In the City, Alone

We drove for hours, through miles of sameness, rolling hills, dry air, scrubby banks, blue skies and blinding sun.
The wiry man whose fantasies of love and glory led him on ridiculous quests perched atop several peaks along the highway, along with crumbling heaps of castles he may have stormed in his dreams.
Between these, nothing much. Growing things were rare, not plentiful as the winds that blew.
And then, not even hills and scrub, but flatness, an arid stretch - desert.
The air grew colder as nothing blocked the wind. The day died slowly, and night took over, and the moon, flashing starkly in the sky.
And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, miles of nowhere, I saw it - a city. A huge, urban, loud, bustling, teeming city, its buildings and bridges and streets and buses bursting straight up from the arid stretches.
We entered the city and were amazed by the activity, the wide avenues, the people rushing around and in and out of shops and restaurants, buying gifts for the holiday, drinking beers, pushing baby strollers with plastic lids so the babies stayed warm and snug inside.
The city was as busy as noontime but it was late at night.
In the shops, we talked with the clerks although we could not understand each others' languages.
The language of shopping is universal, an esperanto.
Everything was cheap and beautiful.
We found our hotel and headed for the bar, where we sat in upholstered corners and ate (not drank) cups of hot chocolate so thick they were as pudding.
Hot, rich and thick - eaten with a spoon and a surreptitious finger.
We slept despite the stuffy heat of the rooms and the late-night noisiness of the streets below.
The next day, we dutifully toured the castle, swallowing all of its anticipated features with our eyes and noses and ears - moat, quartered gardens, richly decorated walls, pointed arches so finely carved they were like lace.
We toured the cathedral as well. We admired the frescoes. We gazed respectfully at the shrine. We selected brochures.
We walked through the streets near the cathedral, where the local people walked purposefully, on their way to appointments, or to meet friends for lunch, or to buy gifts, or to push their babies in strollers, more plastic-lidded strollers.
We entered a shop. A glove shop. The sort of shop they don't have in America. The perimeter of the shop was lined in drawers, possibly fifty or more drawers, small drawers. Each drawer held a different style of glove. All of the gloves were made locally, by craftsmen, out of the softest skins.
In this shop, the customer didn't select her own gloves to finger the leather and fondle the lining. There was a shopkeeper, a glove seller, and she selected the gloves for you.
She examined our hands and considered the shapes of our fingers, the tone of our skin, the length of our wrists, and she selected gloves for us to try on.
I did not buy any gloves. My hands always feel confined in gloves. I like to feel the air on my palms and in between my fingers.
We left the shop, and then we all decided to split up for a few hours, to wander around without the agendas or the influences or the chatter of our companions. We picked a time and place to meet again.
I walked down the avenue where the glove shop was located, and found my way back to the square where the cathedral was located.
There were statues and monuments, grand buildings, and many people, people whose faces and names and voices I did not know nor would ever, likely, know.
There was a river on the other side of the buildings, and thick billows of fog rolled into the square from this river.
Strange, that in a city in the middle of a desert, there was fog, but there was fog. It wrapped itself around me.
I realized, in that moment, standing in the middle of a square surrounded by fog and hundreds of people, that I was alone, and I realized, in that moment, that I had never really been alone.
I realized, in that moment, that I liked being alone, like that, free to wander, not obligated to chatter, not required to do or say anything to anyone, or to be anyone other than the young woman in the coat in the fog who walked through the square.
And then I realized, in that moment, that I was not alone at all, I was part of something much greater. I felt at peace and though I was alone, I felt some sort of love, or the promise of love. It came upon me quickly, like the fog, and then it rolled away again.
This was a moment in my life when I was at a crossroads, like I am now, not knowing what I would do in the future, or if there was promise or only regret ahead of me. I was nervous, but I was hopeful too.
The city seemed to send me a message in that moment - that there is more than you and you are part of it, but you must go to it, embrace it, don't let it roll away like the fog.
I left Zaragoza after only one night and one morning. I never saw the city again. I went on, with the others, to Madrid, and then south.
Later I met a man, on a plane, and we talked, and I felt at peace after feeling frantic and uncertain. His name was Paco. He was slight and blond and wore glasses. He was on his way to Madrid and then to Copenhagen. But he lived in Zaragoza. His face warmed when I told him I had just been there, and how beautiful it seemed, how peaceful, how much I had liked the way I felt when I walked there.
We left the plane and as we separated to take our different flights, he reached his hand out to me.
He removed his glove.
He took my hand and squeezed it gently, and looked into my face, and said goodbye.
He put his glove back on his hand and turned and walked down the corridor to his plane, to Denmark.
I never saw him again.
I never went back to Zaragoza.