How strange that a year should pass.  Is that what we mean?  That the time itself is ambulatory?  That we, those who always want to be concerned with the verb, the going, the doing, are standing rooted.  It seems that a clock has been named with the wrong body parts.  Those are not hands I see, but legs.

            And we.  We are frozen, to ourselves.

            I am imagining a background screen behind me, that vintage cinematic trick.  I am not in an old Chevy giving chase, pretending to whip the wheel back and forth over a treacherous country road.  But the screen is scrolling, flashing and rolling through all those places I fell in love in.  Retiro in the fall, draped in so many kinds of gold it glittered.  Then drenched in snow later, not a soul paddling a toy blue boat, but the lions still looked on regally.  And then spring came again, dripping with peacocks and tinto de verano.

            Playing along, I must lift finger to lip de vez en cuando as glasses of wine and blues bars emerge through the smoky frame.  There is an old stereo in the corner, perfectly timed, completing the illusion.  That first walking bassline that drifted not from a stage but slithered across dewy grass as the Palacio Royal turned on its lights for all the guiris to widen eye at.  And then I am reaching up, trying to hold his hand across the table as the trumpets swell, my physiology mirroring the brass crescendos.

            Some stage hand stands on a ladder perched above me, just outside of what you there might see.  He is tossing a rainy mist or a cottony snow onto my hair as it grows inches.  Can you imagine, someone too afraid to go to the hair salon in a different language?  That confidence should be the biggest package translation loses.  In one moment he tosses too much rain for my umbrella, and we are all watching our hair curl and our toes freeze.  And then we are all coughing for a week and laughing for two about thirty euros for a cab to a warehouse named after textiles.

            Maybe the floor will even tilt into a hill.  The walk to the bus stop.  Twice a day!  Or twenty five minutes up a hill for coffee you can’t find anywhere here in the home I missed so much.

            I would have been meeting friends.  We would have just wanted to be able to say what we really meant for a few anonymous hours.  We would be stemming the homesick tide that now washes its waves upon a new shore, distant in a different direction.

            And here is where my heart begins to hurt.  The end of the roll.

            I was standing in my kitchen today, chopping and dicing and drinking wine because of course there’s that one thing you can take everywhere.  (That one thing that you can touch and take everywhere I mean.)  I was, I am, in a house where I share breath with the family that I’ve missed for five years.  The family that tugs my teeth into a smile daily.

            But then I turned some flamenco on.  Paco de Lucia was caressing those strings and I remembered that first night in Republica Argentina with abuela Carmen.  A tiny little theatre and two worn guitars.  And then Duquende was singing and I was in Sevilla straining to hear the haunt of a saeta.  The April breeze was sneaking in and teasing out the candles they had lit all over the courtyard.

            They are keeping the beat faster and faster but still dampening the clap with the caress of one palm against another.

            The screen has sped up.  One side shrinks, dispensed of all the memory it can muster, or overwhelmed by it rather.  So many nights at the foot of Christopher Columbus.  And that’s not even his real name.  Two coin sandwiches and cans of beer pulled from secret trashcan compartments.  Roasting a pig on Noche Buena, and we didn’t even put a pan with it in the oven.  Meat so tender we cut it with plates.  So what if I cried for just a moment in the bathroom.  I was quick and quiet so nobody knew.

            Bus rides and metro seats and rolling our eyes at the late night wait.  Fourteen minutes.  Thirteen minutes.  Eleven minutes.  Rushing into the tiniest bar in time for the winning goal and then draping ourselves in banderas.  We were taking so many field trips that we lost our breath and then so did the turning canvas of the screen, sputtering and stopping with so little warning.  We were on airplanes home, searching for the oxygen mask to fall, to help.

            Turn this thing around why don’t you!

            Sometimes, I am paralyzed.  If it was the year itself that passed, can I never go back and find it?  I want to turn and run, toe to heel print retracing, gliding over my steps.  I want that sublime moment of cool terror of being alone and being surrounded somewhere so foreign to wash over me again.  I want to find the crumbs of churros and turron and mazapan and bizcotelas scattered on the path I’ve come home on.  I want to be Gretel, staining my hands with the chocolate of that year.

            I want the sweet giggle of a little girl in a blanket fort.  I want storybooks in Spanish.  Princesas and hadas and osos and Ricitas de Oro.  El pequeno dragon.

            So tell me, quick, tell me.  If a year passes, does it also pass you by?  Does it ever come back for a visit, for a cup of tea?  Or even, might it pause so you could chase it down?

            Do I get the same legs that a year has?