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…