I don't know what brought it on, nor when it started. But it was Monday when I noticed it. This huge bout of despondency and apathy had come a-knocking to my door, let itself in, and plonked itself on the couch, without so much as a shall I put the kettle on from me. For the whole week, all I wanted to do was stay in bed. All day. Nothing interested me - not class, not fencing, not anything. Only negative thoughts inhabited my brain - all I could do with myself was make unfavourable comparisons to other people. She's on Erasmus and has more friends than me, he's more dedicated to learning the language than me, they've got better social lives than me, and so on and so forth. The only thing I can say is that if Last Week's Livi had met 13 Year Old Livi, they would have been fantastic companions for one another in total lack of self-esteem. Except Last Week's Livi didn't just have that to worry about - I also was concerned about money and budgeting, something I'm not used to at all, and my bank balance is screaming out for me to manage it better. An extension of that is getting a part-time job here to ease the pressure a bit, and a summer job in Ireland or elsewhere to give me something to do for the summer (as well as finance my fun for the summer). Add to that all the expectations that I was heaping on myself as regards college work and making the most of my ever-shortening time here in Barcelona, and the result is not pretty in the slightest.
Still, I trucked on. I went to all of my classes, did all of my homework, went to the gym, did my laundry, cooked my food, all pretty normal and standard stuff, but it taxed me much more than usual and I didn't get the normal amount of enjoyment out of it. And then something happened to lift me out of all of this.
It was Friday, and I had toyed with the idea of going to a concert all week. The plus side was that it wasn't expensive, and it was only a five-minute walk from my house, and it was Fran Healy - the lead singer of Travis, my favourite band when I was 11/12, and thus a huge player in the formation of my musical interests throughout my teenage years and right up to now. The drawback was that I had to go alone, and that made it unappealing given my already disaffected outlook on everything. But I pushed myself. I made a plan to buy my ticket on the way to the gym, and despite everything in the world telling me not to buy that ticket (bad weather, the guy in Fnac first mistaking the name of the venue and then not accepting my voucher or my card, the ATM in Fnac rejecting both of my cards, the invisible ATM in El Corte Inglés, having to trek all around the shopping centre to find a working ATM, the lack of Fran Healy's actual CD in Fnac for me to prepare for the gig), I bought the damn ticket. I gave the two fingers to the universe and told it I had had enough, and that my depression was to get the hell off my couch and out of my house.
So that night I strolled on down to Sala BeCool, and slid past a security guard that wasn't even the slightest bit interested in the fact that I had a DSLR in my bag and I would be taking photos all night (in Razzmatazz they're not cool with that, neither are they in Palau Sant Jordi). The support act was good, a young American guy in bare feet and a wifebeater singing about how his girlfriend didn't want him to cry, she didn't want a man, she wanted a stone. And then Fran Healy came on. And instantly, the second he started to sing and tell jokes and stories about the background of his songs, songs that had meant so much to me when I was younger and still mean so much to me today, everything lifted. He was singing all his new songs from his solo album mixed in with old songs that reminded me of being in primary school and the girls in my class making fun of me for liking Travis and not Westlife, of getting their third album The Invisible Band for my 12th birthday, of burning their next album from my best friend when I was fifteen, of welling up when listening to certain tracks from my favourite of their albums, of being seventeen and my first and only time seeing the band perform and how we interrupted their soundcheck, of the burning disappointment of their latest album, and of earlier that day, cycling down Avinguda Diagonal and listening to their back catalogue on shuffle. This was the band I grew up to, and I realised that as long as this guy with the stupid hat and the grey stubble and the Scottish accent was still making music, I would still be listening to it, and I would still be growing up. All those stupid worries from the last week vanished as I took photos of my childhood hero and sang along to songs that he had written when he was my age.
I have a bit of a reputation for being a total groupie at the best of times, and true to form I stuck around after the show to see if I could meet Mr Healy. In the past I've waited upwards of an hour and a half to meet a musician, sometimes in the freezing cold (Franz Ferdinand), sometimes in the rain (KT Tunstall), sometimes in the back room of Cyprus Avenue for two hours and they don't show up (Fight Like Apes). After two hours of playing onstage, Fran Healy didn't give himself a break at all, and didn't even put down his guitar before he started signing tickets and taking photos and shaking hands and making small talk. Still, I waited about twenty minutes. I told him how Sing was probably the first single I ever bought, and how I had been feeling low lately but that night had really cheered me up, he signed my ticket, I shook his hand, we took a photo together, and I went home.
On Sunday I went to the gym. When I cycle down Diagonal on a Sunday morning, the cycle path is jammers with families on bikes and scooters and rollerblades and skateboards - apparently you're nobody if you don't have three adorable children on wheels trailing after you. When I was cycling home, I stopped at the Law Department of the UB, where I used to take my politics classes, and I took my earphones out. Nothing. All the kids and the parents had gone home. There was no traffic on a six-lane road incorporating two tram lines that cuts through L'Eixample diagonally from the motorway out of Barcelona right down to the sea. The sun had come out after a drizzly morning. After I dropped back my bici, I had a think about the week I had. By any standards it was mediocre - nobody had died, I hadn't failed anything, I hadn't had any arguments with friends or boyfriend or family, I had a roof over my head and food in the house and a bit of money in my pocket, yet something had made that week different and important to me. And as I walked through the deserted streets of Sant Gervasi, with the afternoon sun shining dusty on the balconies of the apartments and the red bricks of the Mercat Galvany, and glinting off the lizard atop its weathervane, I realised that there is always going to be people to compare myself to, but that doesn't mean I should do it. Yes there are people who are also on Erasmus who might have mastered the language more than me, or made more friends than I have, but I couldn't help but feel that I wasn't wasting my time. I am content with my wanderings and my wonderings, my rambles and my ramblings.
I went home.
There was nobody on the couch.
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