Having a few hours to kill in Madrid before my flight home I decided to walk around my favourite spots in the center, with a risky jump into the periphery, until I came back to a café full of memories (both for me and for half the gay community of Madrid), Mamá Inés, where I'm sat now, trying to organize the emotional stir fry that this tour has brought about. Although much of what I have to say has little to do with dance, I will use this entry as a form of auto-exorcism, something we all need to do every now and then.
So I got off the train at Sol, and saw the new station- it was still being built when I was last here, last August. Other than that there weren't that many changes- a few places had closed down, but, rather inconveniently for the melodramatic poetics of this entry, I think just for the summer.
I wandered along the streets under the asphixiating heat and came across Maty, the dance shop where I fell in love with Sansha Pro and decided to burn down Bloch and Casimiro- and like that, many different spots in which I saw perfectly vivid recreations of memories from last year. I got the subway to the conservatoire (a waste of a euro on an incredibly silly nostalgic whim, as I knew the park complex the school is in would not open until mid-September), and again, an assault of memories in their different levels of emotional intensity.
Why was the city having this effect on me? When I returned to Leeds, or when I go back home, yes, I remembered things, but never to this level of vividness. Everywhere I went earlier today seemed to shoot a fireball of emotions at me, fireballs which I had to face and diggest before I could move on (and by diggest I also mean having the respective post-meal cigarrette. I sound like a truck driver who smokes four packets a day by now).
It dawned on me that Madrid, the city, and what happened in it (at the personal, proffessional and educational levels) had bitch slapped me in the face like nothing had ever done before, and in doing so it had whipped assed me into shape. It's a city that taught me I had to become an adult before I got run over by its hectic traffic.
And the slap hurt;it still does, and I can feel its five fiery fingers on my face day on and day off.
So I sit here now with a caña and some crisps and I realize that I have, finally, faced many of the ghosts I left wandering aimlessly about when I left Madrid. And a curious feeling, one which I try not to feel too often, pride, overcomes me. I've faced them, and what's more, I can say that I've come out stronger after my urban struggle. My body is moving towads where I want it to be, I have a good job and great people around me. My experiences and disappointments here have toughened up my skin and have allowed me to get going where I want to go.
I also walked past a little bar where I once sat alone having a drink after a terrible day at college. A lady walked into the bar and asked me if I wanted my fortune telling (as only happens in Chueca, Madrid) and I accepted, not because I believed in tarot cards but because I was starting to feel very self-conscious. She told me that the current hard times (she even described several of them, which was eerie) were only a process of self-discovery that would take me places. It may sound like a very generic fortune, but whoever that lady was, I wish I could find her now and buy her a drink to tell her how right she was.
