QUICKSAND KINGDOM

HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW.

by Michael Jones

Should I stay or should I go? That question is constantly popping up in our minds and lives. Thoughts of going home, going on, starting fresh, going traveling, or just simply leaving Barcelona each carry their own complex ramifications and implications, each having nothing to do with the other. This implied instability that defines expat life affects us all, and trying to figure how many times I’ve asked myself that question in some form or other is like trying to estimate how many cafés con leche I’ve had in a year. As a foreigner in Barcelona, it seems that at every turn we’re confronted with this dilemma. Even when you stay, no one else seems to, and every other day you’re at another friend’s despedida. I want to meet a friend for lunch today, but she’s looking for a new roommate and boxing stuff up; her good friend who had taken an Easy Jet flight home for the weekend isn’t coming back: “Can you sort out my room, thanx!” I remember when there was a knock on my front door years ago. A mate wanted me to hold on to his new guitar; he had to go home to work for four weeks. Six years later I’ve still got that guitar. Or just this summer, it was the 3rd of the month and there was a tap on my bedroom door—I thought, “Great, my roommates are paying the rent!” Instead I see their blanched, shocked faces returning the keys: “We have to go home, right now, today.” I of course thought the worst and asked if they were alright, to which they replied, “Yes, it’s not anything; we just have to go…NOW!”

Should I stay or should I go? These stories are all too common and we all have them. Still, when asking ourselves if we should go, we have to look at what brought us here. I’m talking to an old woman at the market. First she asks where I’m from, immediately followed by the inevitable question we face all so often: “And why did you come to Barcelona?” I pause before giving one of my pre-formulated speeches on the subject when she lists the typical: love, study, work, or adventure? Can I say all of those? I guess adventure. It’s a timeless question, even if today’s world is getting smaller by the gigabyte. Milan Kundera wrote that anyone who leaves their country of origin does so because he or she is unhappy, but what about the proverb that points out the obvious: “Everywhere you go, there you are”? Or another one I like: “If an ass goes a-traveling he’ll not come back a horse.”

So, should I stay or should I go? I think back to that first year where everything was sound and fury. It seemed impossible to make it here and stay, but every day, week and month that I hold on is a victory, sometimes harder won than others. Now the years have stacked up and I am atop a mountain of such odd victory, yet I still find myself walking around like a ghost, wallowing in the nostalgia of days and sights gone by, making mental notes for the day I will say goodbye to the same city streets I’m still living in.

Thomas Wolfe wrote a book titled You Can’t Go Home Again, but not even 6 months ago I found myself in the eye of another storm: all my bills were overdue and I had fifty euros to my name and no prospects for work. Back to the end of the same line of thinking again and it’s can I stay or can I go. If I can’t go home, where can I go?

So I grit my teeth and push on, of course, and it works out—for now, anyway. But still, that desire and drive to stay or go, pulling me, pushing me unsettles all my plans. I look up at the statue of Colón, pointing to far lands, mocking my volatile yet decided resolve.

Should I stay or should I go? It’s a sunny Tuesday in Barcelona, and thankfully I’m busy with the mundane and my thoughts are free from these questions, for the moment. I leave a café in the old quarter; it’s a narrow street and I look up at the glinting sun and the old antennas. I can make out just enough of Barcelona’s patron saint to know I’m looking in the direction of a plaza that’s over 1,200 years old. In that perfect moment everything’s great and I’m happy. I’m in Europe, Spain, a far-off, timeless land that’s my home. I’m a guiri in Barcelona, and for today I’m staying.

TYPED OUT

Look closely, guiri grasshopper. We've got you pinned.

by Sara Custer

The Broken Heart: These guiris can’t endure the pain of those familiar physical spaces that will make them relapse into the fermenting drunk sadness of fresh love wounds. It only seems natural to this type of guiri to pick up his or her heart from the floor, pick up his or her already packed bags from moving out of the love nest, and start anew in sunny, swinging Barcelona. They are running away from love, and as long as it doesn’t catch up to them, they will survive. This type of guiri will thrive on the abundance of drugs to abuse, alcohol to drink and horny international bodies to screw— just the medicine needed to mend a broken heart.

