H&H Magazine
Lost and Found
Summer 2018
lifeless automaton or robot, but you can’t really act, only react, and your reactions just drag you further into the dance. I came to Spain to party. I came to stay out all night until the sun came up, sleep until the afternoon, wake and do it again; to risk unwanted pregnancy and genital infection among women with a wide range of nationalities, values, and body types. I came to wander a new old continent on an itinerary of whimsy; to wake on an unfamiliar bed, or couch, or floor, and not be able to situate myself geographically until a drawn window curtain revealed a plaza, or mountaintop, or Morocco. I came to eat; to slurp rare and treasured sea creatures into my freshly cultured palate; to wash them down with plastic cups of cheap whiskey, and vomit it all later into the backseat of a taxicab. I came to disorient myself; to agitate my brain’s map with movement, substance, and foreign stimuli, an Earth-sized game of dizzy bat, and see what remained. I came to get down. That Friday afternoon though, adventure was proving beyond my purchasing power. My wallet held only twenty Euros, a Florida ID card, a debit card connected to a First Union account with a negative balance, and a credit card I didn’t quite know how to use. Travelling home from my last lesson of the day, watching the charmed natives congregating around their favorite tapas bar, I couldn’t face down a Friday night sitting by myself in the shared space of my shitty apartment watching bad Spanish television and rationing a weekend’s worth of food for 20 Euros. The beer signs adorning every bar I passed on the way to the metro beckoned, the grinning statue of King Gambrinus gripping a frosty mug of Cruzcampo mocked the very idea of temperance. How could I have come all the way out here for this? Somehow, I worked for the Academy many months before I conceived of taking the money. The last Friday of the month traditionally meant payday. For me, it only
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