Hyena Spots

Sin Besos

His lungs were aching from all of last night’s smoke. He lit one only because he was unsure of what to do with his hands, himself. His gaze fell upon the wooden ripples of the terminal’s roof supported by enormous yellow arms outstretched as if in surrender. In the distance, framed by one of the obtuse arches of the terminal’s roof he could see the four towers of Madrid set against an unusually cloudy backdrop.

Puffing lightly on his cigarette, his thoughts turned to their walk through Puerta del Sol just an hour before. The square was wet and shining after an early morning drizzle. Street-cleaners in bright green and yellow uniforms swept up all the crushed Mahou cans and crumpled wads of protest literature, their long shadows striping the rain slicked plaza. The pedestrians scattered through the square were either rubbing the sleep out of their eyes on their way to work or young fiestadores staggering down the steps to the Metro to sleep the new day away. It was 8 a.m.

‘It feels so foreign,’ she said.

‘What does?’

‘We’ve never seen Madrid at this time of day.’

He had wanted to comment on her word-choice. He had wanted to say other things, as well. Instead he just nodded and adjusted his posture, throwing his shoulders back into a pose of feigned self-assuredness. The only audible response she received was the hiss of the plastic wheels of her two suitcases rolling behind them on the wet slabs of stone.

When he smothered his butt atop the trashcan, he turned to look at the four towers once more. They made him think of gravestones. He then chuckled quietly at his propensity for melodrama as he shuffled back in to the terminal.

It was easy to spot her strawberry blond hair, done-up in a tasteful bun. Looking how she looked, one could never tell that she had been out dancing until five the night before. She was still standing in the cue and did not see him as he made his way past her and all the strangers orchestrated and coordinated by straps of black vinyl.

From the wall he was leaning on he watched a pretty Colombian mother dancing with a stroller, the infant inside it giggling all wide-eyed and dumb. A trio of old Portuguese men with smoke stained beards laughing and hugging. A Dutch couple with immense packs strapped on their backs, their hair tied back in matching, greasy blond ponytails staring up at the gate listings.

He watched the other strangers pass, listening to the soft, orchestral amalgam of foreign tongues humming under the high ceilings of the terminal. He wondered where the strangers were going, where they were coming from. He wondered who was waiting for them.

‘Hey,’ she said, materializing beside him.

‘You ready?’ he asked.

She shrugged, nodded once without looking at him. They began walking towards the security check-point, the heels of her black boots clicking on the marble floors with authority, direction. Their procession was wordless, a certain sense of finality silencing them. She along with her clicking heels stopped at the gap in the vinyl straps.

‘And what about you?’ she asked.

‘Hm?’

‘Estás listo?’ she said, her accent harshening the grace of the language.

He managed to smile. They hugged. They said their thank-you’s. Their good-bye’s. He asked her to tell everyone back where she was going that he sends his regards. Since they were neither European nor lovers no besos were exchanged.

Finally, they exchanged sad, corner of the mouth smiles and she began to weave through the vinyl-guided lanes. With all the turns and lanes of vinyl vacant, her winding back and forth seemed ridiculous. Taunting. They didn’t know whether to look back at each other or not. He watched her walk a few yards, then turn, walk a few more, then turn again until at last she reached the stacks of plastic basins and metal archways and young people dressed in an authoritative manner, with plastic badges on their chests and batons at their hips. She placed her black boots and her purse and her coat in a plastic tray.

Once she passed through the metal detector she looked back and smiled. They waved once through the glass and across the distance. Then she was gone.

His feet were cemented where he stood, where he had watched her disappear along with all of the comforts and familiarities of where she was going and where he was from. Her presence over the last two weeks had poured upon him. The constant burden of being a foreigner, the silent alienation, had been flung aside and forgotten during her stay. As he stood there, his boots sinking into the marble floors of the terminal like wet concrete, the weight of the aloneness crawled back up his spine and situated itself upon his shoulders.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets and sniffed once. He refused to let himself cry over her departure, for they were not lovers and he sure as hell wasn’t European.

After a minute of huffing in place, restraining all facial twitches and blinking hard as the weight settled back into place upon his shoulders, he finally did it.

He succeeded in freeing his left foot from the quickly setting mold and gave a little Charlie Brown kick with his heel, the impetus which managed to float him down the channels of marble and glass and steel and down the escalators and through the ticket booth and down another escalator and onto the train back to his apartment where no one was waiting for him.

Having spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in the weightless purgatory of joint-custody, the concept of home had always been elusive to him. Home was simply a place to lay your head and keep your things.

Ma’s place. Pa’s house. Never home.

Trudging into adulthood, he had thought he’d maintain this mentality all his life. It kept him free to roam. It kept him safe. Safe from the constraints of complacency and commitment. To have a home was a surrender to ordinariness, a forfeit of the freedom that only the absence of a foundation can allow. Those waiting held the shackles of love behind their backs.

