Today I leave Madrid! In a Benadryl induced haze, I am sitting at the LaVazza I’ve never had time to wait for and search for something to say. I don’t really have much to though, I suppose that is the weirdest part. I resent leaving Spain, and I resent the anger I felt toward this country for so many months. That is likely where this dissonance is coming from, I’m already beginning to miss a place I prohibited myself from knowing for a long time. Four months is not nearly enough time for a person who shrinks out of a desire to belong. It took a lot for me to enjoy my time in Spain (books, movies, walks in parks). That is difficult to grapple with—why did it take media and not people to help me give this place personal value? I am still glad I found it, maybe it just let me act like I understood. Global community, what on earth is that!

The woman who works in the multilingual bookstore, with her messy updo and ambiguously Mediterranean aura has revealed the four places she’s lived in a matter of minutes. The big ones—France, Italy, Spain, the US (we are all really fetishists for state power). She recommends a podcast to a man, and I pry and she gives me a bookmark. We make small talk about Brooklyn and the murderous writers and later I find out the podcast is spoken in English but made by a Spanish company. The couple she is talking to now is eerily familiar, but maybe that is just how now metropolitan people look. It is Mother’s Day for them, maybe they also live in Brooklyn, do they have kids?

I think about roots. I think about how maybe, roots are possible for the hip nomads of the world. They embroider communities on the premise of common interest (slightly pretentious literature), and they move. They make lunch from Argentinian seaweed at 3pm in Madrid, just as intended. I wonder if I am cut out for the worlds romance languages have provided. Here, I am calm. I sit, I do not rush, I think, and I wonder. Is this youth? Is this just the antithesis of one of the places that I call home?

I want to live for the sake of things outside myself, something that feels impossible up against the affairs of a stoic east coaster. I wonder if this can only be done here