Highlights of the trip included fabulous food, long meandering walks, a trip to the zoo (where it is possible to rent an electric car and drive past all the exhibits, making the Barcelona zoo my favorite in the world), and ice cream in the Barri Gotic.
The best part though was visiting Ana Helena, a brilliant friend (and massage therapist, and cab driver, and performance artist, and biologist, and all-round great person). Ana is always delightful, but there is something very sweet about meeting up with friends who love Portland but live elsewhere.
In fact, I’ve found it easier to meet these friends while traveling than back home, where I am sometimes overwhelmed with longing for the past. Portland was the city where I finally grew up and found a community, but that process, while rewarding, was also tremendously painful.
The first question from people who haven’t seen me in two or three years is predictably Is that your natural hair color?
When Ana asked I had a flash of sitting with her at the yellow formica table in my periwinkle blue kitchen, pots of dye in front of us, using toothbrushes to paint random colors into our hair. The reason I stopped bleaching? I no longer lived near Stevie and couldn’t face having other people touch my head; and with that thought other memories slipped through, of all the events and performances and parties.
Ana Helena said that she decided to go home for the summer because she wants to be in a place that smells like blackberries, and I could suddenly smell the neighborhood too, just as she described, and I recalled that it was Ana’s ministrations that restored my sense of smell after more than twenty years without it. She was also the person who told me that I had to learn to feel pain, and at that recollection the damaged nerve in my right arm throbbed and twitched.
We talked about our new lives in England and Spain, and I felt a sense of wonder at the fact that two girls from Washington and Alaska made it this far. Even while laughing I felt as though I were looking down at the scene playing out in a European cafe.
Talking to Ana underscored a feeling I have that my life is a work of fiction.
During my sophomore year of high school a geography teacher gave the class an assignment to map out and describe an ideal trip. I have no idea what the others chose – Kennewick? Perhaps as far afield as Los Angeles? I wrote a detailed report about a trip to Europe, meticulously documenting imaginary adventures in England and on the continent.
When the paper came back it was marked with an A, but the teacher had scrawled comments throughout indicating that I was a fantasist, that I would never have the wherewithal or cunning to create the life I was dreaming about.
If that teacher were still alive I might write to tell him that I have achieved exactly what the paper described, and more; but then again, perhaps not. He never made it out of that town, after all.
I met Ana Helena when I was twenty-eight and convinced that the teacher was correct, that I would never move away from the Northwest, never leverage myself out of the bohemian poverty that was indistinct from the working class variety I grew up in. I lived without a thermostat, ignoring my ramshackle body, avoiding strangers. I didn’t think that I could change, or that I wanted to. Then one day I accidentally fell in with people who knew how to fix things.
Ana surely does not remember the first time we really talked, in the backyard at 19th Street while experimental films played in the house. Moe and Dwayne were there too and we were all telling wild stories and that specific moment was the first time I ever laughed without covering my face with both hands, an act that split my little world open and changed everything irrevocably.
If I had never met Ana and the others perhaps I would have ended up here anyway. But I wouldn’t be the same person.
I’m glad to have these friends, and even more happy that the relationships do not require me to be tethered to a piece of geography.
