There was another man who was thinking ahead to a night in a casino, to winning his money back from the same guy who took it the night before.
There was a woman remembering an orgasm with a more attentive lover than the one whose hand she held.
There was a nauseous tourist who regretted ordering the mussels.
There was a man who felt desperate despite his smile.
There was a teenager, staring at their phone, wishing they looked like the person dancing in the video.
There was a young couple both simultaneously wishing their Airbnb was closer to town.
There was a bartender wiping an outside table, dreaming of an old flame who moved back to Argentina and married a lawyer. Marta knew him and she said hi.
‘¡Hasta mañana!’ he said and told her he was looking forward to the protest.
‘Yes. See you tomorrow.’
There was a dog trying to tell its owner it was thirsty.
There was a cockroach scuttling along the flagstones beside a bar, up fresh and early for a night of foraging, its mind full of almost-human levels of fear and lust and hunger.
There was a deeply anxious person who was petrified about dying but whose life was so available to read I knew they wouldn’t in fact die for another fifty-three years. And it would be painless, in their sleep, in a luxury hotel in Kyoto.
There were three young men wanting to get high, one of them secretly wishing he could tell his friend he was in love with him.
There was a woman who had a carrier bag full of apples and bread, who was worried she didn’t have enough rent money.
I passed someone who was feeling guilty for being on holiday while their mother was ill in hospital. I knew this guilt. The guilt of having fun.
I passed someone my exact age. A Spanish woman who was in a deep depression. Who wanted to be nothing.
I thought of the days after Karl’s funeral, when all I wanted to do was not exist. I became fascinated with zero, as a concept and a number. The ancient Egyptians had a hieroglyphic symbol for zero. It was interchangeable with the one for beauty. That appealed to my state of mind at the time. Beauty was nothing. As soon as there was something there was trouble. And pain.
I owed it to the world to feel awful; that had been my logic. And if I didn’t owe it to the world, at the very least I owed it to my dead husband and my dead child.
I had believed that I was simply not meant to be happy. It was such a relief to feel differently. But even there, even walking through Ibiza Town, a faint guilt remained. Like a stain on cardboard that no sunlight could ever quite take away.
Heartbreaks and Hangovers
We kept walking. I knew everything that could be discerned from everything that was ever encountered, the way that with enough understanding a grain of sand could speak of the entire universe.
We walked the longest possible way to the Old Town, passing the butter-yellow facade of the Gran Hotel Montesol, which I not only knew was the island’s oldest hotel, but could also feel, as I walked past its curved multistorey Art Deco corner where a sophisticated and international evening crowd sat under canopies watching people. Watching them but, unlike me, not understanding them.
Because I felt as if I was strolling through a crackling cloud of indulgence and experience, where the memories literally leaked from the buildings and bodies. We took a detour by the waterfront, past the Pacha shop and restaurants slowly filling up and people strolling with large ice creams and small dogs. We passed heartbreaks and hangovers, boredom and stimulation. We passed love and loss, regret and shame, hope and despair, stress and indigestion, piety and pornography, aspiration and acceptance. We passed thoughts about money and music and grief and pet-sitters and painful teeth and weak bladders and bad backs and tinnitus and someone clenching their abdominal muscles. We passed the simple enjoyment of aioli and rye bread and local vino de la tierra. We passed a Swedish woman who was wondering if humans will survive the AI revolution. We passed snippets of songs and adverts and viral videos and unwanted conversations that were stuck in people’s minds like gum on shoes. We passed tourists thinking of their beach reads and flight times. We passed a man who was once told he looked like Keanu Reeves scrolling through selfies for one where he actually did. We passed a ballerina from Paris who was overthinking how to blink. We passed a native Ibicenco beside a lamppost, playing online chess, taking a queen. We passed a man who was imagining he was a DJ at Ushuaïa, playing for a rapturous crowd dancing around the hotel pool. We passed an actual DJ booked to play at the Hï club that night and also – twenty-four hours later – a luxurious place called Club Chinois, his jewellery dazzling but his mind dull from jetlag after a layover flight from Singapore. He missed his twenty-year-old daughter back home in Chicago, and thought of when to FaceTime her as he sat alone on a bench and consumed an inconsequential Burger King veggie burger, listening to the beautiful voice of a busker singing a song I now knew was by a singer called Olivia Rodrigo.
