When you’ve just arrived here, the first question that’s always gonna be asked is “How do you think about Madrid? How do you like it? How are you settling in?” In a tailspin of thoughts you fumble for something to say, but always, always, end up saying you are fine, that it’s a great city, when actually you just don’t know yet. Is it really that different that within the very first fortnight of your stay here you are gonna feel something so mentionable in terms of that question? Is this fumbling you can’t help but feel it in-between the good things commonly said about the city really something worth paying attention to and will eventually become a thought so deeply planted it’s impossible to shake it off?

And is my desperate waiting and longing for this guy just an effort to be more Madrileño? Feels like I am chasing after a vision I’ve created for myself of the western world, and he or anyone else, could just have been a vessel of my cravings.

When I was 17 years old, my parents took me on a trip to the US. The second day we were in New York City, we paid a visit to the famous Statue of Liberty. The ferry to the island was shadowed by dark clouds, so was our mood and my 17-year-long wishing to see it for myself. But just after about one hour, when we were on our way back to the city, something magical happened as the sky cleared up and we could see the sea again. The water of Hudson River flowed against the body of our ship, like America throbbing its life for a 17-year-old boy who at then had been too young to know neither life nor love but who was also in deep desire for both of them. Years later, when America has become a memory so distant he could not even convince himself of ever having been there before, he would realize that it was never about the Statue of Liberty that’d marked him for such a long time, but the epiphany the world had brought upon him about meaning of travel, music of life, and power of empathy.

I feel like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation. Am I too western for China and too oriental for Spain?

In one of my past lives I might have been an American with such a strong personality, such a big ambition and such a tremendous life that even when I was long gone, the memories have found their way into my next life, promising another lifetime of misplacement of searching in vain. The curse I have to live with! The undying need of having to change between languages, the unavoidance of being misunderstood, the constant struggle of trying and failing to interpret words, expression and underlying meanings of texts, and the loneliness of living parallel lives. Someone like us might let imagination run wild, taking us to realms of infinite what-ifs, other-lifes, and could-have-beens. Someone like us travel in time and space, trying to put our life together like puzzles dropped to the ground. Until it’s not that different anymore.