(no subject)
February 25th
My English is deteriorating. I am ever so slowly losing nouns and adjectives, silent letters, and spellings …they’re falling from my brain into oblivion. I can just feel the synapses slowly dying…or else being replaced by malfunctioning Spanish ones.
Oh Spanish. Oh Spain. My heart has finally opened itself to this experience in a way I didn’t even imagine possible. New sights no longer alarm me simply because they’re different, blasts of a diesel powered motos no longer send a jolt of electricity from my core to my finger tips, dogpoo-filled pits no longer give me the urge to immediately wash my shoes, and I am no longer up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-scared of this vague and adolescent concept of the “unknown”. My hesitance has seemed to wane in the wake of shear anticipation; in knowing that tomorrow morning I’m going to wake up to another set of dynamic experiences. This country, which has accepted although not exactly bent over backwards for me, has empowered me. There are no strings, as Pinocchio so famously said, to hold me up. I feel liberated in ways that are almost too mundane to list but what I have so far taken away from this newfound liberty is a certain sense of confidence that I’ve never quite had before. I am not going to stand up and take over the world and I’m obviously not going to say that I have a comprehensive understanding of anything and everything. I just feel better equipped to take on what I don’t know or understand. I feel that I have a new kind of courage and it seems to stem from this freedom.
Spain is almost a geographical microcosm of the United States which you can cross in a day of twisting, car-sick-provoking bus rides. I believe it was in between the waves of nausea and the occasional naps, when it dawned on me that my “stereotypical falling in love” moment had finally come. My eyes had been shut as we traveled the spanish countryside. I was curled up in my small bus seat as the warmth hit me; a light emitting from a small space between menacingly dark clouds, shown down through the window upon my face. I opened my eyes and was blessed with a view I couldn’t possibly forget nor come across again. From where we drove on the terraced hillsides the light shown down on a whitewashed Spanish town built into the crevices of a hovering mountain. The snow capped mountain, veiled in mystical clouds, gave way to a sunlit valley spotted with blossoming, crooked-branched olive trees and abandoned monuments of centuries past. Overwhelmed by the breadth of this country’s offerings, I felt something clench in my throat- some kind of excitement that baffled my emotions. We kept on driving through the green fields, ebbing and flowing somewhere far off into the distance. We drove away from the daylight and into the night through the miles of aired terrain toward our home by the rhythmic waves of the quiet blue lagoon. I knew in this moment, tightly clustered on a bus, breathing old air, and drinking coke without corn syrup, that Spain will always have part of me, and that I will always be in love with it.
Love,
Zoe
My English is deteriorating. I am ever so slowly losing nouns and adjectives, silent letters, and spellings …they’re falling from my brain into oblivion. I can just feel the synapses slowly dying…or else being replaced by malfunctioning Spanish ones.
Oh Spanish. Oh Spain. My heart has finally opened itself to this experience in a way I didn’t even imagine possible. New sights no longer alarm me simply because they’re different, blasts of a diesel powered motos no longer send a jolt of electricity from my core to my finger tips, dogpoo-filled pits no longer give me the urge to immediately wash my shoes, and I am no longer up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-scared of this vague and adolescent concept of the “unknown”. My hesitance has seemed to wane in the wake of shear anticipation; in knowing that tomorrow morning I’m going to wake up to another set of dynamic experiences. This country, which has accepted although not exactly bent over backwards for me, has empowered me. There are no strings, as Pinocchio so famously said, to hold me up. I feel liberated in ways that are almost too mundane to list but what I have so far taken away from this newfound liberty is a certain sense of confidence that I’ve never quite had before. I am not going to stand up and take over the world and I’m obviously not going to say that I have a comprehensive understanding of anything and everything. I just feel better equipped to take on what I don’t know or understand. I feel that I have a new kind of courage and it seems to stem from this freedom.
Spain is almost a geographical microcosm of the United States which you can cross in a day of twisting, car-sick-provoking bus rides. I believe it was in between the waves of nausea and the occasional naps, when it dawned on me that my “stereotypical falling in love” moment had finally come. My eyes had been shut as we traveled the spanish countryside. I was curled up in my small bus seat as the warmth hit me; a light emitting from a small space between menacingly dark clouds, shown down through the window upon my face. I opened my eyes and was blessed with a view I couldn’t possibly forget nor come across again. From where we drove on the terraced hillsides the light shown down on a whitewashed Spanish town built into the crevices of a hovering mountain. The snow capped mountain, veiled in mystical clouds, gave way to a sunlit valley spotted with blossoming, crooked-branched olive trees and abandoned monuments of centuries past. Overwhelmed by the breadth of this country’s offerings, I felt something clench in my throat- some kind of excitement that baffled my emotions. We kept on driving through the green fields, ebbing and flowing somewhere far off into the distance. We drove away from the daylight and into the night through the miles of aired terrain toward our home by the rhythmic waves of the quiet blue lagoon. I knew in this moment, tightly clustered on a bus, breathing old air, and drinking coke without corn syrup, that Spain will always have part of me, and that I will always be in love with it.
Love,
Zoe