My Last Night In Time

The last night in a city highlights an individual’s favorite aspects of that city. Choosing the right café for one’s last tea, dropping by that restaurant whose food is shotty but has the funniest bartender or splurging at the most expensive tapas bar to eat one’s favorite dish, one last time. My last night in Spain began with goodbyes and ended with sunrise tears on top of the Santa Bárbara Castillo.

The goodbye celebrations had been in full swing for about three weeks by the time my turn rolled around. Two of my closest girlfriends departed just days before my flight, so my list of people to bid farewell had dwindled, unlike the amount of tears shed. Those remaining met at the beach, it was miserably windy and half the group was anxious about finals. We sucked it up and spent a couple hours intermittently diving in the waves and discussing the wild depth of our latest friendships. We questioned each other’s first impressions as a benchmark to see how far our relationships had grown and to secretly measure how, if at all, we grew as people. You know, everyone says you go abroad and change. Everyone. However, if I am being honest, I think you just become sure of yourself. But we continued these talks and planned for the next time we’d see each other. For the Europeans, their next visit was relatively soon. For us who reside on a different continent, we rest assured that our friendships would prevail through (possible) years of distance.

The last night in a city also highlights an individual’s closest relationships from that city. Hours are spent in the company of those who mattered the most, and as the day goes on, that number can dwindle down to just one other person.

My closest friends, as previously explained, had started skipping out. We had a solid group of friends who devoted the day to my final wishes. They toughed through a windstorm of sand and marched La Explanada in search of souvenirs for my family. We finally grabbed gelato from the third best heladería in Spain and hugged goodbye. The plans to visit each other created during the windstorm of a beach day prevented the tears. It was late afternoon – I still needed to pack, say goodbye to my host family and have one final date with the German boy I met a few months prior.

I did not even finish packing when I left for my last night out, a task I left to the will-be-stressful hours before my 7:20 bus to the airport. Lukas and I reached my host family’s house around 21:00, a gathering we have shared a few times for Mother’s Day lunch and random dinners. My replacement, a 15-year-old American from Maine and reason for moving out of my host family’s house, was present to witness the goodbyes. Apparently, according to my 9-year-old sister Española, the younger American had better Spanish. Whatever, younger minds pick up on languages quicker. I am going to assume I have better English for the sake of my ego. We left for our date at the fancy tapas bar – a place I never learned the proper name for since the bill from our first time wrecked our wallets and then only deserved reference as “fancy dinner”.

The waiters, who for the first date provided slow service in disbelief of our ability to pay the bill, recognized us for being fifteen years younger than the regular demographic. However, they were happy to see us this time. We split a bottle of the wine with a decorated skull on it – our conversation drifted into tears as my anxiety began spiking in my remaining weeks. The mere realization of my return to a life of stimulus and triggers for my anxiety had created anxiety in and of itself. Figures.

This conversation exposed parts of me that had been smothered by our dream life and starter status of acquaintance. Time and familiarity, always, giving way to learning one’s true inner workings – a phenomenon that is so easy to bear witness in a city of once strangers.

Fancy dinner also pushed us into conversation with two British men who raved about Trump, a moment I never could have foreseen. Our conversation raving about his “greatness” I quickly realized was not satirical and even quicker, shifted into astonishment. Astonishment that dragged as we marched to the Hobbit Bar, another place where I never learned the proper name. The Hobbit Bar is a jazz bar with the tiniest door imaginable. The frequent whispers of its existence and fingers pointing to its direction never stopped us from walking right past the little door for the first two months in Alicante. I swore the place was just a rumor until a professional, a.k.a. a friend who got lucky, showed us the way. The two-story Hobbit Bar is decorated in graffiti left behind by past patrons and currency from dozens of different countries. I branded my mark with “Alexis Hall – The Martian from the Liminal Space”. There, we plowed through a couple of the best mojitos in town and ballroom danced to jazz music. By dance, I mean he led and I drunkenly slurred about the time I took cotillion in seventh grade where a boy claimed I resembled a goat. Flirting in middle school was cute – only effective if you insult a person as a means to evoke abusive banter (any communication between the sexes was getting somewhere) while simultaneously keeping your feelings shielded. Seems this could be an argument supporting the notion that people never change.

We went outside for a smoke where we met a man admiring the bar sign. You would think I would have remembered the name as we joined him in appreciation for the little hole-in-the-wall. Turns out, the man was a friend of the owner and gave some backstory to how he learned to make the best mojitos in town. I would say in the world, but I have not traveled nearly enough for the mojitos of the Hobbit Bar to gain status as the mojito I rave about to my grandchildren when they finally realize my life was interesting in my final moments.

Time was ticking, bags needed packing and Lukas and I had yet to trespass el Castillo for a sunrise. We took off hand-in-hand in a romantic, I-need-help-walking sort of way. I strutted through uneven brick roads and up the hiking path of el Castillo in my favorite black, BDSM looking platforms. We tried the paved route but there was already a couple perched on top of that path and it was awkward sharing our last moments with them, we’re not swingers.

Our last moments untinged by the stress of traveling were special. We overlooked our apartment and managed not to cry. What followed did not matter. The feeling that permeated those moments are inexplicable but widely understood. My best shot of expressing how I felt is to explain my habit of looking up at the sky and feeling myself zoom out far enough to see where I physically stood in relation to where I came from – this can also be applied as a metaphor for the shift in my mental health. I usually did this and outwardly expressed, “Guys, can you believe we are in Spain?”. I repeated this phrase so often it became a joke that I don’t care to explain, but if my friends are reading this, POGO.

The difference between that night’s look at the sky and my previous glances is the closure. I have been working on being present in the moment and appreciating where I am both geographically and mentally. That night, in those moments on the Castillo, I did not have to mourn my new relationships or time in Spain – both would follow me forever. I understand time, a social-construct, to be the most powerful influence on society. My relationships and lessons learned have always been waiting for my consciousness to accept them and will last through the coming measures of time. I left Alicante feeling indifferent. I sobbed, yes, but I neither held anger for leaving my life or fear for entering my old, new life. I had my present moment, and I still have my present moment.

***

Saying goodbye to your semester away is like waking up from a dream and believing it is real. You do not believe those who claim it is not real life – they are on the outside looking in. They cannot feel the depth of your relationships or curl up in the family you created. But as your dream grows distant from the present moment, you realize they were right. Life was a dream. Latching to the wistful desire for reliving the past only blocks the potential of the present moment to be that of a similar dream.

While the dream has “technically” ended, the multiple dimensions of time pervades experience throughout one’s existence. The past, present and future are occurring at the same time, but all we have is our perception of the present moment.

Reliving the past and speculating the future erodes the present. From my current understanding, thoughts and perceptions (which will undoubtedly change with further knowledge and understanding), consciousness is the interpretation of the current state of being. To free oneself from the past and future, a difficult task as they occur simultaneously with the present, frees oneself to reach a higher level of consciousness.

My life in Spain was a dream. A dream I seem to have experienced before and will experience again but merely appearing in a new physical environment. The liberation and freedom echoing from my childhood, the autonomy a gift from adulthood - it seems as though feelings, sensations and experiences are constantly occurring throughout time but revolve to the forefront of consciousness based on the present moment and environment. Maybe that is why life seems so coincidental or why one experiences Déjà Vu. Maybe we all have several themes to life that seem to shift in importance based on the present moment, influencing life daily. Maybe that is why shifting one’s perception on the environment or actually changing the environment stimulates personal growth. If the past, present and future are all occurring at the same, it is our responsibility to manifest a better perception.

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