In the fall of 2019 I lived in Villalba, a western suburb of Madrid, with two Bulgarian women and an 11 year old boy. There wasn’t much to love about Villalba except for a park called El Coto de las Suertes that included the Manzanares river and had an entrance right behind my apartment building (one of the main reasons I said yes to that apartment situation). I wrote this piece last October, while I was still finding my bearings again in Spain and spending most of my free time wandering around this park. The piece itself is quite wandering.
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When I was in high school I pulled out a clean sheet of lined paper, wrote Things I Like at the top, and then attempted to write an exhaustive list of Things I Like. The list covered the entire front and back and then went onto a second sheet of paper. I wish I could reference specific items from the list right now, but it’s tucked away in a closet at my parents’ house. If I were to write a list of things I like in October 2019, I would first title it Things I’m Obsessed With and it would include the following:
sitting on a river rock and eating a bag of potato chips and drinking a tall can of beer for dinner
getting home from school and immediately eating sour slices of granny smith apples slathered with crunchy peanut butter in bed
the breakfast for teachers at my school, which includes make-your-own freshly squeezed orange juice with a highly efficient and borderline dangerous to operate-on-your-own juicing machine
I put all the food stuff first because it’s like the second tier of my obsessions. Here are the first tier, top shelf obsessions:
the dark navy color of the world when I first leave the apartment early in the morning and press play on the first song of the day for my walk to the bus stop
pants that fit perfectly—of which I have none
river rocks that have circular bowls carved out of them by river water
getting into bed at night and getting very warm and reading until I fall asleep
the failed fence that runs through the park
This brings me to the point of whatever this is. A personal essay, let’s say. The failed fence in the park. When people hear I am going to live in Spain they ask a series of questions, it goes like this: 1) Wow do you even speak Spanish? 2) Wow do you even know anyone there? I can’t remember the third question, maybe there’s not a third question. In response to question #2 I say “no” and then the person is like, wow, I would be so lonely. I feel confident that everyone I have this conversation with would make friends here much faster than I do and would be far less lonely than I am.
In terms of human company, I am lonely here and most places I go, and this is where my obsessions come into play. I can enjoy just about any place on my own because of the way I can notice something, even the tiniest thing, and then laser-focus my attention on that thing, often for sustained periods of time. Who said that attention is devotion? Mary Oliver I think. RIP. I just looked it up, the exact quote is: Attention is the beginning of devotion. (Here I would like to note that I’m obsessed with her poem titled “The Whistler.”)
I came across Oliver’s quote during the summer of 2018. I guess I could call it my Summer of Love because I was obsessed with love, with figuring out exactly what love is and how to properly love someone. In the spirit of my high school Things I Like list, I made a Google doc called Things To Think About, which is just a compilation of quotes about love from all the books about love I read during my Summer of Love. It was a complicated summer and then I moved to Spain where romance bittersweetly became the least of my concerns.
Anyway, there are a few nice quotes about attention in my Things To Think About document, particularly this lil zinger from J.D. McClatchy: Love is the quality of attention we pay to things. The quality of attention I pay to the things I’m obsessed with is phenomenal and therefore drenches my life in love. So, to answer everyone’s question #2 more completely, no, I don’t have any friends here, but I’m getting by because of the attention I’m paying to a failed fence.
Last year it was a river, the Genil River in Écija. My obsession with—devotion to—love of—that river carried me through all of my lowest and most lonely periods during the eight months I lived there. My obsessions are characterized by a combination of fascination, adoration, the ability to return to that thing and the desire to spend time with it on a daily basis, and a lack of understanding of what specifically draws me to the thing. Usually that understanding only unfolds very slowly over time, and usually it has nothing to do with the thing itself and everything to do with the headspace I’m afforded when I spend time with the thing. The river, for example, was one of the very few places I felt a sense of home, where I could be myself. But that wasn’t obvious at first. It was a river with dirty water, a river I never wanted to swim in.
So, back to the failed fence. One of my favorite aspects of the fence is how successfully it fails to function as a fence. I have been obsessed with failure ever since eighth grade, when I gave a speech to my school about the value of failure. My speech was mostly inspired by being a member of three school sports teams that lost just about every single game. As a perfectionist, I have to be obsessed with failure. It’s like that saying, hold your friends close but your enemies closer. I wanted to write my eighth grade speech about the value of humor but I was too afraid I’d fail to make it funny. Turns out that everyone thought my speech on failure was hilarious, so ironically, it was a huge success on multiple levels.