The Weasel: These are the people everyone in their home countries love to hate. While all of their friends are settling down into careers, university lives or even families, these people headed for the hills of Catalunya as soon as any sort of responsibility came knocking on their doors. Maybe they realized that University is for suckers and their parents weren’t going to let them live at home anymore. Or it could be that they completed all the necessary preliminaries to start down the road to a career, but their immense fear of failure and inability to answer to responsibilities made their heart rates increase and their palms sweat. Perhaps they even made it as far as the business casual world, tried the 9 to 5 desk jobs and just couldn’t stomach one more conference call. Regardless, these weaselly bastards have managed to move to a vacation destination and earn a living, however meager, while all of their friends and family back home only wish they could be so bold.

The Nomad: Floating from one city to the next, these Guiris are like amoeba: formless, simple, almost impossible to locate. There might be one crashing on your couch right now. Permanent addresses are unheard of, and they never really seem to have a job but always show up at every party you go to. Getting in touch with them is out of the question as they can’t be bothered with buying a cell phone, but they will respond to your e-mails when they have time. What exactly they’re running away from we don’t know, as most conversations are filled with memories and stories from the road and inspired intentions for the next travel destination. It could be boredom or it could be bounties on their heads. We won’t ever know, because as soon as we start to put the pieces together they are gone like the wind.

The Moths: There are guiris out there who are naturally attracted to someone or something in a city. A force outside of their own will has beckoned them to the bright lights of BCN and they cannot get enough. These moth guiris show the most promise for staying in Barcelona. They face no risk of outside authorities influencing their emotional cahoots with Catalunya’s capital. Even if they wanted to leave, they couldn’t, because it seems Mother Nature herself has ordered their attendance in Barcelona’s roll call and they couldn’t be happier.

La Vida en Vivo

It's exactly what Lennon said: Life is what happens while you're making other plans.

by Johanna Marvel

We are all completely caught up in our individual problems, brooding over whether what we are doing is really what we want to be doing and whether or not we are screwing it all up or if there is anything to screw up in the first place. Wondering what we are running away from or running away to and whether or not we will actually find something when we arrive. It all extends up and out like a bloody Mayan pyramid, and we wonder whether we are standing at the top, tossing various possibilities over the edge and watching them tumble down, or whether it's the reverse: we are at ground level, looking at all the upward options, having to decide which route to take to the top. None of this is new. All our dilemmas and quandaries, all of them have been encountered before. We keep wondering what to do with our lives when the truth is that our lives are already happening.

Whenever I find myself wrinkling my brow over how my 24-year-old self fits into the general arch of humanity, I talk to some of my older friends to remind myself that this is all bizarrely normal. For example, one friend who has got everything down tells me about how, when he was my age, he went traveling in Turkey, lost all his money playing poker, got a job as the spotlight operator for Disney On Ice, and made what was the equivalent of 2€ a day, spending one on room and board and saving the other towards getting back to Barcelona. Or there's my friend who became a flight attendant to escape things and see the world, arrived in Barcelona, decided to take a few days layover, decided to take a few more days layover, decided to marry a friend for papers, campaigned against Franco, fell in love with a Catalan, and now happily makes finger puppets for a living—a few days turned into an over-40-year layover. Or the fellow who worked on translating Columbus's diary whenever he found himself in that characteristic state of Barcelona freedom (read: jobless): he decided that he had uncovered the true location of one of Columbus's lost ships, managed to get people to back him monetarily, went diving in the Caribbean, and came up with a cannon ball and a fork. He's moved on to translating Arabic love poems.

It seems clear to me that none of them had the faintest idea what they were doing—they were just doing it, the idea of which can be both reassuring and disconcerting.

But this doesn't mean that we don't stop pondering our own situations, drawing up charts and graphs with what we assume are all of our options. Originally I was going to do that very thing for this article. But after creating a maze of paths, a myriad of possible reasons to stay in or leave Barcelona, I realized that it's all relatively trivial. Yeah, so you manage to stay here for 20 years without papers and without making any headway career-wise. Great. Each option I put after that seemed exceedingly obvious, even when I went out of my way to make it otherwise. And I realized as I was reaching for another sheet of paper that that's exactly the point: you can't make a generalized pyramid. The funniest, the strangest, the most off-the-wall pyramid you can get is a true life one. It's always absurdly shaped; there are never straight lines between anything, and the options suddenly presented before you are always bizarrely wrought. The best thing is to stop wondering where the pyramid is going and to instead draw up where it's gone thus far. It's more entertaining, and remarkably interesting. Screw figuring out whether or not this is the place for you, screw trying to be clever and witty, screw the head games. Right now, you're in Barcelona. So stop wondering what you're going to do with your life—you're already doing it.