a bottle of wine with lunch
god's avoidant attachment, midday pleasure, & cinematic serendipity
i wake suddenly with a desperate gasp as though taking my first breath, as though out of a dream, except it is not as if out of a dream – it is quite literally out of a dream. the year is 2024 and i am 26 years old, napping on the train from bilbao to barcelona.
what shocks me so thoroughly, so immediately, is the greenest green of the spanish countryside, this northern expanse i have not yet seen and which contrasts so dramatically with the arid, rocky, dry-grass landscapes of the south. from madrid to san sebastián: thousands of stooping sunflowers, an ocean of yellow that can only be described self-referentially, their heads all bowed as if in prayer, eerily identical.
so often the eerie does lend to the holy and vice versa. J, not religious, who has a cathedral tattooed on his stomach, finds the whole ordeal of churchgoing quite separate from the church. wikipedia describes the san sebastián cathedral as “endowed with a strong verticality,” which makes me smile considering most of what i remember about being inside it is discussing with E the likeliness of jesus being hot.
humans love to love god so much, and most of all prove it, because really why else are we doing all that? when i walked into the empty chapel in the east wing of the mosque-cathedral in córdoba, an anomaly in itself, it was like a certain holiness felt exasperated to have been disturbed. does god, like all of us, deserve some alone time? are we being too clingy? i’ll avoid musing on god’s attachment style, but only because i could never convince her to take some online quiz to prove it.
suddenly, the windows darken and i lose my place in my book. each time we go through a tunnel, i am consumed by an overwhelming, unexplainable dread. the eight hour train ride is starting to feel like an eight hour train ride, and i’ve already eaten all my snacks. the further north we travel, the duration of the journey feeling endless and untrackable, the fewer sunflowers there are that i can reasonably perceive as reverent rather than distinctly, unmistakably dead.
time goes on and most everything endures in one way or another, albeit differently, albeit the same. in the caves of sacromonte above granada, where flamenco was born and the romani people lived for centuries, a rogue, borderline offensive bottle of coca-cola decorated a lime-washed shelf. staring at it i had to wonder if its inclusion was ironic, or perhaps a joke between employees craving a daily laugh amidst the monotony of cave work. excuse this brief boomer-y outburst, but what is our obsession with making the old new? let the old be old, damn it, and let the new be new.
i bought a glass of white wine for 2€ and drank it under a pergola covered in grape vines heavy with ripe purple fruit, looked for a while at the ancient mouths of the cave dwellings and tried to imagine inside them a life i’d never be able to. silently moved by the achy twang of spanish guitar crackling from the bar’s speakers, i considered the depth of pain required to create something like flamenco. i don’t shy from this notion – that our wounds beget beginning. our loneliness is genesis; this alchemy is our task.
the train idles at a station in a tiny village whose name i don’t recognize and i can barely make out a quote from harry potter graffitied in english on a brick wall 30 or so yards away. it’s “after all this time? always”, except the As are both deathly hallows symbols, and as they continue to interrupt my nostalgia, filing orderly through the car, i realize there are somehow more than 10 people who live in this town, though i’d never in my life have known it had i not been seated at this window, on this train.
staring out every window on every train i can’t help but be reminded of the sheer scope of life on this earth, the way we are all collages, or better yet sort of flesh-and-blood algorithms, only capable of perceiving and creating using that which we’ve seen and experienced ourselves.
i think of blood and taste it in my mouth, or maybe it’s the other way around. i’m not biting the insides of my lips for any reason beyond mindless mutilation – i guess i did have two drinks around lunchtime and didn’t smoke a cigarette.
i delight in seeing europeans genuinely enjoying their lives. and this does not happen in america as wholeheartedly or at least not with the same level of unabashed shamelessness: a bottle of wine with lunch. people don’t care where they sit to have a beer or a coffee outside. they will sit outside the supermarket. under a bridge. beside the highway. it doesn’t matter. there is joy and there is simplicity, and usually they are the same.
