"Al otro lado del mar"

SABERA AHSAN 

In 2001 I decided to leave Spain after 5 years and head back to England, but buried within me lay a unwavering hope that had led me there in the first place.  A hope that took me from a northern English town to a sleepy hilltop Balearic village, and then to mainland Spain and finally back to the shores of England again.
       
        In September 2001 I found myself in the sleepy Victorian seaside town of Eastbourne.  There was no going back to the north of England and its frozen enclosed suburban towns. The thought made me choke. Once a newly married bride fresh out of university but now slightly older and wiser with a failed marriage behind me.  With hope that in the Iberian Peninsula lay all the dreams of new love and a thousand possibilities of passion. Cafe con leche in el Cafe Milano o el Cafe Paris where my heart beat uncontrollably at the possibility of a new “encuentro” and the kisses and caresses that came with that first shy look and a few awkward words .
       
       Unaware of the adventures across the plains of La Mancha that awaited me, the black mountains and frozen rivers of Asturias and desert lands of Levante, where every journey led you to the same place – the sea. How could anyone with a soul ever forget the unstoppable sand dunes of la Costa de la Luz, where the beaches never end and the sun never ceases to glisten its mercurial charm and where Spain finally comes to its majestic conclusion and emerges as a strange exotic dark continent?  Daring to peek into my rear view mirror I recall the raging Atlantic waters and the magical winding mountain roads of Santander where both the wild silver sea and the sky had become one and the same. It was this journey that brought me and my little gold Toyota car to the first shores of Spain in the autumn of 1996.
   
       One September morning in 1997 as the last of the summer sun had already started to fade and village fiestas along the Mediterranean coast line had long past, on a huge cine screen from a Balearic ferry service I crossed the unforgiving Mediterranean, Valencia bound from the port of Palma de Mallorca. Witnessing the carriage of Lady Diana’s body across London brought about a strange melancholic ache in my soul, of life long forgotten. England was in mourning and my heart was still broken, dreams and flashback of my Mallorcan village boy that I had left behind invades my very core. So many words unsaid and kisses that never came to pass.

        Even though I had left Spain a long time ago I never forgot that feeling of when Europe stopped and a new world began and it always filled me with both fear and an uncontrollable excitement, the thousand paths your life can take when you step into the abyss of the unknown. Leaving England a life time ago, a woman child who had made a mistake and taken the wrong path and tried to rectify that path had meant abandoning all that I knew, stuffing everything into my gold Toyota Corolla and beginning my search for new love and sense of belonging again as an adult woman in the Mediterranean country I loved so much.

       After leaving the paved streets and winding rivers of Asturias after two years and a relationship that was now just causing me pain, I let the last of the summer breeze carry my heart to Alicante and allowed it to land one September morning in a school. As I chatted away in my newly polished Spanish a tall skinny man saw my flowing black Brazilian hair and decided that amongst a crowd of excited but reticent new teachers I was the one.  After two years together and eventually following him back to England, to those quiet shores of Eastbourne, I now struggle to even remember any detail of the year we spent together. Finally he left me for a far away world in the east, he too full of hope and dreams of a new love that would fill him with joy and excitement – the kind of love you feel when you are 21 again. His parting words as he left me were: “That was the river. This is the sea”.

        So I found myself teaching a 1960’s prefab hut where the old worn carpet smelt of urine, and became lost and bewildered as to how I had ended up back in England, in the town where people come to retire and die.  Survival meant casting my mind back to the warm, bright, white washed Mediterranean school, the bright red uniforms the call of Miss Asana at every corner and pillar in the school court yard. Long sunset walks along the sandy beach, the constant buzz of evening revellers and new food franchises at every corner as the sun set while Balerares just beckoned beyond the shore’s horizon.

       Every cold desolate morning I woke up in the new exile known as the “quinto pino” of England’s south coast. I would stand on the beach look over the English Channel and reflect on the last five amazing years in beloved Spain, the land that always and continues to bring to me the hope of love, passion and adventure. The longing to cross over the sea to France and then Europe but I couldn’t, I no longer had the strength in me to do it alone. Then it struck me why Eastbourne of all places in England? Remembering how the years had passed standing on the edge of Spain, the very end of Europe and looking on toward the beginning of a new continent - Africa. So the south coast, the very outer limits of England and beyond its shores, lay France and then Spain the rest of Europe.  After heart break after heart break, all the love that had been lived and the trail of broken hearts left behind.  Still waiting, patiently at the very edge of where England ends and Europe begins and hoping and praying that one day he would come and take me once again to “al otro lado del mar”.