It was a dusty place for the most part but it had tacky neon lights and cool reptiles of all sorts. I liked it. I was there on a mission to survive, so that land was as good as any other. One day, after work, I went to the local bar to hav…

This movie title 'Reality bites' just popped up in my head. The 90's. A bunch of good-looking Hollywood actors in lumberjack shirts pretending they had problems, dancing in gas stations. I must have watched that movie in awe as a teenager …

Pouring it down. Four floors above some tiny street of downtown Madrid. 1:50 p.m. A boat's cockpit, a few windowed square meters that the landlord stole from the terrace, that's the kitchen there (or what my roommates call a testing ground…

I can't write today. I'm in a rush. In a couple of hours I'm leaving for another town. My sister is getting married. I'll give a speech at the ceremony. I've already read it to three people. The three of them cried. I think that means it's…

At first he didn't know who I was. My sunglasses, my ponytail. He looked at my trainers. "You are 'la' Carmen, right?" It was fictional to return to that place and see how almost every leaf was untouched. A van with a scary clown sprayed o…

The odd couple exists beyond Jack Lemmon and Neil Simon. It actually is a natural phenomenon going on at my flat now. Enough of perfect matching souls, wedding ribbons and better halves. We’ve seen too many of them throughout our lives. I’…

Rob was white-brown-black. He had a hole in his leg and something going on in his ear that made him unable to keep balance, avoid idiots and jump on time to fall with elegance. I never cared. In winters, he liked to sit on the couch beside…

Last night. Four people of an uncertain age in a car heading to the movie theater. A figurine of Jabba the Hutt hanging from the rearview mirror. Average percent of brain usage barely reaching 10 point 01. Let’s name them Do, Re, Mi and Fa…

The difficult slope. That’s what I named it. It was two hundred meters away from my house. Just a cut in the ground, an ascending wall of mud delimiting a sunny field of daisies from the shady forest of cypresses that crowned our side of t…

Living on the highest floor of a building has some drawbacks, especially if it’s August, a hand fan is the only way you have to cool down, and half the day southern sunbeams paint the rooftop yellow. Also you may sometimes find the lift bu…

When I was little, my siblings and I used to play a game called ‘The dictionary’. The rules were easy. Someone picked a word, quite a complicated one, and wrote down its official meaning on a piece of paper. The rest of us had to compose a…

10:00 a.m.; tomato on toast; juice made out of one and a half oranges; demitasse of dark coffee; me having breakfast at any coffee shop. Breaking news in the local newspaper: It has been proven that Averroes changed the path of trending to…

It was my second year at college, my friend Rosa and I lived in the downtown area of a cute city in Southern Spain. It was a neighborhood full of college buildings, bookstores, coffee shops and used clothing tents. The music conservatory w…

I posted a note on the fridge some months ago: ‘Leaving for skipping robe. I’ll be done at 3 p.m. Save some cake for me.’ This note, which was wickedly intercepted by the girlfriend of one of my roommates, generated quite a stir by the tim…

My brother Manuel was taking what we call a year off from his major. It was not a gap year, like Americans would say, but an Erasmus scholarship program, which in terms of leisure is pretty much the same. This kind of option, that I never …

Whenever I meet J. Cano I know he’ll be carrying some gadgets of extremely high value. Last time, he was carrying a tiny cute drawing pad from which he instantly uploads his scrawl. I can’t forget the first time I saw an iMac computer comi…

12th of September, Philosophy and Letters campus, green building, second floor, 3:50 pm. Eyes and hands moving at an incredibly high speed between the papers in my folder. I’m searching for a concept. Never figured out it was going to be l…

That was an odd meeting: my middle sister, her childhood sweetheart, my aunt Encarnita, and I, on a windy summer afternoon, borrowing my father's rickety van and going for no reason to one of the most hostile beaches of the region. Sometim…

If I had to describe someone who I admire, I would probably talk about Diego. Diego lives close to the train station of a grumpy southern town. He likes waking up early, combing his unkempt eyebrows and allowing his feet to gently guide hi…

Don Gonzalo was the name of the feared Spanish teacher that we got in sixth grade. He was not exactly a Spanish teacher himself, though he was definitely Spanish; I mean, from Spain. What I am trying to say is that his professional field w…

Good roommates are a rare species. They hide in the most unexpected flats, usually in inhospitable districts, dwelling in the smallest rooms, sharing their orange juice and living peaceful lives. For the last years I’ve had a bunch of room…

If I had the opportunity to travel to the past, just one trip would not be enough to satisfy my ambitions. There are so many D dates to witness, so many lost cities and so many cool people to meet, that I don’t even know where to start. Bu…

What am I going to do this weekend? Well, this is the only prompt that I feel qualified to explain, and not exactly because of my excitement before the amazing plan ahead in the next days. I’m struggling with something, something that drys…

The expression “Never, never give up” is that kind of sentence you get to hear usually in the worst moments of your life. Or at least, that has been my case. That may be the reason that I have associated certain negative connotations with …

If I could change one thing about my hometown it would be the road that divided it in two. I grew up in a small village on the northwestern Mediterranean coast. It was one of those holiday spots full of people in summer and empty for the r…

A couple of weeks back, I had a meeting with Luna, one of my best friends from our college days. She was carrying a fruit box full of books. It was what she calls her “feminist library”. In the past, I saw her all the time reading that kin…

Learning a foreign language can be one of the biggest adventures of your lifetime. At least, that’s been my case. I remember when I was nine years old and I had my first English lesson in my homeland, everything seemed so colourful and eas…