Unexpected Gardens

The sun is shining bright but the wind grazes my skin with a cold bite. I had never felt this before: the feeling of autumn and winter, the paradox of a sunny day in cold weather. I used to be a warm-weather person who didn’t know the seasons change, who lived in intervals of twelve hours between sunrise and sunset, who never had to move the clock forward or back. I never saw leaves turn brown, die, and be born again. All I ever knew were evergreen trees. Eternal summer showers.

This new city I live in has taken me in as one of their own. She’s not easy, though. She’s friendly, open-minded — a party girl. It’s easy to fall in love with her. She’s always outside, calling everyone out to a terrace for a cold beer, even in the odd event that it might snow. Madrid is chic, cosmopolitan, but can also be tough, foul-mouthed, even nasty. Not everyone regards her like I do, with deep love and admiration, accepting and overlooking her myriad flaws.

She met me when I was a blank canvas, now I bloom in full color. I feel like I’m hers, even if it’s not true. She’s done me wrong many times, but she’s remorseful and knows how to win you back effortlessly. One deep breath in Retiro Park after crying out to her and I’m good again. She gives and takes, and then gives again.

“Come on, girl, just stay out here with me for a little longer. Look how nice the day is! Damn, I barely even see you out here anymore, come on don’t be a drag.” She would yell into my ear.

We’ve built this friendship for ten years now. We are intimate. I know her customs, the veins on her arms, blue and green. I know where the blood flows easier, and where it clumps up. Madrid made me who I am, but using the soil that I brought, the one I came from.

I wouldn’t say that she knows me. She limits herself to just looking at me, guiding me, winking at me now and then, sometimes she completely ignores me. I get it. That’s the way she is: attentive for a moment, aloof the next.

“What did you think? You think I don’t have enough going on, that I should just drop everything and be with you? Come on, give me a break”, I swear I heard her talk.

Before I was even a canvas, I had to be built. The wood I’m made from comes from far away. A land, my land, where I learned to walk, where I learned to speak, where the first nails on my wooden legs were hammered in. The building block of who I would become.

My motherland. I haven’t seen her for so long, and I lived in her warmth for only ten years — the first ten years of my life, when my consciousness was just a sprout. I would learn everything after her, it felt like, but she gave me the gift of consciousness. Of life. “Go, my baby, play, run, nothing could ever hurt you.” She used to say.

Costa Rica’s love had no pretensions, no gold or riches. She would look just as beautiful on the doorstep to my childhood home or at the foot of Arenal Volcano. She only had pure love, the truest form of life. But I had earned my voice elsewhere. We sang different tunes now. I can only look back at her now as an outsider who feels like a foreigner wherever she stands.

I remember her with tenderness. She had soft hands, a quiet but steady voice. She’s small, even though I remember her being enormous — granted, I was tiny. “Grab my hand, you don’t have to cross these streets alone”, she said attentively.

Now, she only lives in my memories, in the most sacred shrines of my mind. I had come back to her in my incipient adult years and felt that we had grown apart by thousands of miles. Her arms still offered to wrap me in their sweet embrace, but I had grown accustomed to living free, to looking for embraces if and when I wanted. A bad habit Madrid rubbed off on me: the aloofness, that cocky, entitled sense of self.

I want to ask her if she still remembers me. If we saw each other again, would she know who’s standing in front of her? What parts of her remain in me? I would plead to her to remind me of something. Did I put an end to something? Was this shuffled identity of mine meant to be, or was it just a cruel fate?

It’s winter again, and the cold air thinning between my ribs lets familiarity slip out. Heavy, tall boots cover my feet, a futile measure for the cold. My nose and ears freeze, I don’t think they were made to endure these conditions. As I turn the key to what’s my home now, I start to thaw. From head to toe, and from the outside in.

I’ve created a home against all odds. A home made of different pieces from different places, but a home after all — one I built with someone whose language once felt foreign, until it became ours. We don’t have to speak with words. Sometimes our language consists of laughter, hugs, the sharing of a meal. These codes belong only to us.

I still walk the streets of Madrid, of Rabat, of Mexico City, of countless cities, wondering if there’s a physical place in this world for me. I keep calling out to her to remind me. I will keep calling out for her to remind me of something, to never let me forget.

A purple orchid blooms in the least expected garden, and I know she’s answering. She will always be present – in the back of my mind, in the unexpected gardens, in the farthest places I go to. I think the universal scent of rain wetting the grass after a long dry spell will always remind me of my earliest memories with her — and that home was never a single place.