I leave for Spain in 24 days. I've been preparing for this for the past year or so, thinking and thinking but never actually believing one hundred percent that it's happening to me. It's only for five weeks, but it seems longer because I've never been out of the country alone. I'll fly to London, a nine hour flight. I picture myself at the airport gate, my hands sweating as they often do but even more so. I'll have a book with me and I hope that I can get some sleep on the plane. Instead, though, I'll look out the window and watch the sky turn into a new sky that I've never seen. I'll be flying across the Atlantic ocean, likely panicked, but I'll be completely free from anything that I have ever known. I want to listen to something soft and sit alone, knowing that I'll be leaving everything behind temporarily. The idea of traveling to Europe doesn't seem real. I remember seeing Letters to Juliet for the first time and idealizing everything that had to do with the romantic undertones of Italy, and added that to how I supposed Europe would be.
So, I'm preparing to leave school first. I'm moving home this week after my last final exam and saying goodbye to my buddies until summer ends and school begins again. I'll be back in Dallas on Thursday and will begin to take back in the smells of the things and the people that I call home, all of the familiar objects and where they are placed, and I'll prepare myself for the day that I leave. I'll bring familiar things with me-- clothes, music, Tim (my bear that Agustin gave to me for Christmas one year), computer, camera; hopefully I'll bring back unfamiliar things to call my own, too.
Going to Spain is surreal. I want to be somewhere new, and feel a different kind of air and immerse myself in a different kind of people because this safe place where I am is all that I've ever known and I want so much to know more. I want to have an experience that is completely my own, one that I have initiated as an independent person, one that I have acted upon after years of wondering what it would be like. Maybe this is is coming from the in inherently selfish nature of humans that all of us possess, but I'd like to believe that it's my biggest step to becoming completely independent-- to finding myself.
Physically having my own body in a different world, absorbing new smells and experiences and roughness and feeling the emotions of heartache from missing those that I love and the elation of doing something that I've always dreamed of and the catharsis of letting go of the world that I think I know, finding a new perspective, is beautiful to me. I hope to feel a sense of realization, almost, and I hope to understand myself more.
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I went to the dollar store a few weeks back and found out that everything really is a dollar. For the longest time, I thought the books looked so nice that surely they were marked up in price. I was wrong! So, I purchased three books, all for one dollar each, and I've started reading one.
The book that I've started is called Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik: it's a memoir about an American who goes to live in Paris with his wife and son for five years. I love how much honesty there is in the writing, and how many funny things Parisians do that Americans would never consider. I also love how much immersion the book includes; all of the parts about being confused and about Americans having a certain stigma, and there is so much quirky history included that only surely Parisians would know. It's nearly sarcastic but not snarky, just honest.
Here is one of my favorite quotes:
"There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished-- so that he quite literally sometimes can't see what's coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at-- his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. My head was filled with pictures of Paris, mostly black and white, and I wanted to be in them."
That quote is a pretty accurate summary of how I feel about Spain, I really felt it when I was reading it, and it gave me a deeper connection to the book. Also, I'll never get over the fact that I found a New York Times bestseller for one dollar.
- ryan
