Barcelona

Barcelona doesn’t whisper to you. It grabs your collar, pulls you into the street, and says, 

Look. 

It was late afternoon, that hour when the city shifts gears - from sunlit postcards to something smoky, something with teeth. The tourists were still chasing Gaudí’s mosaic dreams, but I was tucked into a chipped metal chair outside a bar that looked like it hadn’t changed in fifty years. 

A place where the vermut comes with a slice of orange and the barkeep calls you jefe even if you’re clearly lost. 

I was near the cathedral when it started. No warning, no polite drizzle - just a gut-punch of thunder and a waterfall from the heavens. 

The tourists scattered like pigeons. I ducked under a stone archway already slick with rain, laughing like an idiot. 

Couldn’t help it. The kind of storm that makes you feel alive. 

I stayed there too long. Drenched. Shivering. Grinning like I’d been let in on some secret the city only tells when she’s wild and angry.

And when the storm passed, the air felt rinsed clean. Electric. I climbed the hill toward the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, not for the art - though I hear it’s good - but for the view. 

The steps were wet, the stone still holding the heat from the day, and by the time I reached the top, the sky was doing that ridiculous thing it does in this part of the world - turning lavender and gold like it’s trying to make you believe in redemption.