We passed thoughts in every language and emotions of every colour.
I know how bizarre this all sounds. But really, it was beginning to feel remarkably normal. Or if not normal, then at least natural. It had only been two days, yet it already felt like for ever.
The difference between a gift and a curse was sometimes just a question of perspective.
Islands Don’t Exist
I had been an island. And yet now, thanks to Christina and La Presencia, I realised that there are no islands. If you go far enough down, everything is connected. Ibiza and Lincoln are joined to the same earth. Our minds swell into each other like a million currents at sea. We merge, we converge. Everyone flows into everyone else without even realising. Even cockroaches play their part. We aren’t just a person, we aren’t just a gender, we aren’t just an age, we aren’t just a nationality, we aren’t even just a species. The walls between us are imaginary. The thoughts we have that are ours are gloriously unique but also gloriously in the same continuing spectrum. Love, fear, grief, guilt, forgiveness. These are the standards in the repertoire. These are the cover versions we get to play. We think we are lonely because we are often blind to the connections. But to be alive is to be a life. To be life. We are life. The same ever-evolving life. We need each other. We are here for each other. The point of life is life. All life. We need to look after each other. And when it feels like we are truly, deeply alone, that is the moment when we most need to do something in order to remember how we connect.
That is why we take the invite to Ibiza or send the email to the lonely old maths teacher or share the ridiculous truth of ourselves. We can’t just sit for ever in our lonely shells, making no sound.
To swim in the ocean, we sometimes have to make a splash.
El Pescador
We passed more restaurants and more tourists and more dog walkers before arriving at the narrowest alley of all. The one with the small but upscale fish restaurant. El Pescador.
A row of small white wooden tables was perched outside on the uneven ground and Sofía Torres and her husband – whose name was Jorge, I discerned – were seated at the one furthest up the sloping path.
Marta was on her phone, with her sunglasses on and her back to Sofía in case she was recognised. She was chatting to a friend and planning things for the protest. I stared at her and tried to access her future, but it wouldn’t come to me, which seemed unusual for someone’s mind I could enter. It was quite unusual that I couldn’t see anything about her future. Did it mean that Marta’s fate was wide open? Multiple futures hanging in equal balance? That could be both good and bad news, I supposed.
‘What now?’ Alberto asked me. I liked that I was now in charge.
I saw a bar further up the street with an empty table and three chairs. ‘There,’ I said. ‘We’ll sit and watch her, and I’ll have a rummage.’
‘A rummage!’ said Alberto. ‘Man, that is a good and peculiar English word.’ And I thought about it and realised he was right. Rummage. It really was quite special. ‘It is almost as good as “fungus”,’ added Alberto. ‘Or “queue”. I love “queue”. Who would be as mad as to put those letters right next to each other in the same five-letter word? Only the English…’
‘And only the Spanish would turn their exclamation marks upside down,’ I countered.
‘And question marks,’ added Alberto, agreeably. ‘What can I say? The whole of Spain likes to party. Even the punctuation. And we have la madrugada…another one you have no word for…The time before dawn but after midnight. A very important and magical time. Yet you need a lot of words for it in English…In fact, it is…’
As Alberto kept talking, it began to happen. I took surreptitious glances at Sofía Torres and started to catch sight of her. It was like being a child, feeling an unwrapped present, gradually knowing what it was before I saw it. Every word she spoke, every mouthful of food she ate, every sip of wine, every gesture: each was the smoke trail leading me to the fire inside. Most of us reveal every single aspect of ourselves in every single moment, but very few people are able to understand these tells. They just exist as never-understood signifiers, which may partly explain the loneliness that hangs around so many of us humans, the loneliness of foreign words looking for meaning.