I give you back to yourself.

Some days fall apart pieces at a time. You wake up late after 5 hours of restless sleep. You're all out of cereal because you ate it for dinner last night because you were too tired to cook. You barely make the train to work. You arrive drenched in sweat. Your school leaves on the field trip without you. The classes you go in search of to teach instead are canceled for standardized testing the principal forgot to tell you about. Your lesson plans are a wash. And the kids are still gypsy devils, you still don't understand the language, you still have to climb the mountain to work, your sneakers are still busted,....and you can feel yourself crumbling through it all. Sitting in the dust of a destroyed self you think, throw it all away, the day, the mood, the experience. Fuck it.

And then someone comes up and gives back to you a piece of your day. Suddenly with that one piece, you find that you can rebuild, you can pull yourself together and go on.

Mari-Carmen was that sly ally who snuck up and shocked me with kindness. It was the final hour of the day, I'd been bumped from a class again for testing, so I retreated to the teacher's conference room to see if I could get the internet working on 1 of our schools 2 computers. While I was finagling, in peeks a head. MariCarmen. She smiles awkwardly, like she's interrupting me and I beckon her in, saying it's a common room. MariCarmen is kind of new...she came a few months ago, as she still has yet to take her teacher exam, so she's on 'teacher in training' rotation, if you will, throughout Andalucia. MariCarmen, you should know, is the music teacher, very very Andalucian (ie has the thickest accent of ALL the teachers), is drop dead gorgeous and very commanding (ie. she can yell). Aka the typical intimidating Spanish woman.

I expected her to ignore me, as usual. But after a few moments of half hearted test grading she looks at me and says, "I just can't, I don't want to grade tests at all" I laugh and say, of course, look outside, it's beautiful, temptation to go is too powerful.

Then we had an hour conversation.

I've never had a conversation longer that 15 minutes with ANYONE in my school. I'm the odd foreigner, no matter how nice of a person I am, I'm the American. Off limits. Black listed if you will, humored, but rarely taken very seriously.

In the shock and awe of surviving the conversation (and subsequent walk out of school after the bell rang to town where we parted) I learned that MariCarmen was a friend I should have been quicker to make. She's only 24, terrified by teaching alone, is outrageously stressed by her students, is overwhelmed and unsure, lonely and eager to find a place in Los Llanos (our school). A mirror of myself.

I thought, maybe the catch phrase, "misery knows no company" isn't quite right, because I finally found a voice to laugh with over horror of the job. Oddly enough, in learning how unsure someone else was in their job, I got a jolt of confidence, as if to say, damn, if no one really knows how to go about this, then I'm just going to do what I can, expectations aside, ad-hoc it is.

[And it felt really good to know that the kids dis-respected a Spainard, not just me.]

We'll see if she talks to me again, but at least now I know that there's a scared 24 year old wandering the halls with me, hopefully I can give her back a piece of her broken experience or perhaps I'll just emphathize with her over our shifting terrain and the fault lines that threaten our sense of purpose.