19 y 20 de Julio - Homeless and Broke

The story of these two days will be written and revised and rewritten. It will not be finished until multiple drafts have been edited, and it will find its meaning far from today. It  has already begun to stew, to take shape as a narrative, and its layers have already started to form in words, but it will take much longer to flesh it out.


But I will give you the long and short of it and promise to show you the narrative at full length, once I figure out how to shape it, and if you ask to see it.

We lost the keys to our apartment at the beach after our property management company had closed. Since Mary’s hackers stripped her email account of the manager’s cell phone number, we could not contact anyone to let us in to our apartment. We had been at the beach, so we did not have three necessities: ID, money, debit or credit cards. We did have: Sunscreen, towels (which proved extremely useful), metro passes (even more useful), and a bottle of wine with no opener (probably for the best).

“There is not much you can do,” said the late-night Embassy man said from Madrid.
“Do you know of anywhere we can go? Is sleeping on the street really our only option?” We asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Know of any place that would be best?” We asked.
“I’m in Madrid, not Barcelona. I don’t really know,” He said.

I said before that we had no money. That’s not completely true. We had seven Euros, which we spent on water and wafers. We slept (tried to sleep) on the train-station benches, then on the concrete outside the train station when security closed the building up, and then on the beach until the rental office opened. We got into our apartment the next day at two - exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry, but we got in.

There is more. So much more. There are lessons learned and good decisions made. But the flesh of these will not completely bud, grow, and flourish until it has had time to be seasoned. The story’s shape, right now, has no edges, no beginning, no end, and no defined colors. But it will.