Una Caja de Sorpresas (Y Recuerdos)

I found my Spain box yesterday. When I got home from Sevilla I made a scrapbook (no, it was three scrapbooks, but still....) and put a lot of things in a photo storage box. I didn't want to cut them up and I wanted to be able to hold them in my hands, so I put them in the box to keep them safe. When I moved out of my parents' house, though, I left it behind somehow and hadn't been able to find it since. I was devastated. We're talking about some really precious and valuable things, and I had no idea where they could be. I asked my mom if she had seen them anywhere in my room, which has since become her craft room and home to her parakeets. I looked in the attic, more than once. I looked all over their house and couldn't find it anywhere. It was one of those things that I desperately wanted to find but didn't want to think about, because it literally broke my heart to think that I had lost it.

I found it in their attic yesterday, though, and was ecstatic. It was in this trunk full of stuff that I had left in my room - old teddy bears, stuffed animals, and the like - sitting right on top, waiting for me to find it. I don't know how it got there or if it had been there the whole time, and I don't care. The important thing is that I found it.

As soon as I found it I rushed back down from the attic and sat in my parents' living room like a little kid opening her stocking on Christmas morning - I had the contents of the box strewn all over the floor, reading over every note, every napkin, every brochure. I held every Spanish coin as if it were solid gold, and noted the details of each as though I had never seen them before. Notes from my senora, napkins from literally all over the world (well, pretty close), sugar packets, receipts, bus tickets, train tickets, plane tickets, travel itineraries..... I was right back in that period of my life for a little while. Best of all, the whole box smelled just like Spain. Don't ask me how, but it all smelled just like my room and my apartment when I lived there. My room and my apartment on el Calle de Radio Sevilla, right by el Rio Guadalquivir, right around the corner from La Plaza de Armas..... I was there again, just from the smells and the sights I found in that box. It was una caja de sorpresas, as Alejandro says, and it was wonderful. I'm so glad to have it back. When it was missing, I felt like someone who had lost a section of her memory but who was told there was something important she was supposed to remember and cherish. One of those sad scenes from the movies where people say to the woman who just awoke from a coma, "You don't remember?" and then they turn sadly to those around them and say, "She doesn't remember. I'm sorry." But I knew there was something important and special I was supposed to remember, but I couldn't remember it in its entirety and its fullness because it was, literally, missing. Now that it's back, though, I have it all back, and I can cherish and hold onto it all and discover it all anew. I knew it's really materialistic and probably kinda shallow to feel that way, but Spain was, for me, such a time of self-discovery and enlightenment, and I wouldn't trade the experience, the memories, or the trinkets for anything in the world.