Spoons and Soundwaves

Most days, I'm so at home in this apartment that it's hard to believe I've only been here for a few weeks. Outside the house has its ups and downs, but those are stories for next time.

The family I'm living with is helpful and great at cooking. Their house is like one of those tiny "this is our home" apartments that IKEA has set up in their stores, but the 5 of us never seem to be stepping on each other's toes. While other students in my program are trying to figure out how to stay out of the way when their host mom and dad fight or how to deal with families who roll their eyes at their attempts at Spanish, I somehow ended up in a house where the only thing I hear more than "No pasa nada" are the church bells next door that ring every 15 minutes.

You know how you can learn more about a person by exploring their home than by spending that time talking with them in another setting? Language barrier firmly intact (although I'm working on it), I'm relying on their house to tell me about my host family. The little bit of clutter is cozy and makes think that Malene, my host mom, means it when she laughs at the stories I tell her about mistakes I made speaking to a sales clerk or accidentally closing the door on a neighbor. Every room in the house is filled with snapshots, professional portraits, and polaroids of the family tucked into mirrors and light switches. One wall has been taken over by a growth chart for Noa. The marks lower on the wall are carefully written in pencil, but the more recent ones were written in blue or purple marker in Noa's own nascent handwriting. And why should everything be perfect?

Homes here seem to be a place for living, not entertaining or improving or investing in. We're all so on top of each other that it would be insane to imagine anyone trying to make their house an entirely private space. Our windows are always open and drying laundry hangs off our balconies letting our neighbor's lives drift in and out during the day. Someone near us is always watching Bollywood movies, the dad across the hall sings to his baby in the morning when he starts crying, and someone cooks dinners that smell good enough to make me want to knock on their door and ask for a bite.

In the morning, I eat breakfast in the corner and make notes to myself to get an electric kettle for my apartment, stop eating so much nutella, and remember my dictionary for class. Our kitchen is smaller than a closet, but is packed to the top with everything we need. The differences aren't that big, but the parts that are strange mean more about culture than cabinets which, by the way, we don't have. There are 4 bins that are color-coded for the Spanish recycling system: blue for paper, green for glass, yellow for plastic, and grey for trash. The washing machine and oven under the counter are both missing their mates; dryers don't seem to exist anywhere in Spain and the stove has been replaced with a hot plate. My favorite part of the kitchen is the radio with a spoon for an antenna, a trick Malene learned from her Dutch grandmother. She has it on all the time and I've kept it on this weekend to take up space in the empty house while she, Jorge, and Noa are gone visiting her family up the coast.

A playlist of familiar and new songs from the kitchen radio, tuned to station 93.9:

+The Kooks: "Naive"
+A country song in Spanish
+Ziggy Marley: "Falling in Love"
+Shakira: "Waka Waka"
+Chubby Checker: "Limbo Rock"
+Counting Crows: "Accidentally in Love"
+Coldplay: "Life in Technicolor II"
+Death Cab for Cutie: "What Sarah Said"
+Steel Pulse: "Roller Skates"
+Spoon: "Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"
+Duffy: "Mercy"
+Something by Beirut
+The Zombies: "Time of the Season"

when did you first realize that planets were smaller than stars? i think i only understood this recently.

i’ve been here for three weeks, where everything has a place, but i can’t find the big dipper.
when i was tiny, my dad would wake me at that time between late late night and morning [there’s a word for that in spanish, it’s “madrugada.” i like how they have words for things that we have to explain with a whole sentence. it’s like they understand something that i ruin with too many adjectives or too much explanation] to show me the stars. even in the spring it would be cold that early, so he would wrap me up in the afghan his grandma made for us and carry me outside. the streetlights on our road seemed like they were always burnt out; the only thing lighting up the night was the moon right above us and it was changing every night. he’d try to show me orion, but there were too many stars for me to tell where he started or ended. or cassiopeia, because she was a queen and was like our name. but all those stars were too dim from my driveway. so he would hold me on his back with one arm and point with the other at the two pine trees across the street and i would find the constellation between them.

every night since i’ve been back, there’s been so much sky. i look toward the two familiar trees, but i just can’t see the big dipper. i’ve noticed that some of my streetlights have been replaced, lighting up the neighborhood while they mute the skies, but i doubt this newness is what clouds the reminder of my little memory.

stars are ubiquitous; no matter where you go, they’re right there above you. my grandpa taught me this word when i still lived in pittsburgh, and told me that god was ubiquitous.

