Above Ground 005: Uniting the Everything and Me

The fifth in a long series of simple events with grand consequences.

31 October 2019 Madrid, Spain 11:34 a.m.

Last night, emotions swarmed me like mosquitoes on a humid day in Western Indiana, perhaps while sitting near a pond without a shirt on, wiping sweat from my brow. They were all good, warm emotions, like the jolt of reality slapping you in the face, except the reality turns out to be better than you could’ve ever imagined, like a good dream turning tangible without any prior warning.

I’ve never thought of myself as sociable or friendly. Sure, I have close friends, and sure, I can have conversations with people. But connecting with others and meeting them in the first place has always been tiring, difficult. The eve of Halloween 2019 proved otherwise. It also proved that when one drops those boundaries built up around one’s soul, or when they are forcibly knocked down by some beautiful and timely stroke of luck, then one is capable of the happiest of coincidences occurring again and again. That god or the universe will send what you need as long as you are willing to accept it.

It was my last day in Madrid –I was happy, excited, but still on edge, as I always was, due to my lack of much money. But I ate my cheap Spanish Tim Horton’s breakfast, downed an American-style coffee (properly watered down) and felt revived–like all would be okay in the end, or at least much better than before– and I swaggered with the air of someone completely in and out of control of his own destiny, just as it should manically be, down a rolling cobblestone avenue guarded by majestic 17th-century housing that had nothing but everything to do with me, looking for any café that was ambient but not pretentious where I could drink three or four coffees cheap and get the day’s work out of the way, so I could see whatever I hadn’t seen in the city thus far––which I couldn’t even begin to pinpoint––so I’d probably end up wandering streets and parks and observing like I always did in a new city.

But the Everything had other plans.

Your stupid little human plans aren’t ever set in stone like you enjoy constructing them in your head.

And I guess the beauty of what I was doing, in my (at this point) brief foray into freelance writing, was trading financial comfort for personal freedom. All I needed was enough money to sustain myself and I would be alright. As long as I kept my freedom. As long as I retained the ability to meet a few people on the streets and decide to spend my day with them, accruing experiences, rather than sitting in front of a coffee and a screen to write a blog.

Let me say this: my mental state at this point was joyously unstable. I was the flipside of mentally ill. An erratic vagabond self philosopher with no need to justify a thing to anyone, intuitively looking outside for addendums to the answers that I’d found within. A man in search of whatever and whoever to answer whyever. And it was going to find me –this morning was the very point I’d finally realized it, and little did I know that it would find me very soon.

So it was then, when I was looking for a café with my old school apple headphones in, cables bouncing around on my chest, mouthing the words to Your Fine Petting Duck by Devendra Banhart, that the universe spoke to me in the raspy Spanish of a young woman, only barely audible over the music playing straight into my ear. Despite not knowing a lick of Spanish (I’m only conversational in German, outside of my standard American English with a bit of Middle America trying to fight through in the form of a few bland unoriginal “colloquialisms,” like “oh yer fine,” “‘preciate ya”, or “how yuh guys doin?”), I later learned that the voice said this:

Hi, do you know any places nearby to eat tapas?

I pulled the left earbud out of my ear, the only one that worked, and looked to my left. A sprightly, assured girl holding a cigarette, with short bobbed reddish-orange hair and olive skin, looked up at me with a smile.

“Sorry, uh, no hablo español,” I said with a nervous chuckle.

Oh thank God, you speak fucking English! We’re just looking for tapas.

She looked back at her two friends and grinned, a smart-looking dark-haired girl and a bespectacled intellectual-looking gypsy with swung back jet black hair and baggy clothes, a rolled smoke in his hand that matched Luca’s. That was her name, I would learn. And her two friends, Agatha and Meeshi. They’d come to enter my life.

“Well, I’m not sure.” I looked around and waved my arm. “All around, I suppose.” The avenue was lined with cafés and their hanging iron signs, dining rooms so small that it was nearly comical, which made them emanate a sense of coolness and confidence that spilled over to the people sitting inside and out. It was early, and most weren’t open.

Aha, we figured, but most of them seem closed.

Seeing that this was the point where they could leave, and feeling some kind of magnetic energy drawing me toward them––three friends on the streets of Madrid at 7:30 in the morning browsing the area for tapas, not looking rich or pretentious but laid back, care-free, and rather poor like me in my days-old linen pants and white tee––I jumped on the opportunity to get to know them.

“Where are you from? I can’t tell if your accent’s native or not.”

We’re from Budapest. A.k.a the greatest city in Europe. Luca said with all seriousness.

The others laughed. Meeshi spoke up for the first time:

We’re from Hungary, and we’re quite hungry.

The classic joke for English speakers when talking about Hungary. He said it tongue-in-cheek, of course, so it was funny paired with its cultural self-awareness. He had a stronger accent than the others, but spoke beautiful, lilting English, as I’d come to find out in our many conversations on his roof overlooking Budapest about life and god and the world.

“Well, let’s look for a place. I was just looking for a café and have a bit of time to grab a coffee. Would you care if I joined you all?”

It took everything I had in me to ask them if I could join. But the question was received better than I expected. Not only did they say yes, but they seemed thrilled that I’d offered to join them.

Yes! Of course. Come along! they all chimed in.

“Okay! Great. I saw this place a few days ago.”

I pointed at a sign, off-white gold and black hanging in front of a small door and a windowsill with a table and four chairs visible. We walked toward it and traded talk of why we were there. Traveling, of course. But Luca came to Madrid often, spoke 5 languages, and it was her favorite city. So she needed to bring her two best friends there to show them.

That encounter changed the next 3 months of my life, and truly, my life forever. It was simple, yes. But that simple encounter broke down the rapidly crumbling barrier separating the Everything and me. Soon, I’d become close enough to the Everything to touch it, able to smile as my mind played its tricks on me.

We drank several espressos at the only open café in the neighborhood and talked until eleven.