ON GIRONA OR GERONA, DEPENDING ON WHAT MAP YOU READ; or YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING UNTIL YOU START WALKING

On the ramparts of the old city, we walked past dewdrops attached to the tips of branches like wet light bulbs while a bird laughed from some treetop. From here we saw the great park, rising redheaded above the rooftops, and we studied the cathedral we would have visited just to see the widest nave in the world but you had to pay to see it. As if the Church wasn't rich enough. At the market in the great park, I got a little box of saffron, tiny glowing orbs of citrus whose name I�ve forgotten, and xurros we ate from a greasy paper cone as we strolled among the gallant plane trees. Although I don't like taking pictures as much as I used to (when a camera was as innocent as I thought my eyes were), I snapped a flick of a bunch of mylaar balloons, dancing in the breeze while attached to a high branch by the knot that bound them together. Later we returned to the park where the moon was a luminous white balloon caught in the barren treetops. We tagged on electrical boxes and on the doors of municipal buildings, avoided suspicious lurkers (who were probably as suspicious of us), and went under a bridge to paint again before hopping over a river to the rest of town, walking past housing complexes, a big bingo compound, and some parking lots, before I paused to demonstrate to Jimmy on how to crush a man's trachea. We saw where the rivers met and by then I couldn't wait to return home.




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