Woody Allen follows me wherever I go...

getting really sad when people don't believe in acupunture...emailing my friends asking: hey you guys, why is America cool again? getting replies back like: "You should have told him no one cares about Iceland. I'm sorry we won World War II and saved your ass from the fucking axis of evil."

Sam didn't know bob dylan was alive.

Maybe I am a little illiterate, especially when he pet my hair like a dog and when I couldn't say anything because I was laughing so hard.

in my mind is a war-

on one side the irish stubble so close to my cheek telling me: "I recommend it!" like I'm ordering something much bigger than food.

on the other ryan with her short hair now, telling me a cat jumped into her car so she took it home and showed it around her room and it stayed for when she had a nightmare and crawled up next to her when she called out, "cat, cat!" like she was really audrey hepburn and audrey hepburn was the fake.

and i am on the kitchen floor with the cellphone hot against my ear asking elke why she's making me choose

Society is fucking people up.

I do not want to see anyone’s little penis!

Where is his mother to scare the shit out of him!

Brick wall brick wall brick wall!

I am a coward in a world of selfish people!

No I don’t want to have a child, body! Thanks for reminding me this was my only purpose!

Science!

You have to treat the whole world like a bitch or it attacks!

Jen’s letting me stay with her until I can find an apartment free of idiotas and pink mold that grew like harmful flowers in the corners of the bathroom and the kitchen once winter came. No one took initiative to scrub the walls, or didn't know how, or care, and seemed satisfied to say, "It wasn't like this last year," while deep frying a piece of meat, opening the kitchen window to let the smoke out.

It's raining. Jen has a headache and complains every once in a while of being clausterphobic. Both of our computers are on our laps. Jen's on Skype. I have never heard anyone call Jen "Honey" before. I mouth, "Your dad?"

“My parents are having money problems right now,” she explains. “My aunt is helping us because she’s like loaded. That's one of the reasons I have to go back. I feel fucking guilty. They’re still paying off my loans from NYU. Sixty thousand for one fucking year. That's a lot. I need to get off facebook. Get off facebook.”

Jen starts to show me pictures of her old hairstyles on facebook.

“That’s when I dyed it brown. Never again.”

“Wow, that’s you?”

“I know, people always say I don’t look anything like my pictures on facebook. Do you want to see my hair orange? Check it out. My dad made me dye it back. I loved it though. It was so awesome.”

“How long was it orange?”

“Like twenty-four hours. When I disappoint my dad it like hurts my heart. If you knew my parents you would understand a lot more about why I am the way I am. I was so cool then. I tried. Now I don’t try at all.”

On gchat, my brother, who studies Chinese and Chemical Engineering in Kansas, is trying to tell me the beer his roommate made tastes like a loaf a bread. And that our friend Tim, from Tawain, has a crush on a girl. He wants to tell me about the architecture of the palaces in China. He tries to say the Chinese palaces had these gates that stopped spirits from getting in and that Tim is too shy to even talk to this girl. He gets his friends to talk to her for him. Jen is still reminiscing about her hair, “In high school for awhile it was a really beautiful dark purply blue.”

I took three trips to the sala and back trying to figure out the WiFi code, because underneath means something different to me than it does to Jen. By the third trip I was wondering if I would ever learn anything. I had seen three apartments that night. I had been broken up with. There was a moment outside, underneath a heat lamp and a glass covering, when I felt more confused than I had ever felt. I wasn’t sad, I didn’t feel like crying. Every time I tried to think of something, I couldn’t, and my voice sounded foreign, like it wasn't even me.

In October I wrote an email to my parents explaining that I needed Dr. Suess as soon as possible. The lack of books in English was something I had not expected. Jen and I often complain about the kids.

“If they weren’t cute no one would love them,” I say.

“I don’t even think they’re cute,” Jen says.

Jen leaves tomorrow for Dublin. She is skyping her friend in America while she packs. “I’m bringing nice clothes to travel with because I like to look nice when I travel, you know. I mean I don’t like to look like a foreigner,” she says. The other day some boys stuck gum to the back of her dress, and that was after she brought them cupcakes with little American flag toothpicks poked through the middle of each one for President’s day.

We make extra money from parents who can afford private classes. I see Inés, who is a six year old girl, three times a week. Last night, she arranged the contents of an open cabinet all around her. “I have to tell you something, but...but...but...I just can’t,” she said, unzipping old bags of baby clothes. Then she grabbed a plastic wand from the table and pointed it at me, saying, “Die! Die!” Exhausted, she sat back on her legs and told me, “You're dead.”

I shook my head. “I just want long hair,” I said.

