Barcelona nights

From the clouds I gaze out into the face of the world.  Future moments, blend to past, past to present.  My presence is enveloped in the traveling clouds as I feel the wind’s feather light kiss on my skin, sending a tingling rhythm deep into my system.  The past unravels beyond time and space and I fall into a submersion of a limitless blue sea.  As I glide through the nebulous regions of the ether, I see all the places I’ve been in the world, I hear the voices and laughter of the friends I’ve met along the way.  I hear their stories, I feel their gentle touch, I fall to their glistening tears of pain. 

The rain falls to the earth below.  

From this ethereal kingdom, hues of luminous rose reflect into my eyes, straight into optic nerves connecting to the profundities of my mind.  The colors sit like sunrise on the glass surface of the Mediterranean sea, the sky a brilliant refection inside my mind.  Faint stars beginning to shine as the sky turns dark.  

Just below the breath of space, I fall into the reflection.   

In this place where silence and wind dance an infinite romance, I find all my lost friends, safely resting in this space of high places.  It began fifteen ago in Barcelona, the first time I set forth into the world beyond.

I first stayed at a Pension that felt hidden amongst the city.  Walking up the placid stairs to an internal courtyard, revealing rows of doors and an open ceiling with dangling plants and echoing spaces.  No one was there.  At least I didn’t see anybody.  There was the man who ran it, he was kind and would prepare a simple breakfast of toast and jam and coffee in the mornings.  There were ashtrays with water in the base and the top lifted allowing the cigarette to disappear into the water.  I was never a smoker but in the pension I smoked.  It felt like the right thing to do.  I would go out into the night and try and find people, try and find the party.  I bought a stanger a rose at a restaurant patio, had a conversation, but never found a party in those three days.  I became lonely.  At the time, I remembered my friend Reuben Miller had studied in Salamanca and visited Barcelona, so I decided to call him.  In 2005 we were blessed that the smart phone had yet to be invented, so I used the calling card my mom gave me and called Reuben from a pay phone down the street.  Reuben answered right away, as people did in 2005.  I told Reuben about my first three days abroad and the sudden loneliness that was soaking in.  His advice came natural it seemed, there was only one thing he said, that I remember at least.  “Go to Hostal Kabul” he told me.  “In Plaza Real, go there and you will find some people.”   I made haste to Plaza Real. 

I strolled into Plaza Real with my one piece of luggage and made my way up the small flight of stairs and entered the hostel.  Just beyond the front desk leaked the comforting sound of intermixing and laughter, of glasses and the smell of beer and smoke and a little sweat. Just what I was looking for at the time.  

I was greeted with a sly smile from a guy named Lindsay who was working at the front desk.  Lindsay and I and the others would go on and paint a world of nightlife and friends, of passion and forgotten dreams.  

 Every night I would make my way to Hostal Kabul, pressed within the old stone buildings in Plaza Real.  There I would find my friends, slowly accumulating and dissipating like the gathering and melting of late winter snows.  

Some memories still dance around my mind and I stop to reflect. 

Chris and Nicolas from Texas were on leave from the war in Iraq.  When we first met and we spoke at one of the tables surrounding the hostel bar, I could see the reflection of war in their eyes— a distant sorrow that could only come from the trauma of desperate loss.  They had two weeks to spend in Barcelona and I could see that they wanted to escape whatever it was that haunted them. There is no mistaking the eager hunger to escape.  

I took them to a club called Cat Walk by the sea down at Vila Olympia.  We arrived before 1am to ensure the free entry.  By 3am the dance floor was moving, alive. An unmistakable Catalan fervor seethed through the crowds movements. We danced to the deep, chromium bass and the house music was pure and clean as the velvet black of a starless winter night.  Each person on the dance floor, a star lighting up the dark night.  

We were all dancing, the DJ playing house music, and time began to slip away.   Trace like, erotic and spiritual wrapped into one feeling of ecstasy.  I blinked in slow motion and then I saw Chris, amongst the DJ and the sexy vocalist, there Chris was sitting right on the stage in front of the DJ.  He moved in his sitting position in front of the crowed, swaying with the beat like a palm tree in a tropical storm, slowly dancing with the wind.  The vocalist echoed her melodies to the people, her voice clean and resonating around the dance floor and her melodies took us to higher places.  We all entered the tribal rhythm—the music was liquid.  In a whirling dramatic climax, the sensuous singer put her hands to the sky and sang an enchanting cappella, enrapturing the dance floor as the electronic music quieted.  Slowly, the DJ brought the bass back, building anticipation boiling into a frenzy.  Just as the music reached a climax the singer placed her hand on Chris’s head, her beautiful black skin contrasting Chris’s pale skin dripping sweat.  We were all dripping sweat.  She began moving him round and round to the tribal rhythm, just at the level of her hips, microphone in one hand, Chris’s entire existence in the other.  She gyrated as the energy in the music built up and up and up.  As the bass line finally was released, the crowd erupted in a fit of elation.  Everyone was looking to the singer, to the DJ and Chris in his bliss.  Chris’s mouth pulled wide into a lazy smile that was contagious to us all and we all felt that bliss, into that ecstasy. Sweat was dripping down the walls.  We all slowly gyrated and moved with her guiding hand and the music.  The music still in my mind and the moment still lost in time.  

Nights went by and I reigned in my clubbing dream world.  I would return to the hostel and meet others, other adventures, other moments in other dimensions.  We went dancing to potions rainbow pure and our skin became warm and we fell deep into the groove.  I can see my fifth floor apartment on Calle Aribau, five blocks from University of Barcelona.  The slowly fading night was soon to be taken by the day.  The warm hue of morning washing over our bodies – Her and I – we moved in our own opulent temple.  Our own afterparty, not sure where the music came from, but it was there.  I remember her writing on the door.  The glass door onto the terrace was fogged in sultry condensation and three words were written in the moisture.  Her lissome silhouette painting her name in the mist.  “…was here.”

I remember the dance floor, those beautiful faces, the sweet house music and the vastness of the night.  

So many moments. 

So many friends I will never see again.  

From these magic moments an ever present darkness loomed in the future.  Patient as the winding river. Soon, I would make my way back to the Source.  Stars began to fade and one becomes lost in the vast realm of Space.  The music would fade and I would make my way back to the sweet sounds of the water.   Find the river, find the waterfall cascading down from mysterious places.  

From the clouds I gaze out into infinite stretch of time, a translucent rainbow ever stretching in the distance.

I take this reflection with me on my journey down the dream road into the presence of what one day will become my life.   

If I am lucky, I soon I will have another taste of magic and I will move through metamorphoses again.  To dance and live with the majestic.  The wise green sea turtle gliding with the tropical currents, like a dancer slowly moving to the yogic chant.  Together we drift across the sea.