Blog Post 31.
I think it is time I reflect on a few things in my life. I do reflect often- some evenings Madison walks into my room and I’ll be on my bed staring at the wall or ceiling, just thinking about things. But this is short-term reflection: over my day, my week, what is about to happen and what I hope to do better next time. It is a worthwhile practice.
Harder (for me) is long-term reflection. Part of this is because, to me, reflection needs to be productive. Taking a four month chunk of my life and making something useful of it in my mind is harder than looking back at my day. When I left Cádiz in late December, I had to explain to my new friends, Hannah, Andres, Maddie, Sydney and Colin, with tears in their eyes, that I would not understand the completion of that four month moment for some time… I estimated it would take me about six weeks for the nostalgia (if that’s what we want to call it) to creep up on me. This is just one of those things I know about myself. A few weeks ago, I began to feel it: a need to reflect on something that has truly ended. se acabó ya.
This is turning out to be a dense set of reflective moments, so I’m going to break it up into the sections as I get a grasp for what they mean, thematically, in my mind (I am perpetually guilty of categorizing bodies of thought and emotion, a trait that I generally find useful). I’ll break up these reflections so as not to bog you down with words.
The newness that became familiar. Nerves that became a sense of coming home. There are plenty of generalizations I could make to help masticate the vastness and diversity of sentiments such an era creates. Being there, I think I failed to realize just how truly new everything was. I was expecting newness, of course, so was not all too caught off guard. However, there was never a moment in which I realized the once-newness had become familiarity. I do recall sitting on the train after a weekend away and feeling relief to be heading toward Cádiz, toward my teeny windowless room, toward the tortilla española that I knew Isabel would have nearly ready for me when I arrived.
The first days in Cadiz were an absolute blur. In retrospect, the entire time there was a blur, a dream, a chapter from a book I was reading and never finished. At the same time, I remember so many smells, the best routes to get to la facultad from home, the feeling of running against the Atlantic’s coastal wind.
So, as you can imagine, everything was new and romantic then everything morphed to acquire a prosaic sweetness. This was a slow process. It was inevitable. I was there long enough to feel it happen. I was there briefly enough to continue finding new things newness, though new things are less surprising in a familiar place.
Kulani Sol 