"Bolaño’s obstreperousness was sometimes a pose—much like his preference for being photographed in a black leather jacket, sternly sucking on a cigarette—but his self-described “gratuitous attacks” had salutary effects. He helped liberate Latin-American writing from the debased imitations of magic realism that followed the global conquest of García Márquez’s 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—all those clairvoyant señoritas and intercourse-inspiring moles—and reëstablished the primacy of such cosmopolitan experimentalists as Borges and Julio Cortázar. For Bolaño, Cortázar’s moody novel “Hopscotch” was the Beginning and the End, precisely because it has neither a beginning nor an end."

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski#ixzz1QDrKo7Nb

Shannon has been quiet since I got off the plane. His small mouth is silhouetted by the sun over the lawn furniture and bushes that continue into the hills at a comfortable distance. We find ourselves alone in an Irish woman's breakfast room in Blarney, Ireland around nine in the morning.

While Shannon chews, everything is silent.

"Why do you like Engineering, Shannon?" I ask.

"Because I feel like I can make anything. If a boss asks me to do something, I can do it," he says.

I look down at the table, fascinated.

"Could you make this table? And this spoon! And this sausage!"

"No, I couldn't make the sausage," he says.

"Ah-ha!"

"The people are really the ones who kept me in Engineering," Shannon says.

We finish our cafe con leche and orange juice and listen to The Dispatch from Shannon's cell phone on our twin beds while we wait for mom to blow dry her hair. Dad is sleeping. Our room is so pink we are scared.

"I've never been a little girl before," Shannon said as the Irish woman closed the door to our room behind her. "This will be a new experience."

We watch BBC and I become emotionally attached to a boy who makes bricks out of mud on his knees all day. We listen to The Kings of Leon, The White Stripes and Jack Johnson through Shannon's cell phone and spend half an hour looking for a place to eat, arguing outside of the bathroom because, "They should have expected this." Shannon shakes his head throughout the rest of the trip saying, "Babies." I read Eating Animals and become a vegetarian. Shannon and I go for a walk around the river. There is a Burger King next to a McDonalds next to a burger place we have never heard of. All are equally populated. A bathroom in either is equally difficult to find. There is a little sign in McDonalds that says "Bathrooms" leading to stairs, at which case Shannon puts his head against the wall and says, "Fuck my life." We buy chocolate shakes from McDonalds.

The sky in Cork reminds me of chocolate shakes.

We walk along small roads with our suitcases. "Hey!" I shout. "Where are we going?"

"Shannon knows where we're going." Dad says. "He just won't tell anyone."

"He has no idea where we're going," I say.

There are layers of bushes around us.

Mom tells me that I should wear her special socks when I'm pregnant. She develops a rash in Dublin because of the all the sun exposure mixed with her antibiotics she has to take and gets mad at us for going off on our own. "I can't be in the sun," she says.

"Well why are you wearing a tank top!"

Later in the pink room Shannon says, "Fuck my life. You should have seen them before you got here. They're children. Dad can't be happy unless everything's perfect. That's why I almost killed him. Playing golf. I had the golf club in my hand."

"What!" I say.

"He apologized in time and I put it down," he says.

I am resting in the twin bed next to his, "Would you say most of your life, most of your day, was taken up by," I can't finish my sentence because I am laughing so hard.

"I'm going to beat you with my book," Shannon says.

"This is a good question!" I say, "By reading or talking."

"Watching TV," he says. "I'm trying to change that."

"How many times have you thought of the boys with the bricks?" I ask.

"None," he says.

"Did you know there are more slaves today than four centuries ago? Wait, I think I just mis-quoted that," I say.

"Did I just make this up?" Shannon says. "I'm gonna beat you with this book."

Meanwhile, I am so happy every time I read a newspaper in a breakfast place or hotel lobby in Ireland, I can't even finish reading. In my little book I write: "Beneath the relationship lies a nervousness on the US part and they leave nothing to chance." - Irish Independent

We find ourselves in The Natural Museum of Ireland looking up at skeletons of giant Irish deer. Large amounts of Irish children crowd the room, which is full of shelves of bird and ape skeletons, human heads, insects, stuffed models of lions, jared squid. "This is the last place you want to be with a hangover," Dad says. Kids of all ages are screaming. Shannon says something looking up at them like, "Giant Irish Deer, well this is awesome." He does not compare the Natural Museum of Ireland to the Louvre.

