The Spanish Berry

I didn’t panic, not in a way most people would describe as panic. I had no energy left to panic, I don’t think.

I had spent the last few months in a love-hate relationship with my sofa, in which this marvelous piece of furniture provided all the comfort and rest I needed, yet also acted as jailor, confining me to my own apartment for far longer than even my introverted, home-loving self cared to.

Severe burnout had pushed me to take time off work on my doctor’s advice, but when the days I thought I needed turned first into weeks and then a couple of months, things I’d previously taken for granted started to grow out of reach. By the time I began to consider returning to the office, my job was no longer available to me.

So there I was, the new year just begun, all the time in the world, and not a clue how to spend it. I wasn’t sure if I should scream, freak out, point fingers or worry myself sick.

Instead, I decided to hang out with my sofa a bit more. We’d hit it off by then and had begun to enjoy our time together. All I asked for was a comfy corner and in return all it required was my presence.

There was no darkness, just exhaustion. I slept for hours, responsibilities lifted from my shoulders in ways my adult self had never had the opportunity to experience. It was a strange freedom, a privilege I know is rare even for those who may be in desperate need of it.

I had battled the guilt of unproductiveness and made my peace with the fact that any industrious endeavours were indefinitely on hold. This is what my body needed, this is what my brain needed, this is what I needed. Given the option, I was going to take it.

In the corner of the room, uncertainty lingered. What would this mean? What comes next? Where do I go from here? I brushed off its comments, knowing somehow the answers would find me at the right time.

You can’t rush rest, you see.

I began to do the only thing you can do when life as you know it comes careening to a halt: take one day at a time.

I mean, we like having it all figured out, don’t we? This need for control, for some sense of agency, to have a say-so of some sort in what goes on. Yet this isn’t always possible. In fact, I’d say it’s healthy to let go from time to time. Otherwise life decides for you and makes you take a break when it’s least convenient. That’s what seemed to have happened to me, anyway.

After some time of this mutual arrangement, where my sofa would expect nothing and I would comply and offer nothing, I found sleeping slowly made way for dreaming.

I had a choice. I could choose what I wanted. What did I want? Yeah, what did I want? What did I want? Not other people, not society, not friends or family. What did I truly want?

Peace and quiet, for starters, I thought.

Something my apartment with old windows and bad sound proofing in the centre of Seville was struggling to offer.

Anytime anyone walked down the street having a conversation I was tempted to join right in and reply with some witticism or other, it was loud enough to feel like they were right there in the room with me half the time.

I never did, mind you. I didn’t want to come across as rude or eavesdropping, but I regret not writing some of those snippets down, there was great writing material in some of them.

That was the other thing I wanted, I wanted to write more.

I wanted to get back to the pastimes I had enjoyed in my teenage years, back to the pages of books that had taken me on many adventures and taught me much about life and myself.

I wanted to read more novels, write more poetry, tell more stories. Fall in love with words again. Not that I’d fallen out of love with words, I’d simply neglected them a little and they deserved more of my time. So, that’s what I did.

I got a library card again, for the first time since my uni days. I read classics like Frankenstein, travelled abroad with the likes of A passage to India and devoured the poetry collections of people I’d studied at school yet never read properly.

I’d forgotten the magic hidden among the stacks of books and the quiet corners of a library and was very happy to once again make their acquaintance.

I also wrote. I scribbled ideas, thoughts, and made notes for future writings. I produced some of my best poems to date this year (even if I do say so myself) but I’m yet to share them anywhere. I’d figure out what to do with them later, the important thing was to get them down.

The third thing I wanted was to be back in nature. To leave the sound of blaring sirens and roaring traffic in the city and go someplace inhabited by birdsong.

While trying to make up my mind about what shape it would eventually take, I threw on my hiking boots and walked with a friend for miles, talking about everything and nothing.

After partaking in the lessons of the pilgrim’s path, re-encountering the joy of the most basic things in life such as food, a hot shower and a bed after a long day, I returned to Seville with my mind made up and a plan of sorts.

It was time to leave city life behind and return to the small town I had grown up in.

I would give myself time to do so, unrushed. I had already started to sort my stuff but I needed time to grieve the life I had led there, say my goodbyes, and do a few of my favourite things for the last time (or at least the last time in a while).

I visited monuments, coffee shops and bookshops. I went for walks by the river, visited old hang outs and went for meals with friends.

As June came to an end and the summer heat began to rise, I bid goodbye to the swifts nested in the blind above my balcony, packed my belongings into the family yellow van and headed back to my parents’ house for a while.

Moving back home seemed counterintuitive from the outside but has 100% been the right move. I set up office in a corner of my old bedroom and embarked on creating a bilingual digital copywriting service, one that, while still very much in its infancy, is now up and running in Spanish and will soon have info available in English, too.

However, the most obvious advantage of village life is being on nature’s doorstep. A short drive to the river will offer views of stunning sunsets and a waterside teeming with birds.

Herons, Egyptian geese (which are apparently not geese at all but a type of duck), storks, egrets, ibis, cranes feeding here over winter, a family of ospray that borrowed a storks nest to breed during Spring, not to mention all the smaller birds chirping away in the branches of the nearby olive trees and oaks.

“I’m so lucky I get to live here,” I say on the first of many trips down the riverside track.

If you’re wondering how my parents feel about the move, my father described me as a ‘godsend’ just this morning.

You see, not long after I’d moved back in, my mother was taken ill and had to spend some time in hospital. While healthy again now, those few weeks of back and forth, visits, tests and the awaiting of results were all made that much simpler having an extra person around for support, practical and emotional.

Then there’s the fact that, having decluttered my own stuff before the move, I’ve been helping them sort some of the rooms in the house so that everyone can find things when they need them. Most of the time we all agree on the improvement, occasionally we need to reconsider an object’s new home. I try to make myself useful around the house, they remind me it’s lunchtime when I’m too focused on writing.

We’re currently enjoying each other’s company very much and there isn’t as yet an end date to this arrangement or any clue as to what the future might look like next.

For now, I’m happy to be in a place (physically and emotionally) that allows me to write again, even if most of it is copywriting at the moment.

I’m aiming to get some more poetry and creative nonfiction done over the coming months, but we’ll see how it all pans out.

As my sofa taught me this year, it’s best to take things one day at a time. Some of the greatests endeavours arise out of times of stillness.