The skies in Madrid are darker now, more solemn, perhaps a bit tinted. The sun plays hide and seek and the winds come with more fluidity. I am spending my last days here, leaving in a month, which will happen faster than I can keep count of. I am still content with my cup of coffee, with my Senora’s beautiful smile and her sweet tongue. We have been talking more, eating dinner together, commenting on the weather, the food, the ways you can cook tortilla with or without cebolla, onion. Her mother, she says, is the only person who doesn’t like tortilla with onions because the whole world does. We talk about sangria and how too much of it can upset your stomach. She asks how I feel, how I like the classes, how I sleep. At dinner yesterday, she asked if I were thinking or if I were preoccupied with something.
And I have been thinking, about returning, about what I am returning to. I miss home. I can finally say it. But there are always these questions: what I am to do when I get back? What have I learned about the person I was and the person I am now after having lived alone for four months?
I struggle to find the right words, but I only manage to say that perhaps I have had too much to eat and need to rest a bit. She smiles and understands, then offers to let me watch some television. This morning she asked if I were feeling better and was glad to hear that I were.
These are the things I am going to miss. The way this room smells, the sound of pots and pans clinging outside of my window from the other apartments, the smell of her kitchen and the taste of every food, the morning coffee the minute after it is done, the moments after when she walks in hurriedly to the sink, then says hasta luego, see you later and closes the door behind her, the way her green eyes lit up when I tell her something unbelievable and surprising, the way she laughs after the interesting things I tell or simply for the way I say them.
“Pues, nada, al fin…”, is what my senora says after every dinner, when we have said all there was to say, when we are tired and ready for bed, and the food has settled in and it is time for us to part.

I spent the weekend alone, for the first time it was just me and the streets of Madrid. Madrid and I have a lot in common. We like the sun. We lust coffee and ice-cream and sun dresses. We admire gorgeous women and handsome gentlemen. And we like walking without destination, without prior thought.
So I walked around and discovered new places. I had coffee in the middle of the afternoon before lunch and then later sat on the grass amongst others and the wind blew in my face and my hair became tangled. I laid on my back and closed my eyes and when I opened them again I knew I was in the happiest state of being, I was content with everything around me and everything about myself. I watched the people around me, drinking beer, smoking a pipe, with their music or a book on their lap. I sat by the little fountain and the wind became stronger so then I decided to go home. I got home at 7 and had dinner with Senora and her boyfriend and we talked about Iran and the Shah and the revolution and the war and everything that was wrong with the world. Then I saw Cruel Intentions in Spanish and fell in love with Ryan Phillipe all over again and downloaded the bittersweet symphony soundtrack and have been listening to it since.
Today I walked around my house, but crossed over to the opposite side so I could see what’s on the other side. I passed a little playground, which I never knew existed. On my way back I craved ice-cream so I got one from McDonalds for 75 cents and enjoyed it under the sun. I then tried on a dress from Mango and felt quite amazing and then left without buying it, which made me a bit sad. None of my friends are available today and I haven’t spoken to anyone in three days and I am so ready to get on my plane to Brussels and just sleep.
I have gotten used to Madrid now and although that initial spark of lust is somewhat lost, I still love it everyday when I wake up and know that it is mine and that I can come back one day and start all over again. Sometimes you live a different life and you realize you can do more than you thought you could. You realize the world is bigger and there are more people to meet and you are inspired to change not for others but for yourself. You get a set of keys and a new room and you speak a language that isn’t yours and yet you feel entitled to it. You miss a little of what you left back home but then you enjoy the new and the bizarre and you live in the moment and make sense out of it. Then you get used to it and it becomes natural and amazing and beautiful and you don’t want to leave.
And that’s what I’ve come to realize.

I suddenly miss talking. I miss talking about how I feel about being intertwined in this crazy, loud, outrageous city. I want to talk about how I am constantly trying to form sentences in Spanish, and how I feel like I understand so much more but that I still lack words, still don’t have time to conjugate verbs. I want to wander around the city before it’s time for me to part, but am always sleepy and tired from class, always starving, always thinking of coffee to save me. I miss the sunny days, the first few weeks when everything was new, every sangria tasted different, every word prettier…I feel nostalgia even for that first day when I cried on the phone, hopelessly lost in contentment, when I ordered a cup of tea outside a cafe and had no idea where I would go next. Isn’t it funny to feel nostalgia when you are content, when you have just begun something, when you are still inside a dream?
I have evolved. I feel strangely optimistic for the future. Despite my love for Spain and this new form of independence, I feel that I am able to go back and not suffer in misery. I like this transformation. Here in Spain, I am always happy. Surly, there are dry days, routines, homework, boring classes, and too much Spanish, but in the end, I like it. I greet the security and the doormen as I enter and leave the building and they greet me back, sometimes asking how I am doing, how my Spanish is. I turn the keys with full confidence, knowing that they will always work. I have made visual memory of important places I go so that I don’t get lost. And overall I am satisfied, really satisfied with being a stranger. I sometimes relish the fact that men call out “guapa” as I walk hurriedly by, completely ignoring them, or that people begin to speak Spanish to me because they can’t tell where I’m from.
Tonight, Senora and I talked about my past a little bit, about my first visit to Europe when I was 11, about the rotten school system in Iran and how as a child I was always afraid to speak up because I was taught to keep my mouth shut. That to this day I don’t like to comment out loud, or to express my opinion verbally. That I still don’t like to make mistakes. I told her that sometimes I forget I lived that life. Me olvide…
I felt good about this talk, felt good that I was challenged to think rapidly in Spanish to recount the past to a woman who’s known me for no more than two months. And now I am writing to say I miss talking.
But the nostalgia will never go away. It’s like that feeling you get when you are in a bus, going home after a short trip to a new place, the feeling of loss as you watch images behind the window as the bus moves. That bittersweet feeling of what you saw and felt, but what you then lost in a moment of transit…