Mourning Murcia

Picture this. You’re riding shotgun, speeding past kilometres of arid land, then dominoes of lemon trees, beds of sunflowers. There are remnants of walls, grey-white bricks wrapped with graffiti, as small as Monopoly houses beneath an infinite blue sky. There’s wind in your hair, sunshine on the dashboard and on your thighs. You’re Nora, and you’re leaving Murcia behind.

Ignacio glanced over at her, eyes golden as resin behind his sunglasses, amber lenses projecting a sunshine scar across his cheek. Nora had insisted on paying him, but he’d Bizumed the money right back. It’s called a favour, he’d said, and Nora had almost cried at the kindness, almost cried as he lugged her suitcase down the stairs. Estás muy guapa eh, he’d said when she opened the front door, summer looks good on you.

He winked at her, crinkled crowfeet and smile lines, then eyes right back on the road. Light-fingered fidgeting with the radio. Next, next, next, until Ojalá filled the space like smoke, suffocating.

“Can we skip this one?” asked Nora, poker-faced, recalling a someone somewhere sitting in a different driver’s seat, a different time – a someone somewhere who hadn’t left her mind.

Whereas Ignacio, she didn’t know him, really – but when you have nobody, you turn to those you know a little more than not at all, and you pay them, you reject their goodwill because it ultimately indebts you. You’ve learned that altruism’s a minefield, a poppy-laden stretch of land that blows your head off, and favours are an arsenal weaponised against you somewhere down the road.

And somewhere down the road they drove, two resigned individuals, flying by windmills in a rundown old car, world-weary, and somewhat resentful towards one another. Nora still recalled how Ignacio had bought her a book of poetry on their third date. How he’d wrapped it and drawn her name on the paper, how he’d asked her to open the glovebox. She’d frozen in her seat, this very seat, months ago. When you’ve been broken (or lobotomised) by someone you trust, just as she’d been, everything feels like a ruse – calculated, strategic, reptilian. And sometimes you catch their eyes cloud over, sometimes you imagine, between kisses, the hint of a forked tongue.

Ignacio handed her his phone, screen smudged with fingerprints, playlist barely visible in the sunlight.

“Look up Arde Bogotá,” he said. “They’re a band from Cartagena.”

“Which song?”

“Whichever.”

A clear, rustic voice filled the speakers – so clear Nora could hear each and every word. Entranced, she was, as she looked out the window, flowers flickering by like a flipbook, the clouds slowly drifting. And she allowed herself to think of Alex, to think of all the little things that could have saved them. She allowed herself to feel nostalgia for the life, however ephemeral, she’d lived by his side. I mean, it was the closest she’d ever come to a life. In her adulthood, that is. And she allowed herself to visualise him, Alex in a singlet, sitting cross-legged on her bed, his long, tattooed fingers around his ankles. He’d been all sunshine in the early days – you know, before he’d been obscured by overcast.

And sometimes you long for the had-beens – for what it had been before it all turned to shit, for the man who made your bed in the mornings, or always packed his pyjama pants because he thought you liked them (you didn’t). But how do you unflush everything, how do you undigest it and vomit it up whole so it reemerges a pristine apple once more, unbruised and unbitten? You don’t. You don’t because you can’t (but what if you could?).

Ignacio let her listen in silence and snuck a look at her staring out the window, at her hair billowing across her face and chin like raked leaves dispersed by the wind. Her hands remained in her lap, her face as still as stone, and one would never guess the surging regret in her chest.

But regret, it’s a funny word. Sometimes it’s repentance (which feels like a call to action), and sometimes it’s a just a peculiar, hopeless kind of sadness. You can regret losing something, and still not want it back. You can regret what happened while knowing you couldn’t and still wouldn’t change a thing. And that’s the kind of regret Nora felt. The ‘I regret to inform you’ kind, the ‘I regret it didn’t work’ kind – the useless kind. But all our hope, despite its superfluity, despite its expiration date, is resuscitated for a moment, the duration of a song, zombified by a nostalgic galvanism that cares not about logic nor reason. And within this parenthesis, he didn’t hurt you. But then the song ends.

“What did you think?” asked Ignacio.

“Sad lyrics,” said Nora.

They sped beneath a blue street sign, ALACANT – ALICANTE, beneath a bridge and its flashing shadow stripes. Darkness rolling over their skin, across the floor, crumb-ridden. A hum and thud of wheels above – ba-bump, ba-bump. And something shifted a gear as they shot back out into the sun, the car like a bullet out the barrel of a gun. It was as though they’d crossed a threshold. Symbolic. Fleeting, Nora would come to realise. A new city didn’t promise a new beginning – not if you brought your baggage with you, not when it still bore an airline tag that read RMU MURCIA.

Her second year there, Nora had lived in the void hollowed out by her relationship. And even beauty taunts when there’s nobody to share it with – even the simplest of things, beer on a sunlit terrace, olives and crisps, they flip you the bird. So, you pay a trip to the supermarket, squeeze lemon into a bag of chips, and drink a litre alone in your bedroom because it tastes like belonging, doesn’t it?

And you avoid your favourite places for fear of running into the love of your life who wasn’t the love of your life. You make a list of new places, new favourites, but still have nobody to share them with – besides a date or two, hence Ignacio. Ignacio laying her suitcase on the floor. Ignacio wiping his brow.

“I better get going,” he said.

“Don’t you want to grab a drink?”

He shook his head no.

“Thanks, Nacho.”

“You’re always welcome.”

And so, Nora walked him to his car and kissed both his cheeks goodbye. She’d be alone now with her new life, the last trace of Murcia disappearing round a corner, exhaust pipe smoking, and out of view.

She stood there a while, staring at the corner, at an afterimage of who knows what. Then she pulled out her phone and sent Ignacio a €50 Bizum.