In 2019, I stopped in Barcelona for two nights between Rome and Madrid because I’d already been there and so much of the trip was unfamiliar territory. It wasn’t an agonizing decision. A decision is not a fork in the road, it’s a stress point in a path before you continue, because the future and past were written at the Big Bang. I’m not a physicist, but I know it’s true.

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Barcelona is not a “beach town” although one side is on the Mediterranean. In 2013, my first time there, I wanted to go in the Mediterranean, but not in a city environment. I rode the train fifteen kilometers north to the more peaceful town of Montgat [moan gat]. After the sea, I wandered into the hills. That’s what I do on trips, I wander. Walking past kind of bland suburban houses, I was fantasizing, about, if I had a family and like, children, and we lived in Montgat.

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During my 2019 trip, I was wearing these Vans Kyle Walker sneakers. They have 'Walker' in the name so you’d think they’d be good for walking but they hurt like hell. I spent my first day in Barcelona in agony, hobbling the neighborhood around my hostel. I can’t explain how painful it was—just imagine it being really painful and that’s what it was like.

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I was wandering, wondering, if since in 2013 I’d been exploring Barcelona a lot, maybe in 2019 a map of the city would be pulled from my brain’s deep storage and click back into immediate availability. And it did. The location information in my brain snapped into place and it was like I’d been in Barcelona the week before. So maybe I returned to Barcelona to investigate the phenomenon of “map click” (or make it up? discover it?)

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No, I think I do things for emotional reasons. But from 2017 to 2019, I thought of myself as an unemotional robot. Or I vacillated between that, and thinking I’m being really incredibly harsh with myself, stop it. Pulling myself through Barcelona, barely able to support my full weight on my right foot, I was feeling no emotions. Instead I was cursed by obsessive cycling thoughts of—not enough time. I was feeling like—I’m thirty-nine and I don’t have enough time to do everything I want. Or, I don’t have time to do it unless I do it while I’m old. And I don’t want to do it while I’m old. I started life too late. So why bother with any of it? Why did I stay so stupid for so long? These were my cycling thoughts. Cursed thoughts. 

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So maybe I returned to Barcelona to grieve the loss of possibilities, the loss of decisions? But decisions don’t exist, all this, the future and the past, was decided at the Big Bang. All this was decided at the Big Bang—is the thought that calms me down. It calms me when I’m scared of death. 

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Having kids and raising them in a suburb of Barcelona was not one of the possible futures or pasts I was grieving. Mentioning it earlier, suggests I was grieving something like that, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was mourning the loss of possibilities of possibilities. One of the endless amounts of things I will never do is be a thirty-something raising children in a suburb of Barcelona and I doubt I’ll be a forty-something doing that either, and if I did, it would stand in the way of tons of other possibilities. But there are no possibilities. Everything was decided at the Big Bang.

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I people-watched a lot in Barcelona. I didn’t think of myself as a writer then, at least not unabashedly. I could have been taking in people’s mannerisms for future use. But it wasn’t like that. I watched them in desperation, like a shadow wanting to be human. It reminded me of changing schools in third grade after my father got custody. My first day at recess I stood at the edge of the playground watching other kids, conscious of my outsider status, and self-conscious about how it looked to be standing there alone. A faculty member, a counselor I think, approached and I remember saying, “I just like watching.” 

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So sad to recall—because I was lying to her. I didn’t like watching—I was paralyzed by emotions (emotions I don’t remember and don’t feel qualified speculating about.) I barely know that boy anymore but I do know that I’m somewhat the same now as then, and that is scary because I had time then and I don’t now. By saying, “I just like watching,” I was repressing emotions. It’s important to express them, to communicate. Too many of mine have turned inward and are painful, angry, sorrowful. Too few are loving, joyful, and, damn I can’t even think of a third non-excruciating emotion. (But I will tomorrow when I'm feeling good again.)

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Right now, I feel not good, but okay. But that okay-ness is because I am repressing the “bad thoughts.” Is everyone else repressing bad thoughts so they don’t stand in the way of getting on with life. I think not because repressing bad equally represses good, you don’t get to choose, and I saw plenty of happy people in Barcelona. I don’t think they were faking. Repressing bad thoughts only induces neutrality—the “I’m okay” response.

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I knew someone who said “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay” while having a bad acid trip when they were a teenager. It’s a calming phrase like, “Everything was decided in the Big Bang.” Maybe “I’m okay” is not a good phrase and none one should say it. 'Okay' is nothing. I shouldn’t lie and say, “I’m great” but maybe I can say, “I can be great?” No, that sound idiotic, and now my thoughts are rambling in and out of Barcelona and where ever I am now.

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In Catalan, rambla means ravine and has also come to mean avenue or promenade. It comes from the Arabic word for sand. La Rambla is an important road in Barcelona that used to be the sewage ravine at the edge of the old city walls. It was usually dry sand but during heavy rains it would swell and take the water out to the Mediterranean Sea.