luckily, i don’t starve myself of pleasure in my day to day life, so i don’t need to do anything crazy like order an ice cream with a glass of red wine (i did witness this). my refusal to self-flagellate affords me the gift of tasteful judgement, even on vacation, which is the excuse for excess.
drinking beers in the hostel courtyard i taught J and E the word serendipitous, and the very act of teaching it felt as such, a scene in our movie i became instantly aware would prove important later. like at sunset on that rooftop in madrid, when K introduced me to vogue cigarettes, which E later informed me are referred to as “prostitute sticks” in germany. listen, they’re skinny and elegant, very audrey hepburn, and made excellent props for my big brat summer finale. and even though the two of them enjoyed laughing at me for a minute, they smoked just as many as i did, so i really don’t want to hear it.
miraculously, my service on the train is strong enough for google maps to load, and i have the rare pleasure of knowing we’re winding slowly through rioja country. it is incredible to behold. the river. the trees. vineyards and old brick castles all the way up to the foot (feet?) of the mountains. i am amazed at the geographic diversity of this country – the beaches, the hills, all the ambiguous in-betweens.
it’s played out, predictable, but i could live here, i think. i could even say i want to. i could even say i need to. i want to thrash and scream and cry thinking about the last two years of my life, during which i was too busy lying and being scared of my own power to actually go and do anything with or about it. but that time has passed and will not return. so really there is nothing to do but follow the signs i am currently being presented with, one by sacred one, in the order in which they appear to me, like timid stars in the dusk.
do i seem crazier to you? a month into 26 and i’m feeling the weight of my late twenties, closing in on me like a coffin lid, to be both morbid and dramatic. the thing is, though i love with all my heart to be young, i refuse to entertain the self-fulfilling prophecy that is considering your age an exempting factor for any given experience or activity. it’s just that my obsession with 20-something hostel living and loving has been freshly, thoroughly reignited, and now, of course, i am stupidly anticipating the end while i remain very much so in the middle, or should i be blessed with a long, well-lived life, some might even say beginning.
i did not come to spain for some grand realization the way i have always sought something groundbreaking and intangible from my travels, even when the desire is subconscious or i resist vocalizing it. but there is a deeply-feeling part of me that is undergoing a distinct rediscovery via this experience – not an uncovering or changing of self as much as a remembering, like a visionary visitation from an ancestor that confirms you are, in fact, cosmically accounted for.
it makes everything – my life in utah, whoever or whatever has so theatrically occupied my brain and heart over the last months – seem rather unimportant, like a fog has finally been lifted, and the wall of glass around my spirit has been mysteriously cleaned.
so, who do i have to thank? verdejo? iberian ham? the french man on the street who said my eyes were like two suns?
i have faded into the background, two humble suns at the cinema, watching it all unfold with unprecedented acceptance and understanding. there is nothing concrete to take home in my suitcase like a souvenir, (except maybe all the vintage dresses i bought in madrid), because feelings are not for setting on shelves, contrary to what i may have exemplified previously.
i am not a perfect woman nor often even good, but i do love deeply and i want what i have, which is more than many can say, who so clearly just endure it.
what i’m trying to say is i’m not sure yet what any of this means – but i am deeply grateful to be in this state of receiving, of listening, and to have followed my heart all the way here to la rioja, where despite everything i feel in awe of this life i am still creating every day with my hands, drinking it all down like good vermouth on the terrace, always knowing the orange slice isn’t just for decoration.
obsession of the week
cancelling plans, locking my doors, and metaphorically throwing my phone in the ocean!
i’m back from a month of traveling and moving into a new apartment and helping to produce a dystopian fashion show and am extremely pleased to announce after the first session of my annual gilmore girls rewatch that my cortisol levels are steadily dropping.
let me know if you’re interested in hearing more about my time in spain, or if you’re already sick of that and want to talk about something else. speak now or i’ll spend the next two weeks going on about café culture. woof!
Wow just finished and this was one of my favoritessss👏🏻😘
Also really appreciated the part about our age.