But as the train pulled into Chamartin and the bases of the four gravestones passed by to his right all daunting and dumb, he began to reconsider.

A Lille Help From My Friends

Although I’ve had an address, a phone number preceded by a +34, a job, a bank account, and a bus pass for over three months now, I have yet to gain a full sense of “home” here in Spain. I don’t particularly miss Minneapolis, especially when comparing weather forecasts. My heart doesn’t ache for the view of that pretty, blue skyline cradled by the Stone Arch Bridge, nor pedaling down the Greenway eager for the beaches of Calhoun. No, not even the photo booth in Nye’s Polonaise beckons my thoughts homeward.

What keeps any sense of “home” here in Spain elusive is the company of old friends, those I share a mutual history with. For the most part the excitement of my new life manages to keep subdued longing at bay, but on quiet nights like this one, loneliness is hardly as elusive as a sense of “home” when a million miles from familiar faces and embraces.

I suppose it was precisely this hunger for the familiar that had me so excited for my trip to Lille; in Lille I was meeting two close friends from my college days. College. Writing this, I just realized that I finished my studies exactly a year ago today. It was about a quarter to nine on this day last year when I slid my undergrad thesis on the conflicting identities of college students who work as strippers under my professor’s office door and thus completed my college career. I feel old.

Of my friends in Lille the first is Pauline who generously offered to host our weekend reunion at her apartment. Pauline is a French girl who had studied, for whatever godawful turn of fate, at Hamline University in Saint Paul last year. Since she was under 21 until her last two months in the States, she was a regular fixture at our house parties, an ever-willing beer pong partner (or dangerous challenger), and never one to be seen on the dance floor without her arms-up and a dangerous smile on her face. Originally from Avignon in southern France, she is currently working on her Master’s in International Law in Lille. 

Then there is Mitchell, one of my closest friends, a Fargonian living just outside of Lille teaching English in a gig similar to mine in Spain. I’ve never met anyone with a wit as sharp and a self-awareness so keen as Mitchell possesses. And it is exactly this aptitude for perception that plays to his downfall, and all the more reason to love him so. While I mask my shortcomings and insecurities with good posture and a perpetual grin, Mitchell confronts his own with honesty and scrutiny, which more often than not leads to anxiety and self-doubt. While these may sound like character flaws, it is exactly his forthright attitude and razor-blade sarcasm that make him the magnetic person he is.

It was nearly midnight when I finally stepped off the bus upon arriving in Lille, a strange mix of exhaustion and excitement keeping my eyes wide but my feet dragging. Between three countries, I had taken three bus rides, two trains, one taxi, and one flight; I had been ‘in-transit’ for over ten hours.

I heard my name called; seconds later I was embracing my two friends. Despite the fact that my feet were standing on the streets of a city in northern France I had never even heard of prior to moving to Europe, in that moment I was home, buried in a familiar embrace.

There’s lots I could write about my weekend in Lille. The bliss of drinking good, Belgian beer after 3 months of cheap tinto. The cuisine. Barhopping down the “Street of Thirst” littered with considerably quenched French students. The hot wine and other Noel fare. The drunkard on the metro and his monologue about God and the almighty Dollar. The well-dressed children waddling in the squares. The eclectic display of architecture throughout the city. The view from the Ferris wheel. It was all lovely.

As it often goes, it was as short-lived as it was lovely. With great effort I summoned every ounce of masculinity I could to keep the farewell’s casual.

I didn’t want to leave. But the itinerary I opened with, those seemingly arbitrary components of identity that makes our lives real in the modern sense were all waiting for me back in Madrid. So I stepped on the train to Brussels, opening my book rather than looking back, commencing my 15 hour commute back “home.” 

El Arco Iris

I was walking home at dusk, the Sunday streets silent. The store fronts were caged shut and a light rain began to fall. The only sounds about me came from the dead leaves I kicked and the occasional car hissing past me in the drizzle slicked streets. With my mind vacant and left hand swinging a shopping bag, I hardly expected to encounter one of those fleeting, poetic moments that occur from time to time. I suppose those moments are as unexpected as they are rare.

I began ascending the the graffiti smeared staircase of the pedestrian bridge that goes over the train tracks that run through Alcalá. When I reached the top and began to cross the bridge, I came across a young woman. She was no jaw-dropping beauty. The woman was ordinary in every way, the type that would otherwise remain a fuzzy, fleeting blur in my periphery. She wore a brown coat, her fair hair tied in a listless ponytail, a pair of uninspired glasses resting on her nose. She stood in place with both of her hands resting on the guard rail facing westward, frozen in a silenced, studious awe. I looked to my right to peek at what had her so thoroughly entranced.

