Farewell to Madrid

My visit to Madrid a few weeks ago was an excuse to see my friends and eat delicious food. It was also an excuse to bid farewell to a city that has been with me from my tender teenage years. I first spent time in Madrid while studying abroad. I have returned at least yearly since, including to live there again during my masters.

For a long time, I thought Spain was where I would eventually make my home. It was my first love, so to speak. The first different place I lived as an adult. My first foreign country, outside of Canada and Mexico, that I remember clearly. It was the first place where I felt history seeping through stones and into my fingertips. It was the first (and second) place where I fell in love. And while Madrid has never been my favorite part of Spain, in many ways it has grown to be my part of Spain. I hop off the plane and am home again, casually chatting in a language that comes so easily to me, navigating the city without a thought and popping into favorite places. 

I am leaving Europe after five straight years here, plus my time studying abroad and the two years I spent obsessed with getting back to Europe after that. I am excited, but I am also terrified. I try to remember how very hard living in new places was for younger-me. The challenges I overcame, the loneliness I suffered, the many times I was lost. I try to remember these because they feel so far away now. I am comfortable in Europe. I am at home. And I am leaving this home I've made for myself to go carve out a grand new adventure in a new and totally different part of the world. 

While I have spent the majority of my time in Europe away from Spain, it was always close, a comforting presence there for me to escape to. Now it will be so far away.

So I went to Madrid. I sat in the sun and lay in the parks. I rubbed my hands on old sandstone buildings. I promised Quijote that I would keep tilting at windmills. I felt the strange southern wind dance across my cheeks, that wind that exists only in Spain and even more uniquely in Madrid. And I said goodbye. And I promised to return.