In the car, instead of freaking out, Mom and Dad figure out our coordinates like civil residents of the rented car. "Look at how well we've trained them," Shannon says, raising his eyebrows behind his Iphone.

"What wonderful people I created," Mom says. We are no longer allowed to make fun of her because who paid for this vacation?

"Wow, Honey," Dad says.

"I don't want anyone else to make fun of me," Mom says.

Shannon hits his head against the wall. I fill up my cheeks up with air and make Shannon hit it out.

"You're so dumb," he says.

I laugh and cry at the same time.

Shannon reads Jailbird on the plane to Madrid. His response is this: "At first it was kinda sad, but then it got really funny!" In Madrid, Shannon and I reflect on Ireland. "We were so close to finally doing something cool," Shannon says, looking down at his suitcase. The stoop of the Hostel I booked in Puerta del Sol was occupied by a drunk by the time we rolled our suitcases through the mass of protesters and their tents. Mom blows out the electricity with her hair dryer the next morning and bangs on our door, telling us to get up because we are going to find someplace else to stay.

"Was there construction out there last night?" I ask Shannon in fear of construction dust coating all my underwear I hung out the window to dry.

"No," he says. "The drummer was under the window."

I start cracking up.

We begin to refer to the protesters as the tent people. There are "No Mas Violencia Contra los Animales" signs and lottery tickets and a mariachi band, which, to Dad, seems the most out of place.

"We'll just tell the tent people it'll only cost them 3 euros to use our shower!" Dad says. "We'll pay for our room!" and I become annoyed because Dad keeps saying, "Hey Rachel, get a picture of that."

"I don't want a picture of it," I say.

"I think it's worth a picture," he says.

"I don't want to look at that Church all day," I say.

"It's pretty impressive," he says.

I have to show them how the light comes into the camera so the pictures they take of me aren't too bright.

"We have to take more pictures of Rachel," Mom says to Dad behind me on the bus.

Dad is amazed the kids are out so late and our waiter looks at his wrist when we tell him we are just going to share two Paella, agreeing to make the food only after I throw out "compartir." Just then, a bunch of attractive-sounding Americans sit down behind me and Dad says it's no wonder everyone's still out this late! More kids run past us. "There's no structure!" Dad says. "Catholicism failed!" The paella is gross and no one wants to eat their crawfish. "Those girls were smarter than they looked," Shannon says as they leave the table behind me for someplace else.

Shannon against the railing saying, "Fuck my life. You guys think you have problems? Do you have to walk around with your parents all day to try to find something to eat?"

I sit on the bed.

"All around the world it's the same problem," I say.

"How many days do we have left?" Shannon says.

The man playing the accordion for the line of people waiting to see inside the Royal Palace of Madrid is too happy. It makes me love him. Mom is using her umbrella for shade and Shannon is looking past us at the Palace.

"Look at those clouds," I tell him. "They're beautiful."

"The fucking clouds are prettier," Shannon says, looking over at the accordion player whose face has begun to seem less composed.

"He's so hot. No one's paying him," I say.

"It can only be you, Rachel," Shannon says.

Walking past the metal collectors and rows of jean jackets and parrots on the side of the road.

Inside the Palace Dad exclaims, "This was worth the whole trip!"

Shannon says, "Time to play Guess That Asian! Japanese, Chinese, or some kind of Pacific Islander?"

"Chinese" I say.

"Correct!" He says.

"How do you know?" I ask.

"They were speaking Chinese," he says.

I take them to a place called Caixa and we look at an exhibit of Russian architecture. "Why is this exhibit about this?" Mom asks.

"You don't have to be sarcastic with me, Rachel," she says.

"Why not?" I say.

"It all looks pretty bleak," Dad says.

Out the window someone spray painted: "I remember and I miss you," on a white wall.

