Cadíz
I said goodbye in all languages of the heart, not meaning it— tears on the train heading north, leaving your sun-baked, saffron land with its half-moon bay and chalk-white stones. Just one week of non-coincidences, breadcrumbs scattered toward your woodland heart, the owls calling, old songs braided with new love. How can I reconcile both dream and waking when truth only rings true in Spanish?
Córdoba Station
Two hours stuck in Córdoba. The train ahead has broken down, as if the south itself conspires to hold us here—it captures you and refuses to let go.
This is my second week of sleeping in strangers' beds, waking each morning confused about where I am, who I am. But with each day, I feel myself becoming freer, more open to what's coming. I'm fore-sensing things now, catching glimpses of futures that haven't arrived yet.
There's this feeling when I reach toward tomorrow—something the whole world of therapists would reduce to searching for my father, some unfinished business from childhood. But I know better. I know it the way I knew my partners before I met them, the way I recognised my closest friends at first sight. Friendship is love in disguise, and we feel it approaching long before it touches us.
Another word for love is knowing. That quiet recognition—like meeting a childhood friend in a dream, someone you remember from before you had words for remembering. I'd love to be known like that, too. To be recognised.
The tears come without warning. For what? The south becoming home. The overwhelming beauty of everything I've witnessed. Love I cannot touch, and love I already hold. Because love—real love—is so much vaster than any single person. It seeps into everything: ancient cities, sun-warmed landscapes, entire countries heavy with history and song. The way strangers meet your eyes and smile without reason.
Love is what we carry inside us and spill onto someone lucky enough (or unlucky) to be there at the right moment, with the exact shape of eyes, enough to awaken a million-year memory. I don't know you, but I want you.
And so we continue, until that inevitable day when we meet the gaze that knows us back. Someone equally struck by this total non-coincidence of meeting finally, meeting again, meeting forever.
What's a single lifetime to those who have loved across eternity?