There’s something different about the air here. 

In the atmosphere there hangs a thickness of sewage. Tourists flock like pigeons; unwanted in space but a seemingly permanent fixture.

Barcelona isn’t the place in my imagination, but what’s happened to this imagination anyways? It’s been in hibernation for three years, slightly reawakened by the smell of Spanish Jamon and gambas. 

Maybe my pre-frontal cortex has run its course of development. Four years ago, the hazy Barcelona air would’ve been distinct, but enchanting. Tourists a nuisance, but romantic.

Today, as I leave the city and ponder what it means to get older and how I’ve reemerged from the pandemic a changed person experiencing the same European dream but from a new psychological, emotional, and socioeconomic standpoint, I feel like I’m slowly coming to peace with my new internal landscape.

Pessoa still resides with me wherever I wander and speaks truths that resonate profoundly:

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

I muse.

What if I went to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy like what was planned throughout this Il Caffe journey? A Fulbright research project was never fulfilled.

What if I had continued my musical training and traversed Europe, leaving a string of notes and rhythms behind me along the way? A voice left unsung.

Along these lines, a thousand different realities of my path live out somewhere in an alternate space and time. Dual lives exist simultaneously somewhere else in the labyrinth but live with me now only in my daydreams and nightmares.

Saudade looms. Dreams that never came to fruition due to the unnatural selection of my own future; an accelerated trajectory into adulthood and the 8-5 life, spurred by the pandemic that condensed 3 years of growth into 3 months. Self-inflicted manipulation of my own development into the path that I told myself I’d never take. 

With the newfound 6-figure job and Private Equity title comes a desensitization towards my own internal compass. I am avoiding the self-realized lessons that have been transcribed in these virtual pages throughout the years; trudging forward against my own will. A robot, living a life not even resembling a lucid dream.

Multiple identities will duel internally – which one will win?