The pattern of my pajamas and the curtains in the mirror of the hotel room. Another accordion player mouthing, "Hola," and how much money we're losing on the dollar. Mom undressing, "I'm so impressed with the Moors and so unimpressed with the Catholics. Whenever my patients tell me they're going to Europe I'm going to say, Great! Take a tour!" And I couldn't believe how beautiful she looked putting lotion on her legs and hands after she changed into her peach night gown--how her face looked so soft and warm, and she smiled. I wasn't even surprised when she discovered the lump a month after she got home, or afterwards, when the doctor took it out and told me that it didn't look malignant at all.

i'm so tired. i don't want to pack.

it is always 3am when i pack.

i just got a headache and a shiver from remembering rob baumann's poetry.

the transparent mysterious bullshit rumbles inside my head like a tinker toy refusing to be made beautiful or written. I only remember the ones i don't want anyone to have. Now my heart breaks the same Yeats' did. There is too much to open up inside of me a suitcase can't be strong enough for this.

I worked myself to tired sleepness. Maybe every foreign country is the un-real place, but the main thing I miss is the scenery on the road that is not between mountains. Cows next to waterproof flowers through cracks in the cement - WTF? ...I told you. Sleepy nonsense time. The difficulty in talking to people because even with yourself you can't really figure out what you want to say.

Sam says: "The Hippies are different here. They like guns."

(?)

saying goodbye is so hard

The spanish bus driver telling me he couldn't guarantee Sarah would make her flight and the words coming out of my mouth because he wasn't supposed to say that to us and I felt like I was the only one who could protect her. The hug she gave me as he looked at his clock and I sat on the metro with my hands on my lap the way I sat on the bus before it pulled out of elementary school.

"The only time I thought about god was when I was about to fall off the stairs."

"That's a good reason."

"It wasn't a reason. It just happened."

"I'm glad you think that' s so funny."

I don't know why I'm so happy. It must be the weather.

Ines told me she couldn't draw a frog, not even after I showed her a picture of a frog so she walked next to the window singing a song to herself while she drew something imaginary with her hand.

the ocean is so beautiful and i'm gonna write about it in my book and i dont care if i do anything with it because beauty.. conquers everythign

The lights in the library keep going down on me.

People look like the food in front of them in the market. A butcher chopping a pig's head. Um, can I please just have some cherries?

Fish fish fish, sting rays, ice. The striped shirt of the fisherman like a hipster with his cigarette, showing us the fish he caught in the plastic bag, but not interested otherwise in offering or taking anything more from my Senegal friend and myself. My friend hangs over the cement of the dock and points, "Look!" There are all these big fish in groups. I yell out, "Schools!" He tells me I have pretty hair and asks what's wrong after I look at the ocean moving back and forth in itself for too long. The Spanish disapprove. Religion and conversion surround me and I am in a sea of moving water hitting up against stone.

My friend tells me he lived in one of those boats in the winter for a month. He asks me if I know how to swim, to not be afraid of him. I am his amigo, his mejor amigo.

But I believe no one in this place.

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT CONCEPT

(I'm too busy staring into your eyes. Oh shit, I just forgot what you said!)

TRY HARDER

Rachel, he is from Columbia! He is chicano! He is homosexual!

WHOEVER THREW THAT IS GOING NEXT

The Chicanos have pride for the Mexicans!

Homerun!

WHO IS NEXT

Yo!

OH, A VOLUNTEER? YOUR WORD IS....CESAR CHAVEZ

(Oh shit you guys, who is Cesar Chavez?)

Cesar Chavez was a Mexican...who had a victory over America.

CESAR CHAVEZ WAS A CHICANO

Oh...

FIGHTING FOR CHICANO CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE 1960S

He fought the laws.

HOLY SHIT WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY

Third base.

I JUST SAID YOUR SENTENCE FOR YOU

Homerun.

Teacher: O.K. I think that's enough for today.

-------------------

Teacher: What do you guys know about Cinco de Mayo

IT'S A PARTY WHERE EVERYONE DRINKS TEQUILA AND EATS TACOS

That's all you know.

TO CELEBRATE MEXICO'S VICTORY OVER FRANCE. A SHORT BATTLE.

Tell Rachel about our Holidays. Do we have any Holidays that celebrate a victory over another country?

