“My heart gets dizzy. It is the most difficult photograph I have tried to take so far: up the scaffolding, hand over hand and out onto the pinnacles, her hair like a sail, leaning out over the tiny city, its clockwork shadows so crazily far below. She kisses him on the shoulder in the Moorish custom. They look at one another. They look into the light. They jump. There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge. I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth: would you cross that bridge if you came to it?”
— Anne Carson (1950- )
Plainwater
Málaga, May 20th 2025
Hotel Molina Lario
For the second trip in as many months, I'm trying to journal contemporaneously. It's a practice I used to have in my younger years of travel, when the days felt longer, the photography more simple, the experience less about describing and more about feeling the place. Back in the days of flip-phone, notebook, paper. My worst fears haven't materialized yet; I haven't buried myself tip-tap typing on my smartphone and forgotten to look up. Rather, I find that writing them out allows me to organize my thoughts, to reflect more deeply and vividly about what is happening in my life and my surroundings, to consider why I'm here.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm here. I'm checked into my fifth-floor hotel room (coincidentally room 520, as in the date today) in the old city center of Málaga, just a few feet down the street from the main entrance of the enormous, Renaissance-era cathedral that stands prominent against the city skyline. Waiting to meet up with Lindsey and Elyse (my co-fellows and friends, whom I last saw 1.5 years and 3 months ago respectively). They’re freshening up upstairs. It's early Tuesday evening in Spain, after a hellish eighteen hours of travel (since mid-afternoon EST yesterday) involving a tarmac collision between a luggage trolley and the starboard engine of our fully boarded Airbus red-eye flight to Paris; a confusing de-planing process (flight full of Bostonians in crisis mode with a crew yelling instructions in French or incredibly-accented English); and a hastily rebooked same-day flight two hours later through Switzerland. Leaving behind the crowd of panicking passengers clamoring for customer service, I was able to walk fifty feet down the terminal and sit down at my new departure gate, thanks to remote support from Mission Control (Jane on her laptop at home, Jordan rambling about trains and trash trucks in the background). Never a great plane sleeper, I had a brief snooze in the Zurich Airport earlier this morning, but my eyes still feel like lead weights.
My favorite moment of the day (so far) has been the brief commuter-train ride from the airport into the city center. In the sleep-deprived, vaguely awestruck calm that I associate nostalgically with being post-call during residency, I gazed out the train windows. Senses heightened and extra-attuned to look for beauty amidst the chaos (of sleep deprivation), I took in a bizarrely familiar landscape - sun-soaked chaparral, coastal plain, urban sprawl - paired with the equally bizarre experience of being in a new place for the first time. I'm comfortable being surrounded by Spanish, but the accents here are different. The people are more stately, more collected, more vaguely European than the bus and train compatriots I rode with in Mexico. The sights and smells are different, and the sounds of the city that waft through my window from the street below are intoxicating. It's a pheromonic experience, being in a new country. I hear bells pealing around the corner. From my room window, a view tucked between buildings, and a faint glimmer of the Atlantic Ocean not too far away, beyond what looks like a port and a cruise ship terminal. Truly, the region lives up to its name, the famous Costa del Sol.
Back to why I'm here. Lindsey orchestrated this one, technically. I suppose I play the part of the willing accomplice. It's a birthday trip for her, or a rather special vacation; one is unsure of the preferred nomenclature. She and Elyse have been here since the weekend; I'll overlap with Elyse just this evening; and Lindsey and I will continue gallivanting through Andalucía for the better part of this week and next week, joined by her parents partway through in Seville. So it's a family thing, or a friend thing, or a celebratory thing, or a thing that can't be bothered with definition. Se acostumbra a eso (lack of definition) after awhile. Downstairs at check-in, I tried carrying on with the receptionist in Spanish, but he quickly and politely guided us into English. I imagine I'll get used to this over the coming days. Thank you but no, you can stop that please. One trusts that effort and intention count on some level.
I’m certainly feeling mixed about being away from home, missing another week-plus with wife and boy. I miss them already. And yet, I know I need to be here this week. Jane and I have been talking about this a lot. When I say ‘this’, I am gesticulating broadly, through the screen, at just about everything in my general vicinity. We have been on a bit of a journey in recent months, sometimes individually, sometimes together, to more carefully define or re-define what ‘this’ all means: how we relate to each other, how we live, what we build, what we ask of each other. I’m still struggling to be vulnerable and authentic in my primary relationship (cloaked as it is in the structures and mores of 17 years of long-term life-building), but I am grateful that at least we’ve been able to have conversations about the big picture. For now, the big picture means trying to recapture some of our individuality amidst the rigors of co-parenting, co-living, co-financing, co-careering, so forth. It means recognizing that our priorities have evolved, will continue to evolve, over the years and decades, and we can choose whether and how to support each other through the evolution. The alternative is to remain an amorphous married blob. Amorphous married blob is comfortable, but it is not love. It feels nice, this year, to be making choices about love with some intentionality, rather than stumbling through life with a restless soul and my heart exposed. I’d gotten quite used to the latter. “I wear my heart on my sleeve; I keep my sleeve to myself,” I believe I wrote in an essay in 2020.
