Lazy Letter: Downtown
I have the fanciest bedroom here, you should come and see. Living in this bedroom makes me feel like I’m the queen or something. They say it’s a seventeen-century house. Murals and window frames, the way each owner of the house has added some type of decoration and has mentioned the year they lived here make it all a little bit romantic. It must be for the colors too, the creeky noise of the woods as you walk around the room. There’s a mirror in front of my bed, right in between two windows. I see my own reflection every morning as I sit up on the bed. That’s really the first thing I see every morning, I mean if we don’t count the murals around me, can’t keep my eyes off them anyway. I look at the trees and water and the paint that creates the illusion of the sand, I read the year of each painting, and wonder how come all these paintings contain some type of body of water. Then I sit up, and I see myself. It’s something that a queen would do, I guess.
It takes me a while to discover the area, to know what’s what and where’s where, which paths would lead me home, which one is the longest, and which one is my favorite. I enjoy walking by that factory wall that faces the ruins and that empty land. I’m not sure if it’s a factory or not, but it looks so! That wall reminds me of my grandparents’ house, mostly my grandpa who loved poetry, and how they had this tall wall on one side of the alley. He said it’s a factory. I didn’t get to investigate more, or ever have a look on the other side of the wall.
Visually speaking, this town is not very appealing. It’s surrounded by farmlands, empty, yellow, and brown lands. If it rains, they say, the area turns green; looking forward to seeing that! I took a walk around the small forest nearby. The map calls it a forest, but it wasn’t really a forest, more like bushes and sad trees, plastic trash I saw here and there, and ruins and abandoned houses. It all made me feel so lonely if I have to be honest with you here. I decided to take a walk, give myself a break, and cheer up, but it only dragged me into deeper thoughts by the end of the walk.
Although, I have to say that I like the local community. We barely speak the same language, but still, they’re pretty welcoming, makes me feel like I’m a part of it. I step closer to the heart of the town as I meet more people, and make small talks with them. Young people mostly work in olive farms or the mine in the neighboring town. And old people take care of their gardens and chill all day. Not so many young people around anyway, they must’ve moved to bigger cities. This is probably the smallest town ever. You could walk from one side to the other end in about fifteen minutes. You could hear the church bells wherever you are. This church, unlike the one in the north, doesn’t play the melody before the rings, it’s only the bells swinging, and it rings past midnight too. The midnight is probably the most dramatic one. I catch myself in very random situations. Brushing my teeth, folding my clothes back in the closet, working at my computer, reading by the fireplace, putting my shoes on at my table, drinking, smoking, taking a piss, sipping water in the smoky smelly bar, walking down the empty streets, or sometimes even sitting, and doing nothing.
16.Nov.17 – Messajana, Portugal