...and her name is Christa P Whitney.
I spent a whirlwind 30 hours in Madrid this weekend (visiting my best friend from high school, for those of you who don't know her, in the last week of her junior year abroad), getting in at 8pm Friday night and leaving at 9am Monday morning. But boy, was it worth it! Saw a concert, ate churros for breakfast, danced until 7 in the morning with a silly pair of Spanish firemen, napped next to and swam in her pool, visited two museums, bought a painted fan at Europe's largest open market, split a bottle of rose lambrusco over a three-hour dinner out in the town... and these are just the highlights.
What mattered more were the lowlights, the short and long conversations that strained to fill a year's worth of our lives spent half a world away from each other; the meditative silences - never awkward, although we often are - that shade in the bold outlines of our friendship. Sunday midnight found us sitting cross-legged on a strip of grassy lawn beside the palace to listen to a couple of young musicians accompany a slight, dark-haired male soprano as he sang impressive arias like "Ave Maria" for a smattering of night owls and lovers gathered in a sloppy semicircle, seeming one cohesive audience but existing in completely different worlds. She and I both noticed his rainbow wristband and powder pink fitted t-shirt, and I wished there that Turin had a gay district. I laid my head in her lap while she took a phone call, and as she stroked my hair I marvelled at her ability to express her feelings in another language (something I've yet to achieve, being somewhat limited to simplicities like "happy," "sad," and "bored" because I haven't yet learned the Italian words for "preoccupied," "relieved," or "melancholy"), and felt hot tears well up in my eyes out of love and gratitude for her. She missed my college graduation, next spring I will miss hers, and both of us apologize over and over again for the absent places at these landmark occasions though each of us knows that the other really means it when she says that it doesn't matter, that she understands why she can't be there. "You're in EUROPE! Of course I wouldn't ask you to come back just for that." But I would if you asked me, we both say silently. I would do anything for you.
She leaves Spain on Saturday. It was important for me to see her at the end of her year in Europe and at the beginning of mine, for I saw in her sorrow at saying goodbye how short one year really is, and just how much I might gain from this time in Turin. My two little boys called my cell phone when I got off the bus from the Milan airport, asking me if everything was okay and when they would get to see me. Was I alright? Would I be home when they got back from camp? And later, when I lifted the familiar red and white checkered tablecloth into the air to settle it over their dinner table on the terrace - when I almost broke a lamp in a living room pillowfight with the youngest, laughing the whole time - when I walked home from the Turin bus stop with new eyes that had seen my other self (my anima gemella, my twin soul, my half orange) living her own life in a foreign city, no longer a visitor but a European, I knew that this was my new home.
One year will be easy-peezy!
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