Fences are typically meant to keep things out or hold things in. The failed fence fails, of course, to do either of those things. The failed fence fails because most of its length is trampled, ripped down, wound up, or otherwise ruined. I like to walk along the fence, first on one side, then right on top of it, then on the other side, weaving back and forth. The fence runs through a large natural park area. On the far side of the fence is the river, sand, rocks, some plants, a few trees, and on the other side is not a river but more sand, rocks, plants, trees. Thus, I imagine the fence was originally meant to keep people from the river. Now the fence is merely a suggestion, but still—it lends the river an illicit energy.
I like to imagine that the moment the fence was erected a mob of people passionate about rivers and river access trampled it in a furious stampede. In some places the fence reminds me of the nests deer make in long grass. In some places it is like the swirl of a cowlick on the back of someone’s head. In other places the fence is a black scribble against the flat blue paper of the sky. And there is a part where the mob of people passionate about rivers and river access let loose a bit of humor: instead of tearing the fence down, they raised it up high, so high that anyone could stroll right underneath.
On one side of the fence I’m where I’m allowed to be and in one step I am on the side of the fence that I’m supposed to be fenced off from. The air transforms in this one step. It becomes abuzz with that illicit energy. Immediately I feel wild. I do things like hike up my skirt and piss on rocks, and other things, like dancing or reading. I haven’t sung yet but it’s not out of the question. Sometimes I eat an orange. Just beyond the river are train tracks. I can listen to the trains coming and going and I can imagine myself coming and going as well. But I remain riverside and practice whistling while I cup my hands in the cool running water.
In my mind I try to scale up the failed fence concept. Failed fences worldwide. Borders torn down and trampled. If only Trump’s fucked up wall were as flimsy as the fence in El Coto de las Suertes. I remember being at the border in Big Bend National Park, where the “border” is just a river, the Rio Grande. Humans can cross, horses can cross, humans can cross on horses, and countless other creatures regularly cross from one shore to the other, from one “country” to the next. In a physical sense, it’s a failed fence, but the seemingly invisible (yet very real) hand of “homeland security” looms large. I swam across the Rio Grande but did not step out of the water on the opposite shore. Crossing the fence to the riverside, crossing the river to the other side, I dream of worldwide fence failure that dissolves the sides.
Whereas borders are constructed as unquestionably right… boundaries are what is right at the time, for particular people, involved in a particular situation.... Whereas borders claim the unquestionable and rigid authority of law, boundaries have a fluidity, an openness to change; more a riverbank, less a stone canal. Borders demand respect, boundaries invite it. Borders divide desirables from undesirables, boundaries respect the diversity of desires.
—James Heckert quoted in Esther Perel’s The State of Affairs
✽ Six Things
Corner Office is releasing our third publication this Thursday, October 29 at 7pm EST! You can join our virtual release party by clicking this link at 7pm. issue 03: romance will be available to download as a PDF and to purchase as a physical book. The PDF is free/donation-based. All proceeds from digital and physical sales of issue 03 will be directed to Side by Side. Side by Side is dedicated to creating supportive communities where Virginia’s LGBTQ+ youth can define themselves, belong, and flourish.
Donate to the #FreeThemAllVA fund to help folks at the ICA-Farmville detention center with immediate food and medical care upon release, as well as other immediate needs such as phone bills and transportation, partial bond fees, accommodations to be able to quarantine for two weeks after release, and commissary contributions.
Sometimes I fantasize about being a hacker but I think I’ll always be held back by my lack of understanding of digital technology. As an alternative, I subscribed to this newsletter called The Dork Web (lol) which covers technology and internet subcultures. The most recent issue is about solarpunk, which was pretty cool to learn about.
Yaby gallery in Madrid has an accompanying journal called AH, and they semi-recently published the second issue. You can read it here in English and/or Castellano.
A dance party playlist care of UN/TUCK x T4T LUV NRG.
Be aware of the rare full blue moon on Halloween! Eek.
✽ Late October Mood
Faye Wei Wei, I Did Not Know You Would Fade So Soon, Oh Flower, 2018, oil on canvas
Thank you so much for reading ❦ Love, Ava