Old clothes

I was lucky in the bus leaving from Barcelona. The vehicle was packed, all the seats were taken apart from the one next to me. I was looking forward to having some space and silence to be in my leaving. But just after we left a girl walked up from the front, started talking to the two girls sitting in front of me and asked me if I would mind if she would seat herself next to me so she could talk to her friend. My first thought was “yes, I do”. I like being on my own. But who am I to keep three friends apart on a journey home? So I said “yes” and smiled at her and she seated herself next to me and started talking, asking me all the questions she could think of. She chatted with her friends and I felt a bit disappointed about not being able to sink in my memories but I felt far happier about hosting this small encounter. I realized it is the people that shape me just as much as a I shape myself and I can be on my own whenever I want. I like their company more than I ever did. The hermit in me has found its place in the world.

Here I am, in the house I once called home. The birds just woke up and I did as well. I wasn’t sure if my day has just ended or a new one has just begun. I smoked a cigarette and thought about all the people I met in the last 2,5 years since I decided I wanted to change my life and did as told by myself. I thought about the roads I walked, the things I saw, old and new friends, the men and women I kissed, the early mornings wandering silent Barcelona streets, the sea, the sun, the discovery of dancing. I thought of a country where there is one word for hoping and waiting. I thought of Calvino and Basho and Whitman and Perec and Thoreau. I thought of my suits, the one I arrived in and looks so worn out on the last photo of me in Barcelona where coincidentally the word “barcelone” is floating in golden letters over my head like a halo. 

I am embarking on a new adventure. I will return. And the adventure won't be in the time inbetween now and then, in the 10 countries I will visit for five seperate art projects, but the adventure will be in the returning. I will return to stay. I never did that before. So I don't know if I am able to. But I've got an old suit I can wear. I wear it now, while writing.

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.”

- Henry David Thoreaux, Walden