--------------------------------------------------

RACHEL WHERE IS YOUR HUSBAND

I don't want one

SHE SAID SHE DOESN'T WANT A HUSBAND

RACHEL DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH WITH YOUR MOM IN YOUR HOUSE

RACHEL DO YOU HAVE A BOYFRIEND

No

DO YOU LIVE ALONE

I live with my friends

RACHEL YOU HAVE SOMETHING RED IN YOUR EYE

OH IT'S OK IT'S JUST THAT STUFF THAT EVERYONE HAS

------------------------

RACHEL WHAT IS PERDITA IN ENGLISH: LOST OR LAST?

You have to warn me when it's a joke.

IT'S ALWAYS A JOKE HIJA

JOKING

EATING

JOKING

EATING

SIEMPRE

RACHEL WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DESSERT

Uhmm...(head falls into my arms with laughter)

YOU CAN DO IT

The thing is I have class in five minutes.

OMG YOU HAVE CLASS IN FIVE MINUTES?

Yeah. So I won't take dessert.

WE WERE JUST COMPLAINING ABOUT THE STUDENTS BEING LATE FOR CLASS BECAUSE FOOTBALL IS MORE IMPORTANT TO THEM

I know. I can understand but I can't speak.

YES YOU CAN

So I understand the students.

YOU CAN SPEAK RACHEL

Afraid not.

WELL IT WAS A GREAT YEAR! WE WILL MISS YOU!

WHAT TIME IS YOUR CLASS AGAIN

Five minutes.

WHERE IS IT?

POR ALLI

It's just around the corner.

RACHEL DID YOU KNOW YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY

WE INVITE YOU

THAT'S WHAT THIS LUNCH WAS FOR

WILL WE SEE YOU AGAIN?

Yeah you guys, I'll see you tomorrow.

I DON'T THINK I HAVE CLASS WITH YOU TOMORROW

I have two weeks left you guys.

WHEN IS YOUR LAST DAY

Uhm May uhmmm

CINCO DE MAYO

hahahha

HAVE FUN WITH OBAMA RACHEL

What are we going to play?

We could play fairies.

Oh yes, please! Oh, please! You're the mom.

No.

No! Please! You're the Mom and I'm the cat and everything is normal.

O.K. fairies, let's go to the dentist.

No! It's a secret from the mom! She doesn't know the fairies are real!

Got it.

I can't sleep, but when I dream I tell stories about what happened earlier in the dream incredibly awkwardly to people who aren't listening, but that does not appear important at the time. In my dream I'm like, "I was sleeping outside and this dog came up to me and dribbled all over my bed," and they're looking away because I confessed how poor I was.

It is increasingly difficult to figure out how to save the whole world. Problems with self-worth increase the longer I'm single. Walking around the market with Jen, both of us saying, "If only we were in the market for vintage clothes." La Americana no se vender? Jen probably hearing her. Maria telling Jen to give her clothes to the pobres, because otherwise she's just getting taken advantage of. Basically, that's what she said. Maria looks either twenty-seven or twelve and we still have the clothes because the door to the church was locked.

The light, light blue of the sky above the street. Only my boots walk to bed at six in the morning.

Jen talked about how she wished she could draw because inside her head it's so beautiful, but it never comes out that way, and Paublo showed us his dimensions for his next grafiti project of people jumping in an arch. I was able to say, "Vas a pintar muy grande?"

Somehow my heartbreak always spilling out when I'm wasted and Phil asks, "You even put the titles of the songs on the CD?" I wanted to give Phil the CD at that moment instead, and probably should have. In the end, Jen throwing her fist in the air saying, "Yes!" because I used the phrase mack it to me. "I rubbed off on you!" Telling me if I was here by myself next year I would probably get molested and look at how that girl walks.

"What girl? I missed it."

"It's because she has too much sex."

"Who told you that?"

"It's true."

Don't believe the high schoolers Jen.

Porque no hablas espanol rachel?

Pablo said, "Rachel, the light turns on by itself after you close the door," and I didn't realize that, yes, her Spanish was directed at me. No one really dances wherever I end up here, but girls are always riding past me on bicycles and teams of boys row past the bars next to the river before disappearing. I talk about the greenness of the mountains. Somehow I have become a self authority on US politics and get angry when Pablo tells me, "That's because you were educated to think that way." I'm still angry about that. I remember the sun at noon, an off-centered line of hair below his chin and the way he turned his head in any direction, fiercely; someone looking at me from outside while in the front seat, stairs to no where, rocks by the ocean, trash with little flowers.

