I came here to study hard things .... and to temper my spirit on their edges. - Anne Dillard

Home. I used to write endlessly about home, thinking and dreaming about home, wanting more than anything to be home. And sometime between then and now, Carrer Bonaventura Pollés 11-13, Barcelona became home. Not a replacement, sino una adición.

Struggle, maybe more than anything else, consecrates a place. This flat is consecrated. This kitchen, this blue couch, this hallway, this bedroom - these places embody a year's worth of my struggles and the lessons I learned the hard way. Not to say that there hasn't been more than enough good times here - certainly there has. But struggle - to grapple with life and sometimes flounder about - is to be changed and pushed forward. It is not for nothing.

As said by Anne Dillard, "There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by." I can only hope for a life full of good days, but the struggles that I've had here in Barcelona - they hit me in the soul, and are what bring me closer to knowing what a good life could mean.

I realize, oh how ironically, that it will be hard to leave. Hard in that complicated and uncomfortable way. As elated as I'll be to touch down in my California, I anticipate - nervously - the ache that will be me missing Barcelona for all her details and all the secrets she knows about me.

I still can't understand how it is that one can feel so about two very different things. I want to be home so much some moments that it makes me dizzy because I forget to suck air into my lungs, and yet, when I wasn't paying attention somehow the walls came down and now my heart is dancing around this city with an abandon that is unimaginably fulfilling.

It's just that it took so much to get here. Can I really be leaving this all in a month or so? Oh shoot.