Inés laughed.

I took the wand and pointed it at my head, “Please give me long hair.”

“But it didn’t work because you forgot to say from the bottom of your heart!” she yelled and I nodded like this was the most important thing to remember.

Sometimes Inés accidentally steps on me when she is running around. We ignore it. Once she accidentally unbottoned the top button of my shirt. We ignored that too.

I think this is part of love. Instead of remembering Imanol’s pupils spin in darkness, I sit next to the waves on a rock and think about how I need to get headphones. I walk by dogs on leashes with raincoats and two cats eating ground meat out of a plasic bag and meet the Irish Economics student at a bar in Deusto with Jen. I drink too much and make my eyes wide when Jen points out we could eat horse burgers here, if we wanted. We end up in the Irish guy’s living room. Imanol texts me that he is in a dark and cold place. I take three trips to the bathroom just to hold my head because there is a river out the window and I could have lived here. That could have been my river every day.

Spain just passed its smoking ban. It was January and cold. My hair was in two little buns and I was trying to force myself into healthy situations, telling Imanol I was getting scared of coming to a point we couldn’t cross because, “I don’t want you to think it’s too hard to talk to me.” I had to repeat that three times.

“I’m sorry for my friends,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you don’t understand and they take too many drugs.”

He looks away after talking to me sometimes with a cigarette. Squinting.

“My band needs to learn English if we want to go to Germany.”

“Have you ever been there?” I said.

“Me? No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m poor, Rachel.”

I could not ignore his face in the blue light from my computer screen. The tingling in my lips and my chin.

“You’re so blonde. Even in the dark you’re blonde.”

Gina came to Bilbao with her mother seven years ago. Now she was twenty-eight and smoking cigarettes in front of her laptop at the kitchen table, telling me she traveled four days in a bus from Romania and Vladimir wouldn’t even drive three hours to pick her up.

“When you’re with this person,” she told me. “You have to have these feelings.”

Everything about the way she speaks is very omnipotent, “When I first came here, I was like you. I don´t know nothing. I know what it´s like to stand there and smile because you don´t know anything.” The smoke from her cigarette rose and settled all around her.

Vladimir was the reason I moved in. Would you believe me if I told you it still felt like summer at that point? That the plants leading up the staircase to the apartment, the goldfish, and the purple and blue colors of the walls had made it easy to ignore the warning signs? Vladimir knew some English and opened the window in the kitchen, looking down on the people saying, “This is our street.” He took me to the grocery store and couldn’t cook, but that was O.K. because I could. We made plans to go to IKEA so that I could buy sheets.

On the third day of living with him, Vladimir hit his cigarettes on the table. “There are going to be some changes with this apartment,” he said. I understood nothing. Two weeks after she got there, Vladimir broke up with Gina.

Patricia came home one night after being fired from her job in the restaurant, banging the pans on the stove and crying. She sat down at the kitchen table with a cigarette, pointing at me and telling me to marry someone who was rich. Gina translated. “No, Rachel couldn’t do that,” she said. She held her cigarette between her fingers and leaned close to me. “Un dia, we will do something with your eyebrow. Clean it. I will help you.”

I saw Vladimir once every couple of weeks, coming home from work at six in the morning after I got out of the shower. He sat smoking hash at the kitchen table offering me, “Breakfast?” and would wink at me before he opened the door and left for his mother’s house or to play billiard or go rock climbing.

Dubbed Gilmore Girls in Spanish played out of Patricia’s bedroom while I wore three sweaters and got under Gina’s flannel sheets her mom must have bought from the Chinos because the pattern was so cheap. A bunch of cats looking out from white fences. Imanol didn't like them. He said my sheets were the ugliest sheets he had ever seen and called Gina a femme fatal. Gina’s phone was always going off with the first half of the chorus of that Eminim and Rihanna single about an abusive relationship. She had Hello Kitty on her socks and sometimes my hair stuck straight up it got so dirty.

“This house is one shit,” Gina said.

“You look like a queen,” I said.

“Yes, I am one queen of disaster."

Gina told me I was the one making excuses and I actually believed her. The little light at the bottom of the boom boom was almost out. I would have to keep myself warm with this wine and Gina’s itchy yellow turtleneck. She said she could leave if she wasn’t always remembering. I scrubbed the walls in the bathroom for four hours and sat in the kitchen with the same shit on the walls and food stuck to the aluminum foil on the stove. No aluminum foil left until someone broke down and bought it. The hall light was out. Almost spilling my tea on the bombona. Whoops. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today,” Gina said. She dropped a plate in the sink. “This is the second one I’ve broken.”