Getting money from the ATM:

Would you like a receipt?

Yes

We're sorry, we can not deliver your receipt to you. We apologize.

Ines was mad at me because I made her do the flashcards. She said, "I never want to be a person," and wouldn't turn away from her doll house. We played that we were climbing up a mountain with all these babies--I was the Dad so I was holding three babies, compared to her one. Ines made this sling out of her new scarf to carry hers.

I stopped and said, "This baby is old! Is this your mom's?"

She seemed tired, "I don't know, Rachel. I can't remember everything. Maybe it was mine, maybe it was my mom's, I don't know."

Then we had to run away from Voldimort, aka The Bad One. We kept turning into him to demand, "Tell me where Theresa is!" Whenever we were him we pointed at each other with our fingers. I got bored and raised the stakes, telling Ines I was Voldimort and I wouldn't leave until I had Theresa, so Ines paid him off and he went away with a coin worth "one zero zero."

Next Theresa was the Mom, which I thought was hilarious because I could call her Mother Theresa and Ines was a cat who would only talk to me once I pretended to be the doctor from the top of the mountain.

I had the following conversation out loud with myself for everyone's entertainment:

"What is this cat's name?"

"Donno we just call her cat."

"Well, that's your problem. Her name is Dorothy. Dorothy, that grass will give you a stomach ache."

And then Ines the cat stopped eating the grass and put her head up.

After class I sat outside the church and watched old people in barets and canes walk very slowly around the church. Just going for a walk, I guessed. It was possible to get some cafe con leche somewhere, or to buy a pack of cigarettes from the self-serve machine around the corner and smoke next to the water-proofed speakers arranged in the bushes, which played classical music during lunch, while looking up at a statue of some man.

The wind was so strong over the ocean the sea gulls seemed to float over it like paper airplanes. If it wasn’t for the cliffs I think I would have tried to catch myself a seagull the way my brother and I used to chase after fireflies in Brookside, so focused on grabbing them we never noticed when exactly it had gotten so dark.

I got my first existential crisis, crying, skyping my parents, reading about the Spanish penal system because I was pretty sure police and jail had a lot to do with the difference between us, not the way I spilled the herbal tea all over my hands—the hot tea—after I took out my contacts, or how I forgot how to cook. I used to know, but I forgot.

I can’t seem to remember anything except the light between the stairs growing longer as I climbed more stairs and grass the size of palm leaves sprouting out of a sculpture of a lamp shade. Even in front of the ocean I was just a mess of long distance relationships and now what was becoming increasingly outstanding in my mind was the place.

It's raining. But it doesn't matter, because Gina sees the universe as balanced. Now she doesn't look at people in the street and I allow her to move my purse from the floor to her thigh in case I forget it. Her eyes are a little red around the corners when I tell her I am leaving and we are both sad because neither of us can handle even this sort of strange and needed goodbye. I take all of the world's sadness into my hair and chop it off when I have to. Am I a mother? Did my mother know this also? This losing yourself? And how come in Spanish she seems O.K. with it, saying she's disillusioned, like it's a joke? I hate talking about boys, god! Please! ...my friend the turtle is wondering about the difference between big shapes and probably wants to sleep in the wild again, where night always came before 3am.

Or maybe turtles don't want.

"And they kept it for you?"

"Yeah, I'm just lucky."

"And I'm sure it was a shitty jacket."

"Shot to the heart!"

It is almost one in the morning here and I haven't done anything today but eat, watch two episodes of South Park, retrieve my jacket and think about becoming a scientist. I got props for being unpredictable from Savannah about the scientist part. The other day on my rock by the ocean there were all these flowers and I deflowered all of them with my fingers. They were white, and up close there was a pattern written like code on the petals. The grass is different here. Waterproof.

There is a girl in one of my classes who fails all of her subjects. All of them. She studies all the time and asks for more practice but she still can't perform. She's beautiful and she wears these boots that are gigantic and black.

girls are amazing.

the roommates are fighting...very much in need of sleep...the boy roommate seems to be on my side...please calm the raging dragon...

...my blog isn't as funny as i thought it was.

