20th May, Calle Animas, Granada, Spain
11.30 AM
Taking apart one’s home is the strangest thing.
There is the bottle of supplements I never took.
There is the book I never read.
There is a jar of paprika that is somehow very very sticky.
I am taking apart the life I have lived for the guts of this year and also, it occurs to me, I am taking apart several lives that I had every intention of living, but did not live. Somehow it’s the un-lived lives that are the saddest. Not because I regret not living them, but because I resent the trash I accumulated that I was obviously never going to use. I wonder then if clearing out a home is an out of body experience because it lets you know on some level just how little you know yourself. I would like this home to be a monument to the life lived in it and the people I was, most of whom I liked very much. But it is also a monument to other things. Transformations I believed in once, but now seem naive.
I dawdle over some objects. My suitcase is already full and I hesitate to bring more home, yet how can I leave this plastic hair flower I bought in Sevilla, or that old dress I’ve lugged around so much of my life? But did I wear that flower- and am I even still the girl who would want to wear that flower?
“One must be ruthless” I whisper aloud.
One must be ruthless discarding hair flowers, but also old selves.
02.43 PM
If a self made man is one who created his own wealth, it seems sometimes that a self made woman, as far as fiction is concerned, is one who constructed her own mythology.
I am thinking now of all the ways that this year has transformed me. Was it the transformations I hoped for? Why move to Spain, if not to transform? Didn’t I leave behind everything I knew, the country and language and people, in the hopes of transformation?
I did not know it would feel like this.
But then, if feelings were easy to face, we would face them in the countries of our birth.
04.02
I find myself crying whenever I try to pack. All week, I could clean, organise, fold. But show me a suitcase and my body started to shake. At first I thought I was procrastinating- conveniently choosing to cry when there was a large task to do. Now I’m wizening up a little.
The tears are not tears of leaving- the leaving itself is far too surreal to engender any real emotion as yet.
I am crying at memories, not memories of Granada, but of childhood, of recent summers, of my late uncle and my family as it once was, not so long ago-
Complete.
When I came here, mine was a body without grief- though it was one with dread, worry, and denial.
When I came here, life was one way, and now it is another. When I leave this home, I will leave the last street I sent him pictures of, the last home I lived in while he was alive, the rooftop I called him from. The city I left in December, bringing him jars of alpujarran marmalade. The city I came back to in January, the marmalade unopened, untasted, the group chat suspended, the world transformed.
04.47pm
I wonder if the reason that our generation and the online world can seem so “narcissistic” and “self-obsessed” (as male journalists so oft remind us) is actually a symptom of politeness, appropriateness.
The battles I face that are self continued within my body, my identity, belong entirely to me. I may turn my own life into language, into films, because it belongs entirely to me.
But life, real life, that life which we SHARE- that most magical life of the family, of the lovers, of the community- this is not entirely mine.
I would feel more sure of the ethics of telling you that sugar makes me depressed or that I’m taking up acuptuncture, fixing my sleep schedule, recovering from burnout, etc.
But is that the story?
Is that the story this apartment holds, these low attic roofs? The interesting story of my life is the one that I do not own.
09.30pm
Who has Granada made me? Who will grief make me? And then a better question- who has love made me?
I recently read a wonderful letter from writer Holly Whitaker about how we transform not by growing but by snapping and breaking. We expect growth to happen in a linear, controlled fashion, but in reality it’s more like a porcelain piggy bank, the kind that you only open by smashing.
When I think of what I hold in my body in this moment- the sadness, the peace, the sunshine- I think of it more as the product of the harshness of life . but also the beauty and tenderness. Look at this new soft belly! Look at these freckles I collected from a life in the sun! Look at this nervous system, which in my mind's eye now resembles a rusted wire.
Perhaps Whitaker is right, and it’s the breakage in life that propels us into our new iterations, our new shapes. But surely also, if a break opens room for us to change things, it matters a great deal how and where we break, what we let into the open wound, how we reset the bone.
Perhaps part of my fear of leaving comes from the fact that it feels safe, antiseptic almost, to be cracked in Granada, where nothing ever shows up at my door uninvited, where my universe is small and pleasant.
Our year here wasn’t easy, but it was the best, most beautiful and easy place for breakages to happen. When I snapped, I was so glad I was here, where the wabi sabi human I stitched back together was formed unselfconsciously, with a light touch and with a great deal of fun.
Was I transformed, as I once hoped? I am leaving Granada with two inhalers that I did not need when I arrived. I am leaving with breath that rattles and struggles from time to time.
I am leaving with a body that is so sensitive that coffee makes it cry.
But my skin is a little golder, and my frame a little softer, from the meals made for me by the love of my life, eaten on our beautiful red sofa as the sky turned dusty and our neighbours peered at us through their window, which was uncomfortably close.
I lived well. I was somewhere beautiful, with a blue sky, and the beauty made life feel sweet, sweet enough to feel tremendous pain without losing faith in the project of living entirely.
I think I have never felt so safe in a home as I felt in this apartment.
Safe enough to turn off the screens and face things, and know it would not kill me, because there would always be the stars, the relentless sunshine, and breakfast in the morning with my best friend.
Contrary to the myth of the self-made female protagonist, I am not the auteur of my own selfhood. I co-create with life and with love. I will not “disappear in summer and come back to school in September cooler”, as we dreamt as children. I will not burn my childhood diaries and rock up to los angeles with a pseudonym and no past.
If I transformed this year, it is not because my work transformed me, but because the work I was doing helped me surrender to life’s transformations. Perhaps then, true transformation is not a machiavelian act of design, but the opposite. An act of faith.
Expedited a cry with “Falsettos” so I could finally finish fucking packing:
What would I do if I had not known you.
Who would I blame my life on?
…I’ve heard it said good men get better with age.
I guess we’ll just skip that stage.
01.00 am
Sometimes we (I) gaslight ourselves about how much grief we are allowed to feel.
About what we can claim as ours.
Something that has made me uncomfortable is that there are no words that quite describe the relationship I am processing the loss of.
My mother described him as the Paterfamilias. My brother describes him as a best friend.
Maybe one way we can process the significance of a person, of a city, is how deeply and fundamentally they transform us.
I will always be a bit him and maybe too I’ll always be a bit Granada.
In the end, I’m glad I’m not a female character designed on paper from my own vision alone. I am grateful I am made of the people and cities I’ve known, and that as long as I live, they too shall live.
I am glad of the softness of my body and the weakness of it, the whole mess I leave with, the tears and the strength. I am glad of them because they are made of love.
2.15am
I realise that of all of these now irrelevant objects, I am most sentimental about the sticky jar of paprika. In the end we don’t care so much about the beautiful fantasies we had for our lives.
We care about the real things.
The simple yet profound which we will cling onto forever.
not to quote you but: “I will not burn my childhood diaries and rock up to los angeles with a pseudonym and no past," and then “In the end, I’m glad I’m not a female character designed on paper from my own vision alone. I am grateful I am made of the people and cities I’ve known, and that as long as I live, they too shall live.” Love it! this was amazing to read, thank you for sharing <3
I'm processing a grief right now too, one that is not fully my own but tangential to me - the materfamilias of my beloved's family. But while I'm happy to be here supporting them in their time of grief, I feel my heart aching back to my own home and the plants that will not be watered for a month. Thank you for writing about grief and family and place and love, since these are all things I'm puzzling through as well. I wish you peace in your travels and transitions, and I hope the next place holds more healing and living and love for you. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts.