When crying happens

(Not when you think it should)

The Journey to Malaga

When the thing that should have made you cry has passed, and that small thing, say, a broken nail or a faulty switch on free headphones, happens, is when a bubbling arises. Or two friends you haven’t seen in a year, not in the flesh at least (see Covid, see Zoom) greet you on a warm, windy, Andalusian evening at an outdoor café, and you have been travelling sleepless for thirty hours or so, and the others, four of them, who have been depending on you to shepherd them through vast and interminable terminals and gates and changing departure lounges for the past two days, have been safely stowed in the Airbnb you booked for them, and the two friends who have been waiting for you seem to care about how you got there, and, after hugging you deeply, bring you a cold beer and lean across the table to listen to your tale, and the sea breeze moves your hair, is when the tears come.

But not for long because soon you are laughing, your bone-aching body forgets its grievances with you, and the conversation lifts and engages, so that this far from what you call home is in this moment the kind of home you love the best. Around a table with friends you love.

Day 1 of the Retreat

We arrive at Molino del Rey into colour and mosaic and the sound of clear spring water over rock. I want to write everything, to mark it down, to imprint and keep it.

I peel and eat an orange. The world in an orange. Chemists in big smart-ass companies have endeavoured to recreate the taste of what I’ve just had in my mouth. Something called Tang, I think. Many people bought that it was orange juice. Ha ha, as George Saunders might say.

Photo by Fruit Basket Agency on Unsplash

In the nearby village they raise dogs to hunt. When our host told us that, I heard “hunting dogs” thinking about wild boars and such. But now, because they’ve killed every wild thing in these ancient hills, and apparently they need something to hunt, they breed dogs in order to chase them down and shoot them.

At night, you can hear the dogs barking in the valley, hear their plea for play, for food, for friendship. They are hungry, these dogs.

I’ve also learned that contrary to a belief I’ve been holding, bullfights continue to capture the Spanish heart. The women crowd the front rows at the bullring. Anthony, our British host says it’s because the women lust after the matador’s ass. It’s a daily television spectacle. Why? I ask as if there might be an answer.

It seems the ways in which I perceive humanity are ways that do not exist.

On Thursday, we will visit the Ronda bullring. Not to witness some magnificent violence but because this is a writing retreat, and on account of Ernest and his manly lust, it is a place of literary note.

About Ronda, he is quoted thus: “That is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with anyone.” (We are doing neither.)

In his short story “Death in the Afternoon”, Hemingway wrote: “There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you are only going to see one and that is Ronda.”

(We are also not going to see a bullfight. That would surely make me weep.)

Deepam muses about beingness

Take away the cell phone, the wifi, etc., and there you are. Take a picture if you like. But try to imprint this moment and this one, and the next, if you can.

If you are able, do this: be here.

It becomes more challenging, inundated as we are with snips and snaps, reels, tiks and toks, scrolling and swiping, to sit without even a glass or cup, and simply listen. It creates a restless leg and a strange aimless urgency.

Here, in the distance, a digger scrunches and crunches earth and rock on the steep eastern hillside, birds sing—both the twittering and the mournful—and water falls shushing and gushing over petrified moss. Swallows with their fine sharp tails swoop right up to my door, complaining as they veer off over the lemon tree.

Photo by Nico Meier on Unsplash

I tell myself I will pay attention. I will notice. I will be there, here, wherever I am. Because as I stand on tiptoe over the hills and gorges of my life, I see that I’ve been sleep-walking, or as Tom Robbins once put it, “half-asleep in frog pyjamas.”

I’m doing my best here.

Honest.

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If you’ve read down this far, I thank you.

Just one (two, actually) thing(s) I’d like to share. In the middle of the airport/flight muddle, as I was riding some escalator or moving walkway, and checked my phone for a flight update, there was an email from Funicular Magazine with an acceptance for my poem, Word for Word. Then, yesterday, after our morning write, I received an acceptance from Waterwheel Review for a flash piece, Mostly Sorry.

Acceptances make me cry.

How about you?

What surprising thing makes you cry?