A hint of anger and jealousy could be seen in the drunken stuper of the idiot as he scooted his chair closer to Jen in my absence. "It's fine," she said. "I'll take one for the team." There was some game on I didn't know anything about but pretty much everyone was wearing red and white and the chairs filled the room. They were thick and sturdy and made me feel like a queen.

Suddenly we were surrounded and the only potential non-idiot asked for Jen's number and then proceeded to impress her by making a star out of toothpicks. It fell apart and she couldn't get it back together and then he left to study chemistry.

Jen looked up and said "You're leaving me?" and he just nodded.

I saw him outside later smoking a cigarette by the door. After this intense disappointment, Jen and I ate chocolate and went shopping, and this time encountered no homeless-looking scientology missionaries or foreign coin collectors asking me if I was having a good time writing in my diary.

Jen almost bought a green shirt with a zipper down the back and I thought about buying an umbrella. We went back to the apartment to be with our computers until dark, when I could finally convince Jen to come out with me and fantasize about next year when she had to go home to pay off her student loans and I would be the only girl left in toy land.

"What do you think would happen if I came down here by myself?" I asked.

"You'd probably get molested," she said.

At the intersection of the bars, on our third drink, she said "I'm tired of playing this game," and told me all these amazing things about horses like how you have to approach them with hunched shoulders, but they make this gurgling sound once they recognize you and that the part of their nose right underneath their nostrils is so soft. She is worth all of the idiots trying to be clever.

iness took off her pants and wouldn't put them back on......i almost fell asleep during flash cards......deep fantasy of a nap in her pink room.........saw a kid in a stroller from the bus and smiled at him..........never got that reaction.....jen talks about the kids almost touching her boobs when she wears low hanging necklaces and refers to where the necklace hangs as "the danger spot"........walking down gran via...every day i'm hustling...

The mother in Areeta who is due in three weeks...I'm just waiting...

"Dude, at least we're not pregnant."

I have never told Ines how carefully I craft her subconscious so that she will never have to look out the window of the train in satisfaction, to never be satisfied, but to create large waves only she can surf forever and helicopters to take her away when they become too much.

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.

"I saw the sun."

I walk around from one strange situation to the next reassuring myself with life lessons from songs like "Can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need," and "We got to get out of this place if it's the last thing we ever do," and "Don't know what you got until it's gone," and some that I just make up myself like "You will learn from this," and "Take what you want if it's a thing, if it's a person take your time." ...mine are not as good.

Victor has a sister in Illinois. She had just returned from a party. She told Victor the guy next to her thought the centerpiece was so beautiful, he took it. But she was most surprised because he took it so beautifully. In Spain and Venezuela we just take things, Victor told me.

Sometimes Iness is so overwhelmed with joy for Theresa she grabs her and kisses her over and over. Other times she looks at herself in the reflection of the window in her wig and dances. Sometimes Theresa sings "Don't stop believing" (the only lyric I know) and Ines makes me keep singing and we have song conversations with her mom listening outside the door.

I sleep for the last night in this room, listen to "A Change Gunna Come" on youtube and prepare for tomorrow.

as Google increasingly allows me to sign in using two different accounts

I mishandle two different realities.

What do we talk about in this instance? Clothes?

I am distracted by despair.

My knees collapse instead of my knowledge of the system

(and maybe I'm pedantic but at least I'm not an asshole.)

I was fired by a guy who wants to wonder about space and criticize football.

Jack Kerouac walks next to me without any money looking at food.

Men on the street call out to us

because we're there.

the nail clippers falling apart over the toilet. flushing a screw because i´m not going looking in that. he says over and over you are not my english teacher.

oh my god

oh no

thats so stupid

wow

the body is meat

in the car thinking i like metaphors

or maybe i just like to see the road curve

see the distance

i sleep in a bright blue room next to boxes of "need to be published" fliers

i cannot move sometimes when some people speak

now the internet thinks it is helping

I went from Adam's steps to the north of this country where it always rains

and i'm on antibiotics for the second time

the girl who worked at the doctor's had dream catcher earrings

i also have those

i went from Adam overemphasizing how hilarious our situation must be to my friends

to not knowing what anyone thinks

in November you wore the same teal shirt everyday

i could easily fall asleep walking to IKEA

how much do you have left? 150 euro and i brought 1000

my achilles. until this moment, when i open my eyes, i die.

