Has it really been four months since I walked away from you without looking back? That wasn't the hard part; the hard part was I know what I would have seen if I had turned my head. I didn't need the actuality of it; that would have hurt more than the bruises that took weeks to fade, the sunburn that turned into seemingly permanent tan lines, the dulling but still present hope that maybe today will be the day it all makes sense. Four months is nothing, so insignificant I couldn't possibly deign to call it an era, but when I look back at it now, it's been no less than a lifetime of shoddy redemption, a Mobius strip of the sorts of mistakes parents hoped they'd made well enough for their children to avoid. And the most heartbreaking part about all of it, now, at least, is that I haven't changed at all. Strangely, my life on paper is so drastically different that it pains me to realize I'm exactly the same person I was before I met you. I guess that's something to be grateful for, though I will admit wholeheartedly and with a certain amount of self-deprecating glee that I lost myself for a minute there.
Let's just get this over with.
I am ashamed of the person that I was prior to, during, and post Spain. That's why it's so hard for me to talk about it. I haven't felt genuine shame in a long time; I've always had someone to pawn it off on, a confessional of sorts to store away my deepest secrets. I had Sanam, to whom I told everything, from whom I gained humor; I had Aaron, to whom I told a lot of things, from whom I gained morality; I had Euliza and Katie and Deanna, to whom I told very little (in hindsight; it felt like a lot at the time), from whom I gained a sense of what it's like to live life with no judgment. When I am able to spread around the things that keep me up at night, when I'm able to place onto somebody else's shoulders the memories that make me cringe, it's like it's not a part of me anymore. I haven't been able to do that with Spain. I don't have Sanam anymore, and haven't for awhile. I gave up Aaron to have Spain. I needed to blame Spain on somebody, so I blamed it on Euliza and Katie and Deanna for not judging me, for not giving me perspective, for not saying, "Wait a minute, this might not be the greatest idea."
This explains why I've given up everything these past few months. Katie and Deanna are part of the past; Euliza and I talk every now and then; Aaron had nothing to do with Spain, and that was excellent planning on my part, really, truly, that he never found out the real reason I went to Spain. Nobody got hurt except me. Well, that's not true at all, but the one person who stood to get truly destroyed, the one person who didn't deserve it, not from me, not like this, escaped unscathed.
The days before I left for Spain, after I had bought my ticket, were odd. I had quit smoking and I had quit eating and I wasn't sleeping all that much either. I was surviving on about 500 calories and three hours of sleep a day. I was running at least two miles every day. There is one (truly horrible) picture of me from that era, and I look like a fucking wreck, all skeletal with crazy eyes. Size zero clothes were falling off of me. It was like that part in Bridget Jones when she's finally reached her goal weight and her friends tells her she looked better thicker--that's a truth that I now realize. I'm not very attractive when I'm that thin, mostly because of what it takes for me to get that thin. Anyway, I was a fucking wreck when I got on my first flight.
In order to get to Spain, I had to get to the airport at 5am. I'd had my girlfriends over the night before -- my amazing, my beloved, my sainted girlfriends to whom I no longer speak, who fell over themselves to help me get to Spain, who took care of my dog while I was gone -- and I stayed up all night while they fell asleep watching Breakfast at Tiffany's or something. Euliza dropped me off at the airport and went into work early to do some homework (she's in grad school now, good on her). I checked my bag (SPOILER ALERT: that's the last I would see of it for a month) and settled in for the twenty hour journey.
In order to get to the Alicante airport in Spain, I had to travel from Santa Barbara to Denver, from Denver to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Madrid, and from Madrid to Alicante. In order to justify the effort, and in order to reward myself for quitting smoking (which I did knowing I could never go twenty hours without a cigarette had I not gone through withdrawal already), I bought myself a first class ticket. Those are running about $6000 these days, for that sort of travel, if you were wondering. Johnny insisted on paying; I refused to let him.
Let me just take a moment here to say how much I love my mom. I lied to her about how much the ticket was going to cost, and when the truth inevitably came out (and she was able to assuage her guilt regarding her encouraging me to go and my subsequent heartbreak with the lawyer-esque logic that she did not have all the facts), she told me that she had made much more expensive mistakes. Because that's what it was. A really expensive mistake.
Anyway, so I don't know if I could ever fly internationally without flying first class because, seriously, guys, it's the way to go. I was able to justify it because I wouldn't be paying for anything once I got there, and a week-long trip to Europe can run into the thousands of dollars when you count the food and lodging and all that, but anyway, first class is fucking awesome. I popped some Xanax; I ate some digestible airplane food; I drank a good bit of champagne at the beginning and Bailey's at the end; twenty hours later, I was standing in front of the baggage claim, on the phone with Johnny, telling him to come pick me up. Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of the lost baggage claim area, on the phone with Johnny, telling him I would be a few minutes because my luggage was lost.