A Letter from a Spanish Winter

If I were good with words I'd write you something beautiful. I would write to show you that the world really is a beautiful place. I know people have probably told you that before, and you probably didn’t believe them. And I don’t blame you, because I didn’t used to believe them either. But now, if I were good with words, I would be able to prove to you that it’s true.

If I were good with words I would write you Spain. I'd write you the Basilica del Pilar lit up from below at nighttime in Zaragoza. I'd write you Madrid in the winter; the Puerta Del Sol on New Year’s Eve and the big brick Prado Museum. All those rooms and all those paintings. I'd write you Goya and Velazquez and portraits and landscapes and every little brushstroke and all the shades of all the colors of emotions. And I'd include the feeling you get in your chest knowing that you could reach out and touch something made by a genius. I'd tell you about the museum of the Reina Sofia and how Picasso’s Guernica is bigger than I ever expected. How the crowd of people standing around to admire it never thins out and how you have to weave through people to get to stand right in front of it. How it's definitely worth it even though you feel like the painting will swallow you whole.

Then I'd write you Andalucía. The narrow, twisting, maze-like streets of Sevilla and getting lost in them for hours. There would be Córdoba and its famous mosque with all the red and white striped arches and the cathedral built right in the middle. And Granada, with the almost surreal view from the Alhambra, the enormous Islamic palace with all the stone patios and gardens with fountains of green water in every one. There would be the sun, no matter what time of year, and the white houses with geraniums in the summer.

I would have to write you the Mediterranean beaches of Valencia and Barcelona and la Concha, the beach on the Atlantic Ocean in San Sebastian. And then I’d have to write you my weekend in the city. I’d write the beach, of course, and the realization that I was on the other side of the world but wading into the same ocean as I had the past summer on the beach in New Jersey. I’d write the cafés and the pizza parlor we went to and the great orange juice that they served in the restaurant down the street from our hostel. I’d write the old hostel owner and eating sandwiches in our room. And then I’d describe to you the heart and the soul of each of the three girls I went with because it was really they who made it such a good trip.

If I were good with words I would write you Salamanca. I would write the way the Plaza Mayor building is the color of fire when the lights are on it in the night. I’d write the sun shining through the stained glass windows of the art deco museum while I sat in wicker chairs with my friends and sipped vending machine coffee. The way their faces were tinted orange and green and blue. I would write running in the rain to get into some sort of shelter and ducking into a café for churros and chocolate. They were playing Enya and we joked that it sounded like the soundtrack to a slow motion battle scene or a documentary about whales. I would write about how we couldn’t find the frog on the decorated façade of the old university until a nice old woman showed us and offered to take a picture of us in front of the building.

I would write you the long bus trips and train trips listening to music and laughing with friends until we cried. How every once and a while the monotony of the landscape broke and there was a bright green patch of land, or a field of tall white windmills, or an old farmhouse, or a deserted pueblo, or a huge black bull-shaped billboard contrasting against the blue-white sky.

I would write the melancholy stones of the bombed out pueblo Belchite and how we stepped carefully around the devastation and whispered softly, Franco was here. I would write the way my throat closed when we passed a building where the inside of the house was clearly recognizable. It wasn’t just a fallen building to me then, it was somebody’s home and it had been destroyed. I would write the sun and the orange bricks and the faded fresco paintings on the inside of the roofless old church. I would write the way a creek wove through, and the way I saw, in the distance, the silhouettes of children exploring in the rubble. The way that it all really was beautiful, in a destructed sort of way.

And I would write waking up in a clean hostel room in the spring with the blue sky bursting through the window and its light filtering through the soft white sheet pulled over my head. There would be the way my laugh sounded different to my ears when I was lying down and the way I grappled for my dreams because I thought I’d dreamed of you.

If I were good with words I’d write to you about sitting in a plaza eating a Turkish sandwich and realizing that my life was never going to be the same. I was never again going to get to live like I was living then, but nor could I go back to how things had been before. I’d write you so well the shiver I felt when I crossed the Puente de Hierro at night in the fall that you would feel it too just from reading about it. I’d write that this way of life and the city that I live it in are all I ever needed to make me realize that there’s more to life than rainy days and bad traffic. And if I were good with words, I’d be able to explain to you what it is this city has that makes me feel that way. But then, maybe not because I can’t quite figure it out myself.

And I suppose you’d be surprised when I wrote you crying on a rainy afternoon. But there’s beauty in sitting inside with rain tapping on the window and crying because things are falling apart, but having the hope, or maybe the knowledge, that things can only get better. If I were good with words I would prove this to you, and the fact that there’s beauty in insomnia. Because somehow, sitting late at night with the harsh yellow lights on and writing and writing until I’m sure my hand will fall off at the wrist, somehow that makes me happy. I can tell because whatever I’ve got inside my ribs swells up and I get goose bumps even if I’m not cold.

After I wrote you Spain, all of Spain, from a tiny pueblo called Alquézar to downtown Madrid, from Cádiz to Galicia to Bilbao to Tarragona, I would write you. Pages, just for you. I would write you into existence. I’d write you so well that you’d jump off my paper, pull your last details from my ballpoint pen, and sit here next to me instead of halfway around the world like you are now.

If I were good with words I’d be able to write you a whole book of beautiful truth. But as I am I can only offer these few pages. And though I may not be good with words, maybe in a few of my ill-formed letters you will find beauty.