By the Waters of Seville

After I’d turned in my application to study in Seville, Spain during the spring of my sophomore year, I became less and less sure that I wanted to go. I lived in the Language House that fall and coming home to my roommates at the end of a long day almost felt like coming home to family. I wondered how I’d gotten so lucky with the rooming assignment. Our neighbors would drop by our apartment unannounced sometimes and we could do the same and it was never weird. I’d also finally gotten used to working at my school's newspaper and had started to make friends on staff.

“Meant to say this earlier but just wanted you to know you’ve been killing it—you’re on a lot of great stories and you keep pitching great ideas! Keep it up!” my editor, Taylor, messaged me once. It made my day.

We had a roll party in the newsroom toward the beginning of the semester, a rare opportunity to see my coworkers as potential new friends. I didn’t know what to expect. Taylor was happy to see me and my friend from the news desk I'd also come with, particularly because only editors usually came to these sorts of things. Not writers.

“I want you guys to be friends and I want us to be friends!” she said.

I did too. So much that I almost didn’t want to go to Spain anymore.

A few days before I was supposed to hear back from Education Abroad as to whether I’d been accepted, my advisor emailed me saying I needed another rec letter.

“I hope it works out for you, but I don’t want you to leave,” my roommate, Sarit, said as we slumped on the couch that evening.

Someone caring that much made me not want to go even more. If my freshman year Spanish professor could turn in the letter quickly enough, great. If I got rejected from the study abroad program, that would be okay, too. I had so many reasons to stay.

A couple days later, I found out I’d gotten in. Sarit gave me a congratulatory hug when I told her.

“But I’m gonna miss you so much next semester,” she said.

On Reading Day, I met with an editor who had also studied abroad in Seville to discuss a story I was working on.

“Are you excited for Seville?” Ellie asked me conversationally, sitting down at the table I’d snagged in the back of Starbucks.

“Sort of!” I replied.

“Only sort of?”

I told her everything—things I hadn’t yet been able to articulate about how great my roommates were, how I’d grown so much as a reporter that semester and how everything was so good here that I didn’t want to leave it.

“Your friends will still be here when you come back. Your sources and this story will still be here when you come back,” Ellie said. “Yeah, life goes on, but it doesn’t change that much.”

I lost count of how many times I choked back tears. You’re a kid, she said. I’m a kid. We all need a break. When I had to leave, she told me if I freak out when I get to Seville, I can always call her.

One of the first things I did after I arrived in Seville and unpacked was freak out. I went on a short walk to the Guadalquivir River and called my mom. It was only about 8:00 in the morning in Maryland, so I didn’t want to risk waking Ellie.

I was miserable for the first week or so, then on a Wednesday or Thursday night, things finally began to fall into place when I went to a bar with my new roommate, and a few of her friends I had a class with. That weekend, we also went to Brussels and I began to fully appreciate being in Europe for a whole semester. But when I came back, I had to adjust to Seville all over again.

It’ll get better, I told myself. It’s still only been two weeks.

A few weeks later, I almost lost hope that I could ever like it in Seville. That weekend, I went with a few friends to a huge carnival in a city called Cádiz and forgot about everything else. Multiple inside jokes came from that night and things were better the following week. The weekend after, I went to Portugal with some friends and I hadn’t laughed that hard or been that happy since I’d come to Spain. But I would always go back to square one when I returned to Seville after a weekend of traveling.

Weeks passed. There were times when I was genuinely happy—I was at my happiest when I was traveling—but most days, I could take or leave my experience in Seville. There weren’t people who made it that worth it and if I hadn’t gotten to travel around Europe, I wouldn’t know what I’d missed. I thought I was born to study abroad. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would. And this was supposed to be a magical place, the best semester of my life. Maybe thinking it would be paradise ruined it for me. With an expectation that high, it’s almost guaranteed to fall short.

But I didn’t know why my experience was falling short. Maybe it was that my Spanish wasn’t improving as much as I wanted, or the four Maryland students who had given all ten of us a bad reputation, or that I hadn’t really gotten to know any Spaniards besides my host mom and teachers or that I hated every minute of my internship, which I did for at least six hours a week.

I noticed my personality deteriorating. If I couldn’t express myself well enough in Spanish and a teacher patiently waited for me to rephrase, I’d immediately get so frustrated, I’d give up trying to say anything. I would show up a minute or two later every day to the internship I despised but wasn’t allowed to drop and left a minute or two earlier every day. I noticed my tone and demeanor with my internship advisor wasn’t nearly as kind as what he deserved—I just couldn’t help it. I think I gave him more trouble than all of the other interns combined, though he never showed it. And I hated the Spanish custom of watching TV during meals so much, I almost didn’t know what to do until I didn’t have it in me to care anymore.

One day I accidentally arrived to my psychology class before anyone else. My teacher tried to chat with me and asked how everything was going, how I liked Seville. As soon as there was a lull in the conversation after he asked how it compared to what I expected, I slipped out of the room. Those questions were too personal, even when they were asked in Spanish. I definitely had some friends in my program I’d talk about those things with, but half the time, I only wanted attention from the labrador retriever who didn’t even always acknowledge me when I visited him at a souvenir shop near my school. That was something else that bothered me about Spain—there were dogs everywhere, but it wasn’t socially acceptable to pet them and they didn’t seem to want to be petted anyway.

I tried to spend as much time either at school or walking around the city as possible. There's a psalm that roughly translates to “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept as we remembered thee, O Zion.” A new version of the psalm popped into my head one day as I was sitting by the Guadalquivir: “By the rivers of Seville, there we sat and wept as we remembered thee, O College Park.” It was a bit dramatic. Especially because I’d chosen to be there and I wasn’t exiled. Even on good days, I liked to sit there and write or watch the sunset, if I could make it there at the right time. Sometimes I’d botellón and go there at night with my friends and drink Tinto de Verano, the unofficial official wine of Seville.

There was also a park where I liked to go and write that was on the way to my internship, Parque Maria Luisa. The only thing that seemed to help even a little was writing, so there were days in a row where I’d journal twice a day, one time usually being at that park or somewhere outside and the other time being before bed. But then I had to make a conscious effort to go to the park on days that I wasn’t interning so I wouldn’t associate it with my internship.

When I go back now to that part of my journal, I can see that as I neared the end of the semester, I was essentially writing the same thing over and over, just with a few anecdotes thrown in from that particular day. I was unhappy, I wrote. I wanted to go home or back to Maryland, I wrote. I missed everything and everyone. When finals week started, I counted how many tests and essays stood between me and my dog. By the middle of finals week, I started counting down the hours and I started to find some hope.

On the last night of the semester after we’d all finished finals, nearly everyone from my program ended up at the same place by the river for one last botellón. It was May, but that night was unseasonably cold. A lot of people cried when they said goodbye to their friends. I thanked my friends for helping me survive a couple classes I didn’t like and tried not to seem too excited about my flight in four hours.