I'm showered, in clean (non-airport) clothes, fully recumbent. I message Lindsey to let her know that I'm going to close my eyes before we go out, and to wake me up if I don't respond to texts. That's just in case, though. Tired though I am (and sincerely looking forward to crashing later tonight), I know I won’t fall asleep yet. I'm too excited to see this place, maybe get a sense of what I've been missing.
“But I could not sleep that night and I got up and sat in a chair and looked out of the window and I could see the square in the moonlight where the lines had been and across the square the trees shining in the moonlight, and the darkness of their shadows, and the benches bright too in the moonlight, and the scattered bottles shining, and beyond the edge of the cliff where they had all been thrown. And there was no sound but the splashing of the water in the fountain and I sat there and I thought we have begun badly.”
— Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Ronda, May 21st 2025
Poolside, Parador de Ronda
Costa del Sol indeed. An impressively balmy, cloudless afternoon here in Ronda. I'm drying off in the sun after taking a few laps in the little outdoor hotel pool, situated a hundred feet away from the drop into El Tajo, the breathtaking gorge of the Guadalevín River. To our south, the land opens into an idyllic landscape: rolling hills, olive plantations, orange trees. Farms, villages, the expected steeples in all the right places. The sierra beyond, blue in the distance, rugged but peaceful. The perfect backdrop. It has been a little while since I had a good swim. The hotel pool is so cold that it takes my breath away each time I push off the wall. I'm reminded of our old family home in California, summer hours spent floating in the round, overly-designed concrete pool, the centerpiece of an award-winning backyard (indeed, there was a local garden association plaque that hung on the downstairs corridor between the living room and the garage). Dodging decaying plant matter and drowning bees, sitting on the hot brick tiles at the water's edge, shivering in the full-blown faux-Mediterranean sun.
It's quiet here by the pool, even though the tourist throng is still clearing up on the Puente Nuevo just beyond the hotel yard, around the corner. Ronda is a beautiful, picturesque town of white-washed houses built into the terraces and cliffs on either side of El Tajo, the Old Town on one side, the new district on the other. It was Lindsey's idea to come here, and I tell her it was a great choice. I love places like this, where you can wander the streets, stare into an abyss, and tell with a glance the stories that people have been living with for generations. I imagine the farming communities in the valley beyond, a sequence of Roman and then Visigothic and then Moorish and then Castilian settlers, building ever upward and closer to the gorge, carving their planked walkways into the cliffside to draw water from the river below, their houses finally hopping across the chasm altogether. First the little old Roman-era stone bridge upriver from here, then a bigger bridge, then finally the biggest bridge of all, a 250-year-old, double-span arch over the top of the cliffs (to replace a hastily-built single-arch bridge that collapsed as quickly as it came up in 1741, killing fifty). We have a terrific place for the night, with what might be the best view in the entire city: a big corner room in the Parador de Ronda, with two balconies, one looking onto the Puente Nuevo, and the other facing toward the mountains. The hotel itself, situated in the town square next to the bridge, used to be the local ayuntamiento (city hall). On our two-hour ride through the region from Málaga, the train-car mostly empty on this mid-week regional route, I tell Lindsey about Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War; his part-historical retelling of fascist leaders and local landowners cornered by a leftist mob in the ayuntamiento; how they were marched from the building, summarily executed by beating, and thrown one-by-one off the cliff edge. A charming and romantic place to spend the night. Unbeatable views, with a faint lingering trace of violent revolution.
After our night in Málaga (wine, tapas and gelato with Elyse; a few pleasant hours catching up on life while the two of them showed me around the city center and its blooming jacaranda trees), Lindsey and I woke early this morning to catch our train, grabbing croissants and coffee at the station. After arriving in Ronda and checking in before noon, we spent the mid-day having a light lunch on a terrace patio beside the bridge, strolling around the Old Town, and walking the switchbacks down to the mouth of the gorge - for the views from below. It’s been more than a fine day, as any day would be that involves drinking ajo blanco and tinto, wearing hard hats, and wandering medieval cobblestone streets. After a few hours melding our bodies into the lounge chairs by the pool, we’ll have dinner in the hotel and (I presume) take a look-around at sunset. Even in full sun, I’m freezing in my wet swimwear. I might head up to our room to shower and close my eyes for a few minutes. Jet lag caught me hard last night; my body went to bed at 10 PM, took a nap, and snapped fully awake at midnight. Tired as I am, I’m in my happy place here, basking and writing and enjoying Lindsey’s companionate silence. I think I wrote something relatively recently about desirable qualities in a travel partner, but it seems inane to repeat them here, so I won’t.
Speaking of desirable qualities, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the general notion (at least as far as Other People are concerned) and have decided I know very little about what I consider desirable. There are minimum requirements, yes. Peace with self, a desire to do good, ability to hold and share emotion. Beyond that? A great blue pale, very little direction. No map or astrolabe or compass. I feel like an empty vessel, a ship awaiting ballast and sail. “I’m a soul in wonder,” sings Van Morrison; one is tempted to reproduce the lyrics to “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart” in their entirety. Words do feel inadequate, sometimes. So I just bask in the sun, mostly in silence.
