Blog Post 21.
I was walking along the coast when a fine sprinkle began to fall. This made me feel excited. The thing is, I enjoy walking in the rain, especially near the coast. Rain makes the point where the curvature of the Earth forces the sky and sea to meet- some call it the horizon- appear differently than usual.
After two minutes the sprinkle hadn’t stopped, an indication that it would instead progress into something more. As if in answer to this suspicion, the sprinkles turned to drops and the gentle sea breeze turned to a marine wind.
As the rain droplets took to plopping, rather than sprinkling on my face, my shoulders, the tops of my thighs above my knees as they moved out from under the cover of my upper body, I caught sight of a bus stop wherein other people had already taken refuge. I approached without changing pace (still enjoying walking in the rain) to joined their ranks. By that point I was fairly soaked through, but not enough to prove taking shelter pointless.
Then it really began to pour. A regular deluge. The wind blew some of the rain into the shelter and our party inched ever closer into its center. The bus stop was walled in by glass panels that faced the ocean to the south. Through the layered sheets of water that ran down these panels, we could see a bright blue sky, dotted with few, not-daunting clouds, moving toward us from the southwest. The sky and sea directly south were indistinguishable from one another, like a painter had delicately laid down thick acrylics for both these parts of a painting then smudged through the line where they met with his thumb.
I thought about the people I wouldn’t mind standing next to, soaking wet, under the shelter of that bus stop. What these people (I’m thinking of a few in particular) would say, what they wouldn’t say. How I know they wouldn’t mind being there with me. That’s a really special feeling; knowing that another person doesn’t mind your presence as much as you don’t mind theirs, regardless of the situation.
Just as well, I found myself standing alone amidst a crowd of rain-refugees, staring at the horizon through a wall of water. So, I figured I might as well think about something, some things.
I started thinking about time- one of my go-to topics- and how we move through it and how it moves through and around us and how, before you know it, the last full moon you will see from Europe this time around has already become a memory and so have the first twelve hours of today and the first 21 years of your life. Everything I am is a memory and I live at the point where memory presses on the quite literal boundary of the existing universe. I feel like I’m repeating myself and exposing nothing new to you- sorry about that.
It’s just that the end of my time abroad is drawing near. This, like waiting for my time abroad to begin, is a certain unreality that does not quite align with my sense of the passage of time (a couple weekends ago, Andrés, Colin, Sydney and I were at Playa Santa Maria talking about how this is our life for the next 17 weeks and what are we going to do with all that time?).
Yesterday my mom texted me that there are 27 days between then and when I will return home. This message caught me off guard- it gave me a mix of excitement and distress (and not just because I have exams and papers to prep for before then).
Yesterday I talked to Madison about how, at this point, any trace of homesickness has left us, if any there was. This place has become familiar to me- a home of sorts in and of itself. Nonetheless, we now feel a readiness to return to the familiarity of the places and people we call home elsewhere.
Rain always gets you thinkin’ about the same old things, just in new ways.
Kulani Sol 