Tricks of the Brain

Et le monde devien plus et plus petit...
I'm on the sidewalk now, giving Javier a kiss on the cheek, then Fernando. The last time, and first time, I saw them we were in Nepal... The beginning of the last time I saw Fernando I was walking alone through the mad maze of Kathmandu rush hour, the day after returning to the city from the trek to the Everest base camp. A bit of a low after the high of the hike... The thrill of reaching the destination, then back to the city and I was thinking, "Now what?" and contemplating eating all the junk food I'd seen in the bakeries of Kathmandu over the day and half since I'd returned from the mountains all at once... Just for the temporary endorphin release caused by chocolate that makes everything feel all right for a moment.
It was as I was considering my chocolate downfall that I started hearing things... Hearing my name carried by the hot and crowded air, the noisy streets of the city. "Hilary," at first startled me and then in doubt, I shrugged my shoulders and theorized all the sounds of the city must have coincidentally shaped my name because as much as I wished it was a friend calling, I was in a foreign country in a foreign city at a foreign time... But there it was again, "Hilary." So I turned subtly so as not to let the tricks my mind was playing on me know that I was falling for them. Just to my right, crammed at the edge of the traffic was a man on a motorcycle with a face mask to protect his lungs from fumes of the traffic. "It's Fernando," he said and then I recognized the way his short black hair stood off the top of his forehead. My friend from Madrid that I met on the small airplane out of Kathmandu to the start-point for the Everest base-camp hike. "Hop on," he said, or something like it, so I did and we rode very slowly, hardly moving any, if at all, with the chaos of traffic, cars and bicycles, people and cows, at a stand-still. Eventually we found it was faster to park the motorcycle and scramble on hands and feet, climbing over bumpers of trucks. Somehow we found Javier, who Fernando had lost before accidentally finding me, and the three of us spent the rest of the day exploring the city and closing the evening with pizza at a popular ex-pat Italian restaurant and a bottle of red wine.
It's the warmth of people like Fernando, Javier and their friends that lead me to Madrid in the first place, and it's thanks to them that I'm living in the apartment I'm living in. Fernando grew up with Ines outside of Madrid and I'm living in Ines's bedroom while she escapes Madrid for the summer.
Ines came back this evening to pick up some of her stuff, and I helped her carry it down to the street where Fernando and Javier were waiting in their truck. Out of the truck they bounced and gave me a kiss. They look smaller than I remember. In Nepal they were the size of the mountains and the monuments... Or maybe it's just memories that play the tricks of the movie screen and render it's subjects larger than life.