and i'm wondering what causes me to feel this way all the time

in my dream i spent all day with the object of my affection's best friend. he was a little fat and wore a black shirt and baseball cap. it was sad. i wanted to cover the kitchen floor with sand because there were piles of it everywhere, but the sand was only dirt and some rocks when i got up close to it. the object of my affection suddenly appeared and showed me more sand in the corner with a sign that said "sand" over it. it was coming out of a picture of someone's hands. but looking closer, that sand was just rocks too and when i tried to make a joke the object of my affection and another person thought it was funny until i couldn't say slip in spanish. the object of my affection looked away not thinking it was funny anymore. he had seven cats because he took pity on them. one was on his shoulder and the others were outside. he told me to sleep with him tonight but i didn't want to sleep in the factory. he got angry. the roommates were in the kitchen with their girlfriends. the refrigerator was open and a lot of pizza was inside.

I bought the radiohead album but it disappeared because I don't understand computers. While I searched for it, Jen didn't talk. I think I looked worried or sad. She was wearing an uncomfortable dress. 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. They said Kansas after I said it and "Where are you going?" I would follow Jen anywhere at that moment. I feel like it's too weird to be in this dream. I lie hungover under the covers and wonder why things happen, then open my legs out the window for the world.

it's too early to talk to the ten year old for an hour and I dropped all my midol on the floor of the bar last night...fuck

Where are the girls who kissed me from the backseat of the car.

The girls who tell me to walk in

because they´re downstairs doing laundry

or sitting on the floor with a notebook and

philosophy spread in close circles

difficult to walk through.

I walk to the door at night and pass a frog by the porch light.

Because I almost stepped on it I was scared.

Where are the girls who write poems

and standing next to her car in the snow

the one with coffee

in the pre-morning looking forward to dreams

she brought the excitement because
she felt more pain

I would remember her big eyes cartoonish

then my dashboard stopped to matter

(how many) accidental times
how many people

Friends stop by and tell me things.

Hey, what's up?

Every great pain, whether physical or mental, declares what it is we deserve; for it could not have come upon us if we had not deserved it.

So...wait, read it again.

Every great pain, whether physical or mental, declares what it is we deserve; for it could not have come upon us if we had not deserved it. So, for example, it's like there's a little kid that was running and fell down. And the teacher says to him: the reason you fell down was because you were running. And the kid feels better.

So your mind feels better once you have reasons.

Kind of. But, it could have also had a lot to do with one thing happening after the other. Like, the kid just fell and is upset, but eventually the kid is going to feel better whether or not the teacher is there to explain the world to him. So it could have been the reasons that made the kid feel better, but it could have also been the timing...and the teacher's voice.

Yeah, ok. That's sort what happened to me after Celeste broke up with me.

Yeah that's exactly where I was going next.

I already knew, Rachel.

You really need to get a facebook.

Maybe if I have time.

That way I could send you all these links, and I could talk to you easier.

I would never be on it if I had one.

It's like there's this conversation you are not involved in.

But I sort of like not having one. Ya know, it makes me feel special.

Special does not necessarily mean better.

Yeah, but I was raised to think it does so that's what I believe. Man, when I have a kid I'm going to tell him the craziest shit. He's going to be crying, and I'm going to be like: the reason you fell was because there's rainbows on Thursday. And he'll be like: oh, ok. I feel better.

Your kids are going to be so smart. I can't wait until you have kids so that I can do experiments on them.

Why don't you do it to your kids?

I'm not going to experiment with my kids.

Alright, we'll adopt a kid and do all these experiments on it, and if they work we'll do them to our own kids.

What do you think would really happen to them if we do that?

I don't know. They'd probably be really fucked up. ha!

some)one) to
take out the bushes
_by the front door
and get some flowers.

I tell her
be more involved in the community
and she says, Yeah...

Sasha I need more of you! All of my comments on your last post are starting to rack up and become individually less! Where is our balance, my friend of letters and sweet sounding moments?

My mom writes me emails about the continuing illusion of life. She probably can remember all the help it did last time to hold me when I started crying at the dining room table during dinner, because how am I supposed to be exactly what I need to be?

My plant is dying. I open the window in my room and put it on the ledge and say, here, I love you even though I haven't given you enough sun. Please don't die.