Barcelona: The Return

All my Barcelona notes are going to be out of order because, well, I’m back and I just can’t manage trying to post-date all the things I noted and did, so we’ll have to backtrack together.

It’s an odd thing, the being back. It’s grey summer in San Francisco, for one, and not sunny and 72, which was the uniform forecast for every one of my ten days in Spain. Ah, San Francisco, you frigid bastard. At least the two places share a certain seasonal predictability.

The oddity is exacerbated by the full 26 hours it took to get from Barcelona to San Francisco. That seems excessive in this day and age, no? Shouldn’t there be some kind of teleportation available? Or at least a slide of some sort, maybe one of those tube slides that ends in a big swimming pool of multicolored balls. An Ikea/Chuck E. Cheese type re-entry would take the edge off the jet lag, I’d think.

Here’s the oddest thing about being back: aside from the surreal exhaustion, I’m not all that upset to be home.

And by “home” I don’t mean “in San Francisco” but “back in my apartment hanging about with R and my writing at an ungodly 5AM.” (Even after eight years I can’t bring myself to call California home. Me and the west coast are an unfortunate mismatch, like lasagna and motor oil. They both have their place but it’s probably not together.)

Re-entry used to leave me unhappy and ragged, and included the occasional crying jag on the plane or the day before in some pretty park over a light lunch. (I don’t recommend that last as a way to end your time on holiday. I can say with authority that the summery appeal of ripe cantaloupe with slivers of prosciutto is significantly undermined when one of you is sniffling about the meaning of life into her napkin.)

Partly, I was the same as everyone else: leaving vacation behind for early morning commutes and dentist appointments is no pleasure. But my displeasure was magnified because I was coming back to San Francisco, a city I can’t seem to like, and because I was returning to a series of jobs that held no permanent grip on my interest.

Flying into SFO felt like I was being suffocated: I’d moved to a place where I couldn’t take any air into my lungs without taking everything I’d never aspired to with it. Like the belief that you’re entitled to have your own garage when you live in a city, that being laid back is a virtue, that BART’s nine stations in the city limits count as a subway system, that it’s OK for a driver to stop dead in traffic when she’s missed her turn, that a city without at least one world class theater counts as having a significant cultural profile, that garlic ice cream is not an affront to garlic and ice cream. And on and on and on.

I felt like I’d accidentally moved to a small town, with all its silent bourgeois expectations and pressures, after swearing I’d never live in one again. It made me not a little ill.

Now it’s different. To a large extent, I’ve given up on San Francisco. It is what it is. It’s always going to be provincial and think that it’s not, and I’m never going to love its hippie soul or its yuppie reality. That’s OK. As long as I can write here and be with R, everything’s all right.

The writing makes the material, surprising difference. When I lived in New York and wasn’t writing for a living, at least I was where I felt I belonged and was supported by a striving environment. Not so here. When I was part of the Silicon Valley machine, I was afraid that the sheer volume of days spent in a city so uninterested in what makes me who I am, so unlike who I am, pretending to be someone I am not, might actually add up to my being someone I am not.

Now that I’m writing, that anxiety has dissipated. I’m here at my desk in the unwelcome grey, surrounded by unopened mail, illegally imported cheese, and customs forms fixated on swine flu, and I’m not devastated. In fact, I’m glad to be back and writing. Excellent news all around, yeah?

(Especially about the cheese. Because that could have meant jail time. Which would have meant limited access to cheese. And nobody wins there.)