Telling me, “I wait to see if someone cleans this kitchen.”

All of my walks. Alongside the highway and through the white walls in the rain into tourist shops to escape. Did men have the masculin intuition to take care of women? Did I have the intuition to be taken care of? In my free time I curled up in bed and fantasized about it. Does the cunt trap the spirit of a man so he can’t be free? Trap of the cunt. Cunt trap.

The misquito attacking me at night and the telephone company drilling a hole in the wall. Vladimir coming out with the ladder from the little room. “It’s me. Have you one cigarette please? I need.” Holding his arm out like he’s got an IV. “I need drugs.”

Gina showing me pictures of whales getting slaughtered while we’re eating breakfast, as some kind of long-standing ritual on an island off of Scotland or something. She says, “Look at the water. It’s red.” And told me dolfins were her favorite animal. She was shaking in the kitchen stirring instant coffee and milk around with a little spoon, on her third pack of Vogue cigarettes. “My head,” she said. “She hurts me.”

“Because you don’t eat.” I said.

“I eat ensalada.” She said.

“When’s the last time you had protein?” My mom used to ask me this question.

“I don’t remember. I wish I could be like Patricia,” she said. “But I cry. I need to be more selfish. I always say this but I never do it. At the beginning I had so much energy. He took it from me. He has to break everything. To be me, is O.K. but it is very sad to be me."

Patricia made Gina stand up and hugged her. Then slapped her ass. They tried on Patricia’s black dress, which made their boobs look wonderful and then they held their boobs in their hands and stood next to each other in the mirror to compare, but I kept my shirt on because I was younger and skinnier and I didn’t want anyone to feel bad.

I went to a bar with Imanol and put my hands around the candle because it was warm. We sat in a booth by the window and had to move our legs in a certain way or our knees would crash. Imanol was getting really paranoid that I wanted to curl up in my scarf and sleep and kept saying, “Don’t look at me.”

While we were outside for a smoke break, he gave me his scarf and a Moroccan tried to sell us plastic flowers. A bunch of kids were outside the tea place and some Scottish guys were peeing behind a recycling bin.

“Hey, they’re speaking English!” I said.

“What are they saying?” Imanol said.

“Something about approaching a girl because she wants you to. As they pee behind the recycling bin. Jesus Christ this fucking country.”

“You’re tired.”

Gina’s sad in the bathroom and she can’t explain why. You don’t understand me. No. No. Stop looking at me. English is so easy. It’s so easy English. Talking to Imanol on the phone as I change the calendar to February. He’s wondering how I can speak Spanish so well and asks, “Are you shy Rachel?” Lying on top of the bed with the phone to my ear and my fingers alive.

“You’re nice,” he says. “I am the opposite of nice.”

I stop and point to a newspaper inside a gated storefront, “A newspaper!”

“You want that?” Picking at the gate with his fingers. “You really want that?”

Saying I just want to touch you and I can’t hear you and you’re fucking with me aren’t you. His eyes when he is in my room. “I want to see you,” he says. “What are you doing to me?”

One night Jen came over for dinner. I baked eggplant and brought my laptop into the kitchen to listen to the new Radiohead album. While I searched for it, Jen didn't talk. I think I looked worried or sad. She was wearing an uncomfortable dress. On the way to a bar she said, “The buildings are at a weird height. Not too tall, not too short. So you feel like you’re a rat.” And there’s no way to make your Spanish self yourself and believe me I’ve tried when I fall into my arms because I knew that was the reason.

I made her stay for another beer. People put their arms around me and gave me their rum and cokes. They looked at the floor and squeezed their hands into little fists when they danced, asking me, “Where are you going?” but I would follow Jen anywhere at that moment. I felt like it was too weird to be in this dream. I stayed hungover under the covers and wondered why things happened. My space heater and twirly Windows Media Player made Imanol sit up and stare into it and call me a drug. He yawned.

I have to think. If I’m a drug, I’m a smart drug.

Jen was laughing because I couldn’t pronounce his name. I was around too many children all day who smacked me in the ass and touched me with their lollypops, asking their mothers why they were giving me money. One of Inés’ fairies didn’t have wings and one of them wouldn’t help her. The constant conflict.

Gina wore black and white all the time then and was always folding clothes or doing the dishes or buying fish at the market. I bought cheap, good wine and put my feet on the legs of her chair, smoking her cigarettes. She leaned close to me and pointed with her cigarette like she wanted to tell me something important in our kitchen, which was still stuck in the seventies and made everything seem very unnatural and old-looking and dirty.

