1.22.26

Hi Noah,

I’m not going to answer your request but instead I’ll just tell you a little bit about what’s going on here in Spain. Over the winter break my friend Ben and I travelled to France, Switzerland and Germany, drinking beers and doing crosswords and making friends with beautiful Australian women. One of the women said she liked my skullet and besides 15 men in the german club the night before, it was the only compliment I received on my haircut the whole two weeks I had it. What she actually said was, “You look like a bogan… but it really isn’t bad.” But I took it to mean, “Please, have me.”

We got back on New Year’s Eve and as has been the case when I’ve returned from any trip, I spend the next three or so days recovering in a depressive stupor, sleeping fifteen hours a day and watching a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I had to postpone the depressive stupor by one day because my roommates were going out to Murcia for a New Year’s party in a bar and there was going to be a girl there who I had been dying to talk to. I thought it might even be possible to kiss at midnight except I learned that they don’t really do that here because right as the clock strikes twelve they stuff their face full of twelve grapes. Instead of kissing, you get to choke on twelve grapes. It’s so fun. But after I muscled mine down, I figured it didn’t hurt to shoot some kind of shot with Emily, another English teacher from Chicago, so I asked if she wanted to go on a date. She said yes.

Three weeks later and the date hasn’t happened yet. She went to visit a friend in Cartagena for a while, then Dom came to visit me for a while and we went to Morocco and Madrid where I had the worst fever I’ve had in years. Being in a Moroccan hotel with nothing but a water bottle, a dead phone with no charger, and a contentious friend telling me I’m hogging the blankets is not a fun time. I was hogging the blankets, but that’s only because my body was both 103 degrees and freezing.

Dom left and I’m back in Orihuela. Emily left on another trip, and as soon as she gets back, I’m going to Valencia. So who knows if this date will ever happen. It might be another month before we find a time, and a month after that I’m probably leaving the program a month early to come home because I’m tired of being here. 

But things have slowed down here. The hemorrhoids I had are gone, the fever has broken, and the sun even came out for a little bit yesterday. I’m so grateful to be back in my apartment with nothing to do and with all my health and wits about me. It’s felt like weeks since I’ve taken a deep breath––between three countries over Christmas, Morocco the week after New Years, and Madrid the week after that, I’ve finally been able to come home and eat a carrot. Vegetables are hard to find in this country, so I can’t stress enough the relief I felt when my teeth snapped that fibrous root right in half. 

In other news, Ben asked out his co-teacher at the risk of ruining the rest of the school year, and a different married colleague of his shook ass on him at their Christmas party. Camila told some of the group that she wants to break up with her long distance boyfriend who we all met and hated, and now she has a ‘friend’ (male) staying with her ‘indefinitely.’ Kellen is making the most of his open relationship by spanning the Iberian peninsula with hookups and now has connections in Cartagena, Madrid, Valencia, Granada, and of course Murcia. Molly has a gorgeous Panamanian fucktoy who randomly comes over but who can’t hang out with us if the activity involves spending more than 3 euros because he literally has no money. These are the friends. 

I asked Molly if they thought Stevie Wonder was truly blind or if it was a sham, and they responded with some Portlandian wokeisms about why is it so unbelievable that disabled people can accomplish great things and they have blind people in their life who would be offended by that question and do we have to diminish black excellence, etc. I said I thought he was truly blind but I thought it would be an interesting question. I was right.

Kellen unfortunately got me into Fortnite because his Switch is plugged into the TV with no games besides that one, and every day when we get home from school, he facetimes his boyfriend on the couch who is waking up at 5:30 in the morning in California before work to join duos. Kellen’s boyfriend, whose name is also Luke, is incredibly fun and visited in December and has raised my standard of love. If they’re not getting up at 5:30am to play Fortnite with me, do they even like me?

I still haven’t figured out how to grocery shop or eat in this country yet. Foods and stores are very different here and it’s not helpful that even in familiar environments in the USA I was lacking in culinary skills. Basically, without a Trader Joe’s, my intestines run the risk of disintegrating either from lack of use or from carcinogens. I.e., I cook very little and eat a lot of packs of oreos. Last month I found out I have hemorrhoids so I’ve paused on the oreos and have been eating a lot of––yes, you guessed it––raw carrots. The shits don’t hurt as much anymore but the texture is something interesting.

I’ll tell you one last thing: every morning I ride my bike to school at 7:30 when it’s dark and arrive at 8 while the sun is peeking over the mountains encircling the Vega Baja. It’s cold and windy and sometimes raining but I absolutely love the feeling of riding in the fields of artichokes, cabbages, mint and other produce. I ride through the dirt paths and get to watch first light spray the sky from behind Cruz de la Muela, and even though I’m both freezing cold and sweating underneath my three layers, mittens, scarf, beanie, and helmet, I feel alive. Solitary in the farmland, looking up at the beautiful colors just erupted,  in this city that I never knew existed before, in this country I never wanted to go to, in this continent that lacks natural predators and firearms yet for some reason still finds health care to be a necessity––in fact, a right, they say––on this planet I didn’t choose to be born into, I feel alive. Somehow I’m alive and that’s so so good, my friend. It’s so good.

Love you a lot,

Luke