Barcelona

Rain hard enough to wash the color out of things. My jeans are still bleeding dye onto my white sneakers—that indigo running in trails that won’t come out—and I’m moving through the city in the particular way you move at three in the morning when your body has decided it doesn’t care about straight lines. Somehow we’d ended up somewhere across the Westend, no clear path back to how we got there.

I remember beating people at foosball. Someone took a loss to me that night, or maybe several someones—the details have blurred but the satisfaction stuck around. Someone else fountained vodka-orange all over my shirt in that slow-motion moment where everyone just watches. After that the evening doesn’t quite hold together. We ate döner with enough garlic sauce that it seemed architectural, the kind of decision that makes sense only when you’re already too drunk to question it. Somewhere in the noise someone mentioned a brothel in Barcelona, and in the way these things work, it sounded like maybe we were all actually going.

But Barcelona never happened. Somewhere between the spilled vodka and the kebab, the plan just dissolved. Whether anyone had meant it or it was just drunken talk, I never found out.