bags of candy with thier mouth open, loudly recounting on thier cell phones thier christmas presents ( a card with five bucks, a heart necklace, a bag of truffles, a card from richie and susan) and thier dinner (three pizzas of pepperoni pizza, two spicy hot wings, a piece of apple pie, two truffles, and three cokes), and black people who refer proudly to themselves as "real niggas" and declare thier intention to get "real fucked up" right before cussing at the driver for being a "black nigga bitch" who alledgedly 'only cares for white men.'

then i was deposited at 11:00 pm downtown in the rain. watching crack deals go down christmas eve style, by men wearing stained santa hats.

i got to my mom's house, ate some pieces of cheese and plum pudding prepared by a neighbor who insisted on reciting the recipe, said hi to her sometimes-coherent parapalegic boyfriend, collected my dog and went home to cry some more and unpack.

so i'm here on christmas, in my apartment with my dog sleeping quietly next to me. the sun is going down. i've spent my day reading the new yorker december fiction issue and watching a 1960's british documentary about the effects of social class. when considering what was more depressing; staying home alone with no food or wine on christmas- or taking the bus to 85th and Aurora to eat microwaved won tons in a dirty house and monitor the parade of my sweetly scattered mother's needy and transient friends, i chose the former.

tomorrow, back to work, to pay off the debt of my memories. i will put these things on hold and schlepp some salsa and have anxiety dreams about forgetting to refill a secret shopper's coffee. and life will go on.

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