The Blind Eyes of Sandstone Brick

by Emily Humphreys (Australia)

A leap into the unknown Spain

There was a little plastic Hawaiian figurine, clad with a straw skirt and a colourful lei around her neck. The springs that stood in place of her two legs wobbled as we drove, swinging from left to right atop the dashboard of my friend, Angelica's, 2005 convertible Volkswagen. The wind rushed past my ears and I couldn’t help myself from holding a flat hand out, letting it catch the wind. I’d been sitting next to Angelica for just under an hour now. We were driving west, along the French Riviera having reunited in Nice a day before. We didn’t know each other, we didn’t know where we were going and as the sun set beneath the waveless sea with bursts of salmon and tangerine, we were realising we didn’t know where we’d be sleeping that night either. We sat in comfortable silence, enjoying the warm breath of summer along the Mediterranean coast. I’d met Angelica for only a single night, a couple of months before in Greece. It was my first night travelling alone and I’d consoled my first-day jitters with a jug of happy hour sangria. The tether that drew solo travellers together and habitual questions of identity that often followed, sparked the realisation Angelica and I shared many strangle links. Those inexplicable ties that would make you say, 'Oh! It's a small world'. She had a car and I had a dream I would stubbornly hold on to. I craved the freedom of an endless, one-way road. I had enjoyed the spontaneity of the capricious local buses, but a car was a ticket to a less weathered path. I knew there was a small beach, down a narrow dirt road somewhere calling my name. Kaleidoscope sunsets kept us company each night as we breezed along the coastline. My incoherent French had switched to a Spanish accent that caused even the kindest waitress to screw her nose. We crossed the border and waved goodbye to flaky pastries and welcomed the small, breezy white-washed towns on tomorrow's path. We’d had our problems. Yet even the rotten smell of tomato that clung to our clothes days after La Tomatina festival in Buñol, couldn’t humble the contentment I felt as we burrowed ourselves into new sands every evening. Girona, a small city in Catalonia, was more than an opportunity to dream about painting my own home a vibrant shade of apricot. It was a reprieve from the searing sun. For my straw hat, a respite from the unrelenting wind of the open roof. The cloudless sky and weekend pause drew crowds that set our car circling the concrete jungle. Our hazy summer brains had granted us enough patience to wait out a spot. We wandered into the medieval quarter of the city and across a murky brown stream: a whole world away from the cerulean waters we had become accustomed to. One of my favourite things about venturing into a place so untouched by time and not yet perverted by another franchise, was laying my hands against the walls. Cold, damp and sturdy. Stone and mortar that had stood for hundreds of years. Lanes that forged pathways between countless lives. Buildings that facilitated hundreds of hidden exchanges. If those sandstone bricks had eyes, they would tell a thousand stories. The permanence of the terracotta archways and the incomprehension of the thousands of footsteps that had walked beneath them in their long and rich life was an unknown I welcomed. It was an exercise of my imagination to fathom everything these walls had seen, secrets they had heard and the rich patchwork of life that had swept past them, however fleeting. I loved the excitement of wandering through a city I had just learned the name of. The adventure of stepping on a bus to an unchartered destination with unfamiliar people. The unknowing surrounding the personal intricacies of an old passageway or a crumbling building was not as rewarding as being satiated by their knowledge. With a quick internet search only a few finger taps away, we seldom had questions unanswered. Whether it be tomorrow's destination or yesterday’s whisper, I was learning there was beauty in leaving some things unknown.