out of body
Barcelona // June 14, 2024
Hey everyone. I hope you are doing well.
I’m in Spain now. I’ve been here in Barcelona for a few weeks taking some classes about architecture and such. It’s been cool, but I haven’t met anyone who seems to want to know me. Everyone said Stockholm was going to be an antisocial city, but I made tons of friends and all of them are strange, strange people with very nice clothes and hair.
Barcelona, mostly brown, not many parks, and a ton of tourists. The roommates: five frat boys from the US, I think Kansas or something. They can’t be separated and God can’t tell them apart. Two are handsome and the other three are kind of scary. They’re nice enough, but they don’t speak any Spanish which is funny. I’m not fluent. I speak like a nine year old, but I can say things and I understand what people say but I think they, the real Spanish speakers, can tell right away that the Spanish I’m trying to speak is some weird approximation of the language they don’t even think about not speaking.
I’m fine honestly. There’s not that much to worry about. Three meals a day, a few coffees, and sometimes a cigarette or two or three. Maybe some beers here and there. I’ll go out with a guy, we’ll talk and I’ll never see him again. Maybe we kiss. I can’t tell.
A guy Lorenzo told me I look like an Eastern European. He said it’s my eyes. That’s funny of course because I’m half that and half Irish or something like that. Lorenzo, bald, maybe a few inches taller than me, Italian accent-ish asks me in weird Spanish how old I am. He’s smiling, so I know he’s at least 35 and he wants to see me naked. I tell him 21 because, yes, yes I am 21 and he smiles so big it's really quite creepy. Before he and his friends sat down with me, I was sitting at this table alone in the part of town I keep being told to stay away from. There are lots of immigrants and people who speak strange languages, so the Spaniards and Catalonians are scared their wallets will go missing. Lorenzo and his friends take a seat at my table. I don’t know exactly how to tell them I really actually love being alone and I’m having a great time sipping my beer and watching these skaters chuff down cigs like they’re pure oxygen, so I just let these older fellas take my three empty seats. I keep my head in my phone or my book maybe and light a cigarette. I don’t inhale because the cigarette is just to keep my hand that isn't scrolling slash holding the book occupied. It’s a lot like incense cross fidget toy I guess. Whatever, the guy Lorenzo is smiling and he asks me my age. I tell him 21, he smiles, you know. I’ve had a couple beers, I mean maybe two, so I get up to go piss. The bathroom: graffiti on the black walls, all in English, right by the kitchen, whole place smells like fried potatoes and piss and my hair is greasy and I’m super sweaty. I come back to the table outside and Lorenzo is chatting with another gay guy who is creepy in that gay guy way. Sip, sip, sip, sip, beer done. What the fuck is that? There’s some blue thing at the bottom. I drank the beer fast. The pill didn’t have time to dissolve. Lorenzo looks at me a bit and smiles less than he did when I told him I’m like 20 years younger than he is, so I get up and leave. I don’t know if I even paid, but I probably did and Lorenzo and his friends are smoking and drinking really big beers. I’m up, out, in a corner store. Chocolate bar, water bottle, heading home. Eat, drink, shower, start to feel real light headed. Like jellyfish style almost. You know how I get. This time it’s worse. I’m on the floor. I’m crawling to the bathroom. I can’t see shit. It’s not even that late. Vomit all night, shaking, blood in the toilet bowl. Fuck it’s getting worse. Hospital? No, just drink water. Barf water.
I wake up the next morning and I can’t move my body because if I do I’ll throw up right there in my bed and I don’t have the energy to clean my sheets. Eventually I make my way to some little private doctor’s clinic on the corner and the guy says in a Chicago accent, “Yep kiddo, sounds like you’ve been drugged.” And then I remember the blue pill at the bottom of my second or third beer and then I remember passing out on the floor and the crawling and I think “Fucking hell man”. So yes, there’s a man named Lorenzo somewhere in Italy slash Spain who wants to see me naked bad enough to spare good drugs on a guy like me.
A few days later I’m on a run and think “Somewhere David Foster Wallace is talking about fish and water,” and I think “Man I am totally out of my body.”
That man who I slept with in Sweden, Jan, he wrote me a poem. When he first sent it to me, I laughed like crazy because the first line opened up with something about my body being like that of a “corporeal God”. I lost my shit. I like to run and I’ve got these muscles kind of pasted onto my form, so I get it to an extent, but really I’m super overrated. He’s so nice and we still talk sometimes. He lives this life where he reads some books and sunbathes on cliffs with a bunch of really queer people. He says a lot of his friends like to be referred to as “It” and stuff like that. I don’t know that many people like that, but I’m willing to give It a try. So, yes, he’s naked and, yes, my body is on top of his, but nothing is going in anywhere, we’re just rubbing up against each other because god dammit it feels good. His penis is probably the same size as mine, but I’m not exactly sure. I don’t have the time to just stare at it like that, nonetheless pull out a measuring tape. It doesn’t matter; he’s beautiful.
My friends, bless them, they tell me all my writing is starting to sound the same. They are right and I’m totally okay with it I think. I know the story about the infinite abattoir. There’s this guy who never leaves work. The slaughterhouse just keeps going on for forever exponentially. It’s crazy we make structures just to kill things. Ok, my hands are over my ears and my head’s between my knees. Eyes shut so tight. I’m in public with a plastic bag over my head breathing in and out for mindfulness.
I met up with Amelie, that girl I fell in love with a couple years ago. She lives here in Barcelona now. I remember when we first met she told me she was moving to Spain in two months. I thought “Damn I was just about to fall in love.” I did anyway. We slept together for six months, maybe eight, but she says it was two so one of us is lying. Anyways, we had this beautiful sex many times and she laughed so much about everything and pretty quickly, yes, everything was funny. We met up at a park in the center of Barcelona. It took maybe ten minutes for us to locate one another. She was in this beautiful summery dress and I wore red because she always said I looked handsome in red. With a picnic blanket spread out under the shade of a very Spanish looking tree, we talked about our lives. She loves the fruit here. It’s so “juicy”. (That’s how she used to describe me. I tell her so and she doesn’t believe me. We had the same sex, but the rest seems to have been made up in my head.) She told me she thought I never cared to know her. She said I never asked her any questions about her life, I’d go on my phone too much, and I’d always show her photos from my damn camera roll (94,000 images and videos as of writing this). She’s right, of course, but in my mind I never asked her questions because I assumed she had no interest in being known. I forget that people love being people. I forget that people want to know each other and be known. We left the park and walked around for a pretty long time until we found a bar with the perfect balance of lighting to suit her incredibly specific needs. Some food was eaten and drinks were sipped and I said “Goodbye, Amelie” and she hugged me for just a moment and got on the bus.
The timeline is all wrong. I can’t get myself to think linearly. It just doesn’t add up, it multiplies. Oh my god I’m totally out of my body.