Madrid has a certain kind of magic. The sort imbued with breath visible in the air upon its release, centuries worth of art treasures, and old men roasting chestnuts, corn, sweet potatoes on little grates on the street. Long lines forming outside Tabacs to buy tickets for the Christmas lottery. Leafy boulevards and befountained plazas.

In the midst of this, I am starting to be a little homesick. Partly because of the omnipresent Christmas spirit, partly because of my actual sickness, which is not too awful but is making me sleep and cough a lot, and partly I think because of the hospedaje, which is allowing me to dive into my own small rituals of living more than I have in a long time. Long mornings and early evenings in bed, lost in the world of a book (in this case, Anthony Burgess´s Earthly Powers, which George gave to me). Careful arrangement of my belongings. Long showers and strange dreams, and supermarket dinners in bed. I love, I miss.

One of the purposes of this travel spurt, one that I didn´t expect, has been to make me feel a strong urge to set up house. I want somewhere that is mine. I want to cook real good dinners with glistening vegetables every night. I want to learn how to make lamb properly. I want a wood stove. I want a big garden. I want to stop being restless and feeling like I need to be somewhere other than where I am. I want to be surrounded by people who I love. I want to cultivate a life, to disappear into the small crevasses of daily routine. Then again, that´s not for me, just yet. I have a lot of dissatisfaction left in me, and a lot of wanderlust, and a lot of searching. I have a lot of evaluating and trial and error ahead of me before I find the right place and the right people, the right apartment or house, to make my own.

But also, I feel like time is running out. Sometimes this manifests as a strong sense of my own mortality, and the fear (and sometimes belief) that I will die soon. Sometimes it manifests as a big fear in everything that´s wrong in the world, and the belief that the shit is going to hit the fan before long. We are making this planet unliveable. I would like so much to have children, and to see them grow, but I don´t actually think it will happen. This is my abiding cynicism, I guess. The sense of time running out is what sent me on the road in the first place and also what gave me so many second thoughts in Seattle, and now it´s giving me an urgency about acquiring this domesticity. Hortense, the main female character in the book I am reading, marries at the age of 18. She sort of loves the man she is with, but she more feels like he is a good framework for a good life in the future. I don´t know if I believe in marriage, and I certainly don´t have any prospects, but the logic makes sense to me. I think part of what´s so terrifying about these years, after college, is not knowing whether the decisions you make now are truly free ones, the vortex of your twenties ready and willing to swallow them whole, or if they are some sort of groundwork for your later life. And if you don´t think you will have a later life, if you think that due to circumstances beyond your control it´s all going to be condensed, then what? Do I start trying to find a person to settle down with, to have babies with, someone who will make me happy for a few years or maybe forever? Do I start getting my financial act together, find a small job that I like and that still allows me to write and to have time for friends and for my own headspace and for domestic mastery? Do I buy and fix a house in Buffalo, ensuring that the place that I have carved there is not only mental and emotional, but tangible? Or do I continue this rigamarole of the past few years, of following my restlessness and bolting from my unhappiness, always doing and seeing new things in new places, always straining to maintain impermanence?

I don´t know, don´t know, can´t know.

I used to always assume that the huge capacity I have for love and perception, for exactitude and fastidiousness, was going to turn into something Great. That I would be a Great Writer or a Great Teacher, open a Great Business or continue the Great Intellectual Work of my parents. More recently, that I would grow up to be a Great Theorist or a Great Activist, or a Great Humanitarian. Not Great on the hugest of scales, necessarily, but in my community, whatever it was. Respected for my dedication and hard work in whatever field I directed this capacity towards. Not so much because I craved attention or praise as because it was the only thing that seemed like it could possibly rein in and utilize all of my energy. The problem being, I broke myself. I spent too much of myself worrying and striving towards this idea of perfection, ignoring my heart and my mind and my body, and stunting my growth. I spent my childhood and adolescence burning the candle at both ends and now there is hardly a candle left, and nursing myself back to health and sanity has been and will continue to be a lengthy process, one requiring my whole mind, whole heart, whole body. My ambitions have changed. I want a small life, a life that is mine. Not a career, not Greatness, but people around me to love and who love me, and the realization of all my domestic dreams, and time that I can spend in my dreamworld.

We´ll see?