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.