“What the fuck am I doing with you in this house?” She said, telling me she couldn’t believe it, “I have to laugh a little bit.”

I sat down next to her. She stood, walking to the middle of the kitchen holding a plate. It fell into little pieces on the floor.

“What the fuck?”

“I just feel like I need to do something,” she said, smiling and turning around to take the broom and dustpan from behind the lavodora. “I love to clean.”

Gina swept slowly and beautifully, as if the floor was ice and she was a machine you watched while it cleaned the ice rink, “I love to clean. I will be so cold tonight, tia. You sleep with me tonight?” And our feet touched when she told me this was the last night and that she was scared and she moved her plants too quickly into the plastic bags and jumped too easily when I walked past her and Patricia kissed her goodbye. She called to me, “Rachel, sweetheart. I will miss you so much, tia.”

And there is this amount of distance I am remembering that I need.

All of my lighters had been stolen as I stood in front of pictures of America in the museum and survived through text messages that were 15 cents each or missed calls that didn’t cost anything. I didn´t feel like the bond was very strong sometimes between me and anyone. Only poetry. But I couldn´t marry poetry. Or have babies with it. And it couldn´t carry my bags or help me when I ran out of money in a brave new world indeed. I was exhausted but I had to walk back past all of the men on the streets, and home to the idiots smoking, and chalking snot in the back of their throats, to look at the mold on the wall as I sat on the toilet like it was my enemy and there was no time to sleep.

“I don't think I’m gonna get anywhere,” Jen’s friend from America says through skype, at the other end of the hallway. “I don't know how to make this freaking decision.”

I was starting to hate kids and ran away from the new roommate who was crouched over a bowl of potatoes and garbanzo beans in the ugly kitchen.

I went to visit Gina in her new place and told her she had too many clothes. She shook her head, folding jeans. “You don’t know me,” she said. “I go one place new and, bit by bit, I buy new things.”

“You need to get rid of your old clothes.”

She was sad her new room didn’t have a window and wanted to draw a picture of a window so at least she would have that. She was worried that she wouldn’t be able to talk to her new roommates about boys because they were lesbians. She told me Vladimir had two children and never met his dad.

I leaned back on her bed searching for my phone in my pocket but I didn’t feel much different here than I felt in Kansas, walking through the sorority houses. The trash on the steps and red cups floating in the pool. The bees next to the bush that grew through the stairs. Boys playing basketball with their shirts off and the pool at night. The moon from across the street while I waited for traffic. Lying back on the front steps in the cold on the phone and dancing with the lights off. There were moments I had died in that place. I don't know what it is like to be a scientist, but I know what it is like to watch an expression and body change from closer to very far away. I sat on a rock by the ocean singing songs to myself about how beautiful music is, and I waited.

Right before she left for Dublin for a week Jen lost her keys. We searched everywhere while her Spanish roommates were in the kitchen making something amazing. I didn’t want to embarrass her, but I found the keys in the empty kleenex box. Jen declared only that the keys had been found to the roommates and we all cheered and everyone thanked me.

Then Jen shut her door.

“God it smells like garlic in here. I need to stop loving garlic, maybe then I’d get a boyfriend.”

I set my cup of tea wearily next to her laptop and annouced that the Irish guy just friend requested us on facebook, and he’s a twin.

“Fucking twins man. Fucking mind fucks.”

I nodded the way I figured someone should nod in front of geniuses and later went to sleep on the sofa.

While Jen is in Dublin I escape into her room like a bear into a cave. On Sunday, I left the house to visit Gina because I got hungry. She was setting the table and turning patties over on the stove, pouring tomato sauce over her potatoes like ketchup. Later she smoked on her couch while listening to music videos on youtube. Her mom was eating peanuts from a bag at the table behind us, breaking the shells into a pile that grew quickly. We were: her mother, her mother’s friend from Romania and me. Gina’s lesbian roommates were artists so there were maps and plants in the kitchen. Sculptures in the corners. An upgrade to say the least. In need of another video to watch, Gina asked the room, ¨Que queremos?¨ then, in English, for me, “What do we love?” Her mother said something in Romanian and Gina put on an old music video of Shakira. “Perfect,” Gina said. “A woman who knows what she wants.” While her mother and her friend were skyping their children, who were my age, and dating, Gina and I sat at the table. Her hair was curled in layers and she was wearing a long gray sweater, sitting on top of her legs and commenting every once in awhile on the clothes the women pulled out of shopping bags to show their children in Romania. “Rachel,” she said. “The women in my country are stronger than the men. You know why? Because we have more friends.” And like a lyric this hangs over me like a sick truth that won´t let me forget it.