Dear Reader,
I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering Europe with my wife searching for that elusive phenomenon some men call rest. We found it hidden somewhere between Paris and Barcelona. But rest is as elusive as it is fleeting, and now that we’re back home we return to the beautiful humdrum of daily life.
One of the benefits of travel is the strangeness accompanying a new place. Even if you’ve been there before, you are outside the norm of your day-to-day existence and, in turn, notice that which you often overlook. This is especially beneficial for writers and poets. Writing is born out of experience, and new experiences often serve as a necessary creative jolt, especially when you feel you’ve run out of things to say.
So, I spent a lot of this trip writing. Not necessarily for the projects I’m working on, but instead for me, processing the experience and looking for new things to say. Most of that writing will remain sealed away in my notebook, but one of the pieces I wrote I’ll share with you today.
-Ryan
PLACA DEL SOL In a backstreet bar in Barcelona, an American expat seeks to make sense of his soul—his past laid bare in cigarette butts and bottles of booze, tortured memories, and broken hearts. The kind that sends you across the ocean in search of what pious men call redemption, knowing all too well that peace is fleeting at best and that good men (being good) don’t find themselves drunk in foreign cities seeking absolution. They’re the type to settle, rest, find a good, square plot, and call it home. No, travel is for the guilty, and home is for the good— ordering cerveza in grade school Spanish remains the fate of bastards and cynics.