Granada

I wrote this months ago and never finished it, but I figured if I have it I may as well publish it.


We only spent about a day and a half in Granada, but I had spent a couple of days here before in the middle of the summer when I studied abroad in Cadiz. I remember running along a river in the sweltering heat of the early morning and looking up at the mountain that contains the Al Hambra. Russell and I had made our Al Hambra reservations for the afternoon we arrived, and we decided to walk (or sometimes race) up the mountain to Al Hambra. We stopped for 2 euro tapas and ended up going up the back way through a beautiful residential neighborhood.

Fried Sardines... Yum

I thought that I had missed autumn while being in South Africa. Autumn is one of my four favorite seasons, as you saw from my post, and I was devastated to have missed it. When we got to the top of the hill, I realized that it was full fledged autumn in Granada. I didn't realize the trees in Spain were so similar to those at home. I started laughing and running around through the leaves, SO excited for the smell of fall and the sight of the wind sending leaves in various shades floating to the ground.

FALL!!!

The Al Hambra is one of the coolest parts of Spain's history. It was the last Islamic stronghold in Spain, and although it was used afterwards by Catholic monarchs, it still contains much of the Islamic design that its original residents cultivated.

If you ever go to the Alhambra, make sure to reserve your tickets online, as they only let in a certain amount of people every half an hour and it would be ridiculous to go all the way to Granada and not see what some people consider one of the 7 wonders of the world.

The Opposite of Loneliness

The link at the bottom of this page has popped up repeatedly over the past few days on my facebook newsfeed. So have many statuses remarking "Rest in Peace Marina Keegan." After the fourth or fifth time this link popped up, I decided to click on it, and I was absolutely blown away. This girl is phenomenal. She is a powerful writer, but not only that, you can see so much of her vibrant personality through her writing. She writes exactly what everyone else is feeling when they graduate, but don't have the skill or ability to put into words. Not only am I incredibly impressed, I think this girl is awesome. She's my wish friend. This link is her last editorial for the Yale Daily News, where she graduated from a couple of weeks ago. This column, which tragically talks about how she and her Yale classmates have so much lift ahead of them, is a truly real piece of writing. One that sits with you for days afterwards. She perfectly articulates exactly what I want out of my own life. What everyone wants out of life:

"We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats."

While driving down to the Cape with her boyfriend, their car mysteriously drifted off the highway, and Marina was declared dead on the scene. I can't even count the number of times I've driven down the Cape with friends. In fact, I did so just 3 hours before Marina did. Marina went to Buckingham Browne and Nicols, a high school very close to my own and whose students I spent a lot of time with in high school. Her boyfriend, Michael, who is thankfully said to be in stable condition, went to Regis High School in New York, a high school that also sends lots of students to Villanova. When someone so close in age and circumstance to you, as naturally selfish as we all are, we think about ourselves. So while Marina's column talks about the amount of life she and her classmates have left to live, all I can think about is how fragile mortality really is and how I am so unaware of its precariousness. These gifts that all of us already have, even at age 21, are so incredible, and most of the time we don't even notice them. Just as Marina says, we're all in this struggle toward the opposite of loneliness together. We're on the same team. So I wish i could thank Marina for calling all of this to my attention when I still have one year left to figure out all the stuff about undergrad that she already seems to get.

This column has gone viral because of the wisdom beyond her years that Marina expresses, as well as for the tragedy that followed its publishing. Marina was about to move on to a position as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker, and I like to think that if she hadn't passed away, I would've stumbled upon her eventually in some editorial or Pulitzer Prize winning book. But instead, I've stumbled upon her this way, and I can't help but pass on a little bit of her legacy in the little way that I can.

Read it: The Opposite of Loneliness (Click!)