For the last five or so days I discontinued the blog and took a break from writing, save for one late-night incident in which I wrote around two thousand words. This was because an old friend of mine, Kelsey, came to visit me in Barcelona during this period.
Kelsey's appearance meant that for the first time in three weeks I was not alone in a foreign country. Naturally I have had interactions, nights out, acquaintanceships, etc. with countless people over the course of that time, but in all of those cases there was an overriding sense of novelty and also of transience, and as a result any social bond I'd created over those three weeks was not enough to cut to the fundamental root of the aloneness that I'd been cultivating. Of course Kelsey cut right through the root.
When a person is alone in an unfamiliar place, it is an adventure. But when a person is with familiar company, it becomes a vacation. Everything becomes easier. With just one other familiar person it's possible to create a shared cultural bubble, a zone of safety, that I think has the effect of impeding or at least dulling the intensity of one's experience. And as a result there is little to note of these last five days. For the most part I brought Kelsey to places that I had already seen. We also went to a bar that looked a lot like the Rainforest Cafe. I was incredibly glad to have her here with me, but it was also of the utmost importance to my time abroad that at some point she be gone, which now she is.
The force of being together in this foreign place may have had one significant effect on us (i.e. myself and Kelsey), which was that there was a sudden clarification of the relationship between myself and this girl I'd known for the last seven or so years, for better or for worse, and as a result I will probably never see or speak to her again, although it is not possible for me to go any further on that subject. All I have written in this post has been hideously abstract. In truth, I can not go to the heart of what has transpired in these last few days, and so I can only write these limp little platitudes.
On the last night Kelsey was here I took her to the Plaza de Espanya, where we found that the road had been closed off and that there was a massive number of people waiting in front of the palace and fountain. We went and waited with them, although we had absolutely no idea what was happening, and we wound up waiting there for over an hour and a half, not knowing what was to come and having no ability to find out, in a really truly hilarious Waiting for Godot type situation. It turned out we were at some kind of Catalonian national rally. A massive projector played a film that we couldn't understand a word of, there was a massive fireworks display, and everybody in the crowd lit sparklers and held them in the air. And then there were two people in the middle of it all, two stupid Americans, who did nothing but turn to look at each other and laugh.
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