see? this is safe. i can submerge myself in it without losing everything else. i won’t drown.

last summer, i was worried about the one star that burned weaker than the other six. i know it’s been working so hard for so many years, but i hope it doesn’t fade completely, at least not while i’m still looking at it. i wonder if that is a completely selfish wish. then i wonder if it’s already dead and maybe we’re just seeing leftover light. the message [“goodnight, ladies and gentlemen. thank you for coming to the show.”] hasn’t gotten to us yet.

the thing about night is that you can feel the darkness. it’s like when you see stars from somewhere where nothing else is. with no lights to dim their brilliance, you realize how many there really are, filling in the space in between the ones you see every night. because that only happens when you’re far away from everything else.

and then there’s tying memories to something big, something in the sky that everyone else can taste, if they want to. it’s more universal than having thoughts about books or songs, and no one can talk about it, not if they want it to stay real. you throw a rope up above your head and bind just a speck of yourself to your star. you let your ideas swirl around—they’re there in case someone wants to share with you, but you’re content knowing they’ve been thought.

i heard from someone you're still pretty

do you remember when we used to talk? we’d sit in that empty parking lot and roll the windows down and let the dew from the night collect on our skin, making us shiver even in the warmth. we were exploring because we wanted to feel infinite. but then, we were so safe in our little beds—anything could be shut out if it got too big or too scary. every time, we would stretch the clock to the last minute then rush you back to your house and hope we made it in time. you remind me of home.

remember how we used to sit around for hours and hours, and how your mum worried, and how we just laughed?

and then when things got thick. i was trying to figure it out and it was summer. the heat boiled everything out of me until i was one tiny core of fury. i got so angry with you and i pushed away because you didn’t pull at me. were you afraid or did i just want you to be? i’m good at imagining thoughts into places where they don’t exist. and remember when i made you cry? maybe i was right.

i hope that you remember me [happily]. sometimes i catch glimpses of things that remind me of you, but not often. it doesn’t make me sad that i don’t think of you, but when i do, it’s warm.

now i’m 500 miles from home but blankets are still impenetrable armor for sleeping. you hear a sound in the night, in the dark, and pull the covers up over your head, knowing that if something really is coming after you, somehow you’ll be safe, small, invisible. and maybe you’ll remember our stolen ideas, hidden deep and uncovered later, when you know you won’t get caught.

i just want to be comfortable. wrapped up but free.

i’ve got manners that i’ve smuggled away and memories that aren’t quite right but i rest on them.

in the beginning, sometimes i left messages in the street

but you wanted her to look through your memories and feel like she owned a part of them simply because you were hers. you wanted her to wish she possessed some old part of you. you wanted her to love your family and your bed and the streets you drove on and not want to leave ever. with her, you weren't okay with rain, you wanted a storm--an unstoppable, torrential downpour. instead, you had clouds and clouds, threatening to let everything pour out but she gave up before even the littlest one could break. she likes possibility but she won't give herself over to it and she can't be happy.

give it time and it'll fix itself, but right now you're not sure if you want it to. you have this obsession with feeling and you can't shake it.

in the beginning it was uninviting, but it's quickly becoming devastating. you're continually doing maintenance when all you need is something new but you can't give up because you're too attached to memories. and your nostalgia is this particular kind, a kind that belongs to experiences that haven't been lived yet and things that you want to wake up tangled in and then woven into the sheets of. your shoes are always the same and don't travel very far.

lately, your life has faded to black and white and your dreams, once fantastic, play out the small things you crave when you're awake. you're distracted and worried that you're losing your imagination and innocence and everything else that you gave away so easily and so willingly because you thought you would never run out of things to give. what you once thought was tying you down has turned into your safety net for when you walk on tightropes [which seems like every day now] and it's moving farther and father away, making you fall longer every time. you wake up with bruises you can't explain and a longing you can't articulate.

it's almost winter and you want to be warm. you miss the familiar and think about how strange it is that everything you used to recognize has become foreign. telephone lines are too thin to travel. the static is too loud and your words move too fast to span the distance.

so how will you handle the discontent? this aggravation is hostile to your nature, which is overly sensitive but impassive. you'll look for brilliance in your ordinary background, like the inviting coolness of your pillow, and lay away at night hoping they don't run out of good songs. you could wait for it to come, but instead you'll be after it all night. you've got time to make.