By: Paulina Sicius
Madrid's neon skies and charming facades.
There was a time in my life when living in Madrid was just a temporary affair. “It’ll be less than a year. Ten months go by much faster than you think,” I would tell Chase, the boyfriend who was waiting for me back in Miami.
When you’re in a place temporarily, you avoid setting any kind of roots for fear that when the inevitable departure comes, it’ll be more painful than it has to be. Already missing Chase when I got on the plane, I didn’t get a Spanish SIM card and relied on coffee shop Wi-Fi and friends’ hotspots. I chose a bank account on the sole requirement that it would be easy to close. The studio I lived in resembled a prison cell, and it had one tiny window, a twin bed that creaked when I took deep breaths, and an industrial-sized kitchen sink. If I spread my arms out, I could touch the window and the opposite wall. I bought the bare minimum for the place: a stiff pillow, a turquoise towel from Primark, and a second-hand set of bed linens. I tried to decorate the place with cutouts from the music and culture magazine they gave away for free at coffee shops and bookstores. I avoided friendships with Spaniards and stuck close to other Americans and foreigners (they were here just as temporarily as I was). I made superficial work friends with some of the other staff at the high school where I was teaching English. But I mostly kept my distance, never asking them to grab a caña after school, afraid of melting the barrier I built.
On long weekends, which are almost a bi-monthly occurrence in Spain, I used what was left of my senior year student loan refund money to take solo trips around Europe. After all, I was on this side of the Atlantic for only ten months, and most importantly: I was twenty-two and everything felt urgent. Eating pasta in Rome. Dipping into thermal baths in Budapest. Visiting the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Seeing the Globe Theatre in London. “You’re spending a lot of money. You need to save for when we go live in New York,” Chase would say. “You’re being irresponsible. You know, I don’t know if I want to be with someone so irresponsible.”
On the weekends I stayed in Madrid, I did not feel like I was living a real life. I hung out with an American girl named Meghan, whose passions were Love Island and going out to a skate bar named Peacock. Our nights out always started at Peacock, where the Colombian owner would give Meghan and me free imitation Fireball shots for every gin tonic we bought. We usually ended up talking with a group of Venezuelan boys who hung out there daily. They would teach us to skateboard and sponsor our cigarettes for the night. Meghan, the Venezuelans, and I would leave Peacock—or wherever it was that we ended up—by the time the sun had risen, and neighbors were on the street taking their dogs out for their morning pee. The streets were always wet from the cleaning trucks, giving the impression of a recent rain, a rare event in desert-like Madrid. We would all double-cheek-kiss goodbye, and I would take the first subway back to my studio.
I remember my Friday and Saturday nights in Madrid fondly, but my Sundays were spent hungover and fighting with a boy who loved chastising me. Because of the time difference, he would wake up early on Sundays to make sure he was already up by the time I woke up after noon. “You know I don’t like when you get drunk. And I hate the idea of you spending so much time with those Venezuelan dudes,” Chase would tell me over Facetime, his face perfectly framed on my phone.
One day after school, I tried calling him to tell him about the magical creative writing workshop I had just facilitated with the Spanish high school students. He hung up. I tried calling again, but he hung up again. This went on for a few rounds (more than I’m proud to admit). When he finally answered, I told him I missed him and loved him, to which he responded that he had been thinking and decided that he was upset. If I wasn’t going to visit him within the next couple of weeks, he didn’t want to be with me.
Reader, I wish I could tell you that right then and there I told him that he was a controlling piece of shit and that I did not want to be with him. It didn’t happen that way. I bought a roundtrip ticket to Miami to go visit him in a month. The next day, he asked me if I was moving back to Miami when I visited him. I said no, and he broke up with me.
My immediate reaction was to see if I was within the timeframe to return the flight ticket. We apologize, you are outside the window for free 24 hour flight cancellations. I closed my laptop. I did not have the energy to call the airline and come up with an excuse as to why I had to cancel, so I laid in bed, put the covers over my head, and cried myself to sleep.
I went to work late the next day with swollen eyes. Every word that came out of my mouth sounded more like a whimper than a word. I could hear my students whisper to each other asking if they knew what was wrong with me. That day after school, the Spanish teachers invited me to cañas. Vaya gilipollas, they said as they took turns hugging me and smoothing my hair.
The next few weeks, I went through the routine that now became all I knew: wake up, go to school, get home, journal, fall asleep. On the weekends, I hung out with my foreigner friends, but I was completely withdrawn. I laughed on command when others did and only spoke when someone asked me a question directly.
“You need to get out of that funk, niña,” one of the Venezuelans observed one day.
“Sorry. I just feel like I’m not here, and I don’t know how to be here, because I feel like I’ve never been here, really. These past eight months my mind has been back in Miami and now I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life. It was all so planned out, I was supposed to be here for ten months and then I was moving to New York and now that’s all gone. And I have to leave Madrid when I was never really even here.”
“Why do you have to go back?” contested Meghan. “Stay.”
. . .
“Al final me quedo en Madrid, no vuelvo a los EEUU,” I told the teachers with a mischievous smile a little bit over a month after the breakup.
“Que bien! Hay que celebrar con unas cañas”, they responded and clapped with joy. In Spain, cañas, or small beers, are used as an excuse to celebrate or console, or for any situation, really.
That same week, I toured a couple of new rooms, ready to get out of my studio. Rooms with windows where Madrid’s neon blue sky spilled into the space, and I could dance across the floor.
I moved into my new room in the summer. I put up the same cutouts from the magazine. A few weeks after I moved in, I met a Spanish boy with a crooked smile and a strong Galician accent named Javi. On our first date, we got cañas and talked through the night until the sun rose.
Life in Madrid was no longer a temporary affair but a real life.
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