on love

I thought I knew what I was getting myself into… because I knew I had no idea what I was doing.  I just knew I had to leave, because I was lost.  So very lost.  And I wanted to be found.  And I thought that if I lost myself so far, so far from anything I ever knew, that maybe I would find it.  The “it” I didn’t know what that was, but I knew it was there.  Waiting for me. 

I had a panic attack just days before, the weight of the 4,631 miles pressing into my lungs before my feet ever left the ground.     I felt suffocated but talked myself into packing, packing way more than I would ever need, the weight of my hiking pack toppling me over in the kitchen.  We laughed, but I insisted on taking everything. 

When I got into the cab to go to her house, I had meaningless numbers and letters scribbled on my hand that I showed to the cab driver.  I began to get nervous.  Excited, but nervous.  My new roommate and I got out of the cab and rang the bell and heard the voice of our new home.  As we climbed those five flights of stairs, each step increasing in difficulty, I felt a weight being lifted from my soul.  Then I saw her.  Milagros.  My new host mom.  The woman on the paper.  It was like a light turned on in a room I had thought would be dark forever. 

She smiled and hugged me and said a whole lot of things I had no chance of comprehending that first day.  The magnitude of my decision to leave my country and live with someone I had never met before with a language I clearly did not really understand was beginning to settle and my lungs turned heavy.  Then everyone else popped out of everywhere else to meet the “new American girls” and it went away.  I understood they wanted to feed us and they were happy we had arrived.  I also got that Joan was making fun of me for the amount of bags I had.  Marissa, in beautifully unperfect English, explained that her mom, Milagros, took care of her four month old daughter, Carla, during the day and that, “she is… how do you say… the babyshitter?”  I laughed and corrected her and then I knew everything was going to be alright.   For the first time in a very long time time, I felt like I might be okay.

Within a short amount of time, Milagros became one of my best friends.  I don’t know how to explain it and if you were to ask her, she’d say the same.  She didn’t become just my friend.  She became some combination of a friend, a sister, a mother… all the best parts of any relationship mushed into one tiny little person.  I loved her.  Love her. 

At some point in the fall, Milagros asked me when I was leaving, believing I was only there for the fall semester.  I smiled and said that I wasn’t.  I said I was staying until June and asked if it would be okay to continue living with her (we had been told not to mention we were staying through the end of the year in case the relationship didn’t work out).  Her face lit up and she ran to hug me and said she was so happy.  She said she wasn’t ready for me to leave.  I laughed and said I wouldn’t be ready to leave in June and maybe I would just stay forever.   She laughed and promised my room was always mine for whenever I wanted it. 

Friends would ask if I wanted to go out to dinner.  I didn’t want to.  Milagros’s dinners (and conversation) were better than any meal I had eaten at any restaurant so I always ate at home.  She never cared if I brought people over to join us.  Friends would ask if I wanted to go out after class or go have lunch.  I found myself turning them down because above everything else, I wanted to go home and see Milagros and see the baby, Carla.  I wanted to help her with going to the mercado and wanted to make the baby laugh.  I wanted to hear about Milagros’s sister who lived in the mountains.  I wanted to hear the stories about the architecture her husband designed throughout Barcelona.   I wanted to see Marissa when she came home, to hear about her day at the market.  I wanted to hear some smart sassy remark from Joan.  She became my family.  They became my family. 

When I was mad, I would yell about it with her and she would yell right back, angry at whoever had done me wrong, always on my side.  When I was sad, I could cuddle up next to her and she would pat my hair and say, “ella, ella, ella.  Ya esta.  Ya esta.”  And if I was sad for too long she would yell at me and tell me to be strong.  Not in a mean way.  She just always yelled.  It’s just how she spoke.  To this day, when I’m on the phone speaking in Spanish, I yell.  I can’t help it.  Maybe it was because she was just so little and her voice was so big.  I remember asking her once why she was always yelling at her daughter Yolanda on the phone.  Every day she was yelling at her on the phone it seemed.  She talked so freakishly fast that, in the beginning, half the time I couldn’t pick up what she was saying.  She seemed genuinely confused when I brought it up and then I realized she wasn’t angry, that’s just her.   For years she chuckled at that.

If I wore something that didn’t match, she would block me from leaving the house.  She would insist I tell her where I was going and when I would be home.  If I had a story to tell, she wanted to hear it.  If I had drama to spill, she leaned in and delighted the antics.  When people came over and spoke to me too fast, she knew when I couldn’t understand and would cover for me so I wouldn’t be embarrassed.  When the US invaded Iraq and anti-American sentiments were high in Spain, she would stand between me and the men who would yell at me for being American.  With her, I felt safe; from everyone and from everything. 

She made me every Spanish dish under the sun and wasn’t offended when I couldn’t eat the paella she created because the shrimp had eyes.  I apologized profusely because I did not want to be rude, as I explained to her that I had never seen a shrimp with eyes before and that I couldn’t eat something with a head.   She thought that was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard and, laughing, took the heads off my shrimp so I could partake in the deliciousness.  Of course my “Spanish siblings” thought that was a riot and taunted me throughout dinner, threatening to hide shrimp heads and eyes in my room.  I spent holidays with them.  Birthdays.  Celebrations.  They taught me inappropriate sayings because they thought it was funny.  They accepted me and wanted me for exactly who I am.  And I, them.  It was love. 

When it became time to leave, I was devastated.  I didn’t want to go.  For the first time in forever, I felt free.  When I came back to the US, I realized I couldn’t let her go: my life could not be complete without her.  She was one of my best friends.  I called her as soon as I got to my grandparents’ house.  I have called her every week since then.  I have called her, religiously, just about once a week for the past twelve years.  I have visited her, named my daughter after her, brought my children to meet her. 

When I realized it was time to say good bye a few weeks ago there was no second thought about getting on a plane to show my love one more time to a woman who had completely changed my life.  I was frantic, worried I wouldn’t make it in time, but I did.  I got to see her little face light up when I walked into the room. I got to hear her laugh.  I got to hear her yell.  I got to hear her stories.  I got to feel her arms hug me.  I got to spend the last six days of her life with her.  Before I even made it into the air, she was gone. 

Twelve years ago I was looking for something.  I found more than I could have ever dreamed.  I found a love, a friendship, I never knew existed.  I found “it.”

I am…a lot of things.  I am so very sad to have lost one of the most incredible women I have ever come across, one of my best friends.  Yet I am grateful.  Grateful for the love and friendship of the past twelve years, grateful for the time I had.

As a very dear friend of mine once said, “How lucky I am to have had a friend like you, to be so sad to leave.”