🌄 English letters 003: Home and away

Madrid, España

Hey you,

How are things?

I’m back in Madrid. You know, to see the family and friends. To push things (me) to get something published.

But I’m already thinking about getting back out there.

I think about it in those terms sometimes: getting out. As if this city was an empty room without windows or something. It’s a stupid feeling. Self-imposed. Self-belligerent. As if I hadn’t lived for almost my whole life in here. I am Madrid.

I don’t know what is it that pushes me away from it. I have thought about it. Maybe too much. But I’ve promised myself not to overthink, not to overanalyze when I have already reached so many walls. So I’ll let it rest.

I’ll say though, that I enjoy it. The going away and around, not the leaving behind. It pushes me to create, to observe, it encourages me to change things, to accept change. Everything is change. It guides me to understand the whole picture, the movement of water, not the bends in the river, not each wave of the sea.

When I’m in Madrid my eyes are fixed in the things that stay. Of course everything is different, so many things change in just a few months. The streets are dressed differently. Old places are gone. The feeling of the city shifts. Some friends change houses. Some friends get married. Some friends get new white hair. The nieces and nephew, those are the ones that change the most. And yet, my eyes want to look as if things stay still. They look as if they didn’t accept the change. Maybe that’s a way of them to protect me from thinking about what I’m missing in the time I’m not here.

Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. For the ones who have decided to be out, to seek something else, whatever it might be, we need protection, we need a hideout, so we blame stillness.

Everything always stays the same here, in Madrid. It’s not true. Of course it’s not. But it would be worse to tell yourself that life is passing by without you there.

Why leaving then? Why leaving again? There is no reason for most of the things we do in life, not a deep reason anyway. At least that’s how I felt back in the day. There is a world, and then there is the human world. We live in the second. We think in the second. We feel in the second. We wait for the second to give us meaning. But that’s like looking at the instructions of a board game for a way to pay the bills. You can’t solve anything by playing a game. A game is just a game. Then we start looking for it. For the reason. We might not even realize, but we need it. A reason deep enough to guide our living, rooted enough. A reason in the real world.

That’s my feeling, anyway.

Why did I tell you all of this? Ah, yes, Madrid. Why do I feel like leaving it again?

When people ask me what do I do when I travel for long, I just have one clear answer: I observe. I leave to look. To see how everything is so similar behind its differences. How everything stays still in its core. Everything is stillness. Funnily enough, the more time I spend observing out there, the clearer I see Madrid when I come back. Like I have never looked at it before.

I wonder if you have a similar feeling. If you have left home or thought about leaving it. What does it mean to you? Home. What does it mean to come back?

Missing you.

Love,

p.

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Madrid street