Hot Stuff — Far Away Is Here

Shanghai to Madrid. Late June. I am hot stuff. From one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other--though I did fly around the other side, over the Pacific and home to NoVa, to NYC for a week's stop over before crossing the Atlantic on one of those liminal, overnight flights. I am not working this summer, not teaching or advising, only writing, reading, wandering. I proposed a project (which I'll tell you about soon) and got a travel grant to NYU's beautiful study-abroad campus in Madrid, at an edge of Chueca, in a beautiful old building with amazing light. Shanghai to Madrid. A dramatic transition, but certainly a charmed one, and every moment is a transition and so? / I am hot stuff. I AM hot, we all are, we are melting, the millions of us here in the center of Madrid, this proud proud city during the week of Pride. There is a heatwave in Europe, and temperatures here have topped out at 110 degrees. Still, people are filling the Plazas all day and all night, scantily dressed and fully covered, fanned and sweaty, and cool as cucumbers and red-faced, tongues out... Close by in Toledo it is hotter still and agricultural land is spontaneously catching on fire, spreading, all those trees... There have been deaths reported in France, in Italy, in Spain. / Here in Madrid, I don't know. I walk around my new neighborhood in circles, getting lost, my head is buzzing so much faster than my body can go. My back aches from the memory of those trans-oceanic flights, so many different beds, picking up the niece I had not seen in months; she'd grown more than I could have known over the Internet. Here in Madrid, I find a massage by looking up reviews on line (cheap for here but so much more than I ever paid in China). She says my back feels like it is full of rocks, her hands sliding down me like biking across cobble stones. Still, it feels so good, an hour where a stranger calmly forces me back in my body (like it is her job, her work). / Madrid, of course, is amazing. The streets are ancient and bright and alive, the food delicious and cheap, people talking excitedly everywhere, as if there is so much to ponder in this life. / I walk tentatively, slowly, wanting to open my mouth but unsure. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, I blend in on streets, in restaurants, and before I begin people speak Spanish to me and I stutter, I do my best to reply, and yet... My knowledge of Spanish is both awkward and deep; I can barely speak it but due to learning French for five years in school, having a Mexican boyfriend for a few years, living with him in Mexico some, after ending him traveling in the Spanish-speaking world over the years--due to lots of following, listening, lots of leading around my family and friends when I was the one with more Spanish, strangely, now I know what is going on. But it's been a while; I've been absorbing Arabic, Chinese... Not like Arabic, which feels much more mine, or Chinese which I would let wash over me with pleasure, here, things stick, and I try, but it feels hard all of my own volition, no one translating for me, no one to translate for... / Once you finally get your order right, it's so easy to overdose on bread, on cheese, on wine, when you have been in China without these things, when they are ubiquitous, cheap, sublime. / If every moment is a transition and transitions are hard, then does that mean every moment's hard? I don't think so, that it has something to do with the shifting tension between perception and reality, of course, but ah... / Lucky me, I have time, I had a dear cousin here for a conference this weekend from another far away land, I have an old, dear college friend living close by with a beautiful and sweet family. I don't have work, but I have so much work to do and finally I feel like I have gained some measure of stillness in this new place, the work has begun, at my temporary desk in a bright white office and the half moon table temporary home with a very old, yet sturdy a/c.