I spent most of the day today on the beach, amidst diminutive Asian women asking me if I wanted a massage and men with backpacks asking me if I wanted cervesa-hash-coke, children and dogs, men sculpting elaborate sand castles and equally elaborate sand hands to put change in, fishermen, old women stripping off pantyhose to dip their feet in the sea, and what looked to be a yogi teaching a young woman how to meditate. I (re)read The Fortress of Solitude and crafted a perfectly sunny playlist of early 90s conscious hip-hop, wrote postcards and free-association rambles, and got (probably) sunburned, and failed to notice the tide coming in until the Mediterranean actually hit my toes, wrapped up in song - it wasn´t like that, I wanted my cardiovascular to fight back, Cupid had me runnin´circles in the daytime with a flashlight, lookin´ for her...When shook the sand out of my socks and looked up a single long cloud spanned the blue sky, a tattered ribbon of white and grey.

The parts of the day that I didn´t spend on the beach, I spent gaping at beautiful fruit and seafood in the Boqueria, drinking Spanish coke (which is better than ours), and wandering the Barri Gotic, ducking into shops and coveting the numerous glittery clothes that are in fashion in Spain right now. Like the magpie I am.

Travel feels like life and moods distilled and condensed. I have been forgetting to be gentle with myself, as my meditation cards tell me to, instead existing in a constant riptide of joy and panic. When I panic here, it happens in my body, not my mind. It begins with a cold sweat on my back and becomes a numbness of the hands. I don´t allow myself to think and clench and unclench my fists, walk faster, until it goes. I have come to expect this, but the questions it presents scare me. Most notably what am I ignoring that needs to be tended t0? and can i ever permanently close this door? It passes quickly enough and I am in a different plaça, a different mindset, drinking in the present and the many layers of memory, with Andrew and Ben and Whitney and Bri, that trace the streets of this place.

It is fitting that I should be rereading Fortress of Solitude here, in a city that causes me to wear my nostalgia in a lighter, if more precious, knit than usual. It´s an important book for me. I had my first bonafide panic attack in the midst of it, a year and a half ago, manically reading and underlining in the jury waiting room, and pacing and reading the hot streets of downtown St. Paul on my lunch breaks. Later that night, scrambling down the banks of the Mississippi with Andrew, I manically retraced the zoom in on detail, the dissemblance of the world around me, and as per usual our own personal histories, and I pressed it into his hand, and demanded that he have it. For a long time after I was afraid to reread it, afraid that it would act as some sort of catalyst for a new breakdown, but here I am, plowing through it under Catalunyan sun, and it is nothing but a source of comfort, nursing the grand fountain of generative memory that always springs forth when I am here.

Here are some reasons why I love this book:
¨He´d detected in himself a certain translucency today, a talent for being ignored...something in his conjured solitude had followed him out onto the street, then reversed itself to drape all over him."
"The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn´t."
"Your body could be cooled from inside, sweating like an iced glass."
and
¨Voices in memory you can´t name, rich with unresolved yearning: a song you once leaned toward for an instant on the radio before finding it mawkish, embarrassing, overlush. Maybe the song knew something you didn´t yet, something you weren´t necessarily ready to learn from the radio. So, for you at least, the song is lost. By chance it goes unheard for fifteen years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpectedly finds its due date."


♥