The Search for Life

by Addy Pratt (Spain)

I didn't expect to find Spain

I can’t remember the sound of broken glass shattering in the pubs, clubs and bars of Granada. Echoic memory is replayed and stored in your mind for about three to four seconds, so what I remember is that I heard it, and that it helped. It made me feel less alone and quieted my recently acquired fear of unexpected disaster with the proof that life surrounded me. In the midst of my attempt to process a sudden death just two months before, students (one-third of the city’s 240,000 residents) and mass-goers and vagabond musicians and celebrators of Franco’s birthday dropped drinks all over the city. I didn’t expect to find comfort in their sound. If you leave the house or the stools (precariously perched on cobblestone) of the pregame tapas bar before once y media, you might as well drive a star-spangled pickup to the disco. Not that you’d fit through the 14th century alleyways. Nighttime shows the best of Granada. Ancient and alive. The Alhambra (the last Muslim holdout in Spain) glowed against the mountains, and iron light posts make an empty canal appear romantic, but I barely took a single photo. I kept the memories of sounds. Glasses shattered when Granadinos (literally translated to pomegranates) moved. The elbow off the corner of a black-lacquered bar, the unsuccessful handoff of a pint dripping in condensation and overflowing with foam, the song that makes everybody jump up a little too quickly. It’s all evidence of how astounding it is that we live in and through and past these small accidents despite the frequency of disaster. Sometimes disaster is the heart attack that takes half your parents out of existence when you assumed you’d have time to determine if a relationship was salvageable. He’d lived in a different house for nine years, a different country for three. It occurred to me so many times, the thought you never expect to come true: that what if he died right now, and we were left with this non-relationship, where the only contact was when I made sure he paid at least some child support? I found out. My mom didn’t know how I’d act after a cardiac arrest that Portland July turned me into Girl-With-a-Dead-Dad less than two months before my study abroad departure. “This is a big deal’’ she said. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. People would und-” “No. I’m going. I’ve been planning this trip since I was six. This won’t stop me.” I meant it. That part of my life wouldn't ruin another. Her brows pinched like my shoulder blades. I realized when I started adapting to a Spanish social schedule that what I wanted was reassurance. I wanted to find something that told me, in my apprehensive state, that good things do happen, though the bad seemed more obvious. It was buried in the white noise of night life, the echoic memory of glass meeting ground. I realized I was searching for life. I found it in Granada. Some of us get to stay. We get to order three beers and drop the fourth. We add a sticky layer and walk on. I thrived in those moments when noise reassured me. It alerted me to the existence of life concentrated on and around the city’s narrow streets. At my loneliest in Granada, I was grateful that someone was awake to keep me company, even if they didn’t know that’s what they were doing. Strangers I couldn’t see as I passed them from zig-zagging lanes, through the anarchist vegan graffiti and windows of suspiciously inexpensive suitcases. They flirted and danced and sang and swung doors open and slipped off curbs worn slick by millions of visiting soles. They made nights less lonely than days. Gray smudges mark the white rubber of my black Converse. They make me think me of the busy bars and discos of Granada, and my desire to keep moving, finding more proof of life around the world. A nomad in high tops. They call to mind bits of breath and smashing glass that compel me to walk on. There may be disaster ahead. But then, maybe not.