It was a marvelous sight. 

The sky was ablaze in a beautiful, hushed way. The sun behind the thin sheet of rain clouds covering the entire sky was like an inferno in a plastic bag. The train tracks leading to Madrid were reflecting the sky’s vibrant hue, guiding my eyes to the horizon. There at the edge of infinity I could just barely make out the silhouette of the Four Towers, like little black finger nail clippings in the distance.

I kept walking, but my pace abated. The woman stood in place, her gaze fixed. Other strangers on the bridge looked at her but not the sky. The strangers kept walking. Their eyes stayed locked on their feet or the opposite end of the bridge. They did not see the magic.

I did. I turned to my left where the sky in the east was a subdued blue gray, the mountains in the distance painted in a dramatic, angry way. I noticed the first end of a rainbow out of the corner of my left eye. I followed it from this end all the way up the sky and across the horizon to where its opposite end landed at the foot of the mountains. It was a crippling experience. While I have seen rainbows before, I have never found myself with such a vantage point to see one in its entirety, let alone the stunning landscape that cradled each of its ends, all contained within the panorama of my vision.

The sight had me giddy; I wanted to share this moment with someone. I was but a few steps away from the stationary woman. My mind raced in search of the Spanish word for “rainbow”, but it was in vain. I had never learned this word.

I passed the woman, a lonely part of me aching to just tap her shoulder and point to the wonder waiting behind her. I didn’t. As I made my way to the staircase at the opposite end of the bridge I looked back at her twice, wondering if she had taken her eyes from the wild hues of the west to view the rainbow waiting just behind her. She hadn’t.

11:00pm. November 7, 2011.

Off to a Good Start

The bus tore off down the narrow, unpainted single-lane highway. A golden plume of dust swelled and followed the bus until it disappeared behind a bend in the mountains. From the edge of the road I watched the plume disperse and give way to a sweltering, sun screaming sky. The long-sleeved shirt I had worn in order to cover up my tattoos for my first day of teaching was already clinging to my sweat-slicked back, and it wasn’t even ten in the morning.

Despite the Spanish sun baking me from all angles, a creeping chill worked its way up my spine, the trickle of perspiration forming on my upper-lip salty and icy. I suppose it had to do with the fact that I was hopelessly lost, stranded in a small mountain village miles from any semblance of familiarity without a map. Earlier that morning I was moved by a spontaneous fit of desperation to jump on the bus right in front of me, rather than wait for the right one. (I think I’m supposed to take the 271 up there… This one’s the 272… Only one digit off… Should I?… Yes… Wouldn’t want to be late on your first day, probably just a typo…)

I was reminded of kindergarten.

The first time I took the bus home I boarded the wrong one. I had misheard my teacher who had told me to ride the bus home with my classmate Brent, not my best friend Brett. 

Standing there alone in the wee village, a sinking feeling swallowed me. I felt like that five-year-old in the back of an empty bus with Brett and the rest of my classmates long gone, looking out the window hoping my house and my mother would be waiting for me around the next corner. However, just like my house never managed to situate itself on that bus’s route some 17-odd-years ago, neither did my school decide to relocate itself to my convenience last Tuesday.

See the ridge of the mountains in the distance? I was lost somewhere on the other side of it.

Being all too familiar with unfortunate situations, and often with no one to blame other than myself, I have found one thing to hold-true: things work-out. Perhaps not always to the most ideal of expectations, but when things go wrong it’s important to take what you can get.

I lit a cigarette, a pathetic attempt to look casual as the panicked frenzy coursing through my mind threatened to disjoint my knees and send me to the ground in a hysterical fit of weeping. I strolled into the little town and found the village’s sole bus stop. There I managed to employ my horrendous Spanish to convey my current predicament to a jovial young man named Luiz. Several times during our conversation he’d politely excuse himself to skip across the street and kiss nearly every person he saw meandering down the sidewalk. He’d skip back to me, explain his relationship to the person he had just smooched or slapped on the back, then happily return to his stories, as I nodded along only comprehending a fraction of what he was saying.

When the good ol’ ‘dos-treinta-dos’ pulled up, Luiz sent me off with a squeeze on the shoulder and a hearty ‘adiós’. As I watched him waving to me from the window, a sense of ease and relief lifted my spirits. Or maybe it was just the air-conditioning. Regardless, the authentic and genuine interaction I had had with Luiz that didn’t end with the all too common exchange of mobile numbers or the promise of a Facebook ‘friend request’ was refreshing. The feeling my brief time with Luiz left me with reminded me of why I had wanted to leave home and travel in the first place.

Then I looked at my watch. I was nearly an hour late for my first day of teaching. The anxiety soon resumed, but was at least counter-balanced by the feeling I couldn’t quite find the words to describe, nor truly feel the need to.