flight

I walked to the coffeeshop this morning barefooted. I've been walking here and also down to Wild Oats barefooted as much as possible lately. I'm trying to build up callouses on the bottoms of my mythically smooth and tender feet.

I was never a kid to run around barefoot and my comfort in shoes has persisted into adulthood. I usually wear shoes in my house, only removing them at bed or bathtime and I am annoyed when I visit a friend and am asked to leave my shoes by the door. I do not enter the world prepared to remove my shoes on command.

But lately I've been trying to build callouses. Perhaps the bottoms of my feet are the only part of me left not covered in thick callouses? I'm speaking metaphorically of course. I'm at the coffeeshop alone. SK is across the river. I am heartsick and my stomach feels hollow. What are we doing?

Lately I've been fantasizing about living in Spain. I guess it began when I started reading 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' awhile back, which is set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It wasn't so much the setting or the subject matter that got me, but Hemingway's translation into English the simple Spanish the characters all speak to each other -- I was reading the English, but hearing the Spanish -- what little Spanish I remember crowding my brain unbidden like bubbles fizzing to the surface of a pop.

I read and heard Spanish and thought "I want to go to Spain and finally, really learn the language." I took a lot of Spanish in college and attained some level of proficiency, but I have since lost it all through lack of practice. I was amazed how much came back when I spent eleven days in Mexico a couple summers ago. I could only speak in the present tense, but so much vocabulary returned, so much grammar. Now: all gone again.

I started fantasizing about leaving Portland, traveling to Spain after I take the bar exam in February, maybe teaching English there, learning Spanish, having a European adventure, changing my life. I would go to Spain with only a limited understanding of the language. I would be a double outsider, not Spanish and not European. The expat websites I've consulted warn people who are not members of the EU that it will be harder for them to find work and make a life in Spain than for their European counterparts, but I know it can be done. As I sat at County Cork a few nights ago, alone, just blocks from my house, I thought "if I'm going to feel alienated and uncomfortable in my life anyway, I may as well go somewhere interesting and new for it."

To throw myself on another country, on the mercy of the locals, their customs, their government, is to infantilize myself, in a way. To become dependent again on others for almost everything. At least at first. And what a relief -- I am so painfully, stubbornly, masochistically independent, it will take a transatlantic move to a new country, new continent to shake me out of that particular pathology and grant me the relief of placing my fate in the hands of others, in small and large ways, every day.