People come, people go. So goes the line in the movie Grand Hotel. And so goes our lives.

In Seattle, where I lived most of my adult years, I established friendships, some close, some casual. I saw some of those friends move to different cities, while new people came into my life as a result of work, writing, or mutual friends. I’ve accepted the often transitory nature of relationships. But I’ve also learned that whether long or short, the time I’ve had with a person is one-of-a-kind and unrepeatable. Rather than mourn the loss, I view the entire experience as an amplification of myself, the accumulated interactions condensed to a lasting spark tucked away in the physiology of me. The more people I meet, the more I expand in tucked-away sparks.

Málaga is a city of tourists, travelers, short-stays, international students, people who call themselves expats, and others like me who refer to themselves as immigrants. There’s lots of coming and going in this city and I’ve learned to accept that people I am drawn to and spend time with might one day move on and away from Málaga. The most recent example is the beautiful, young, smart, and adventurous Spanish teacher whose small-group class I’ve attended since last fall. A natural teacher, Angela always made her classes lively and linguistically challenging, the conversations she initiated with us reflecting her philosophical bent. At only twenty-five, Angela has the poise, aplomb, and introspection of someone much older. She’s from Cordoba, a city she clearly loves, but she’s also a wanderer and adventurer, and we, her adoring students, are losing her to the wandering and adventuring her soul craves. She’s off to Thailand and thereafter a stint on a cruise ship. China is her eventual goal, and she has been preparing for it by learning Chinese.

Though we cheer her on in her pursuit of experiencing and embracing the world, we are bereft at her departure. But we are also thankful that the void she leaves will be ably and affably filled by Sebastián from whom I’ve been taking private classes since coming to Málaga. In the photo above, the two brilliant teachers and delightful human beings Angela and Sebastián are flanked by me and Fiona, a recent friend who has become one of my favorite people. I suspect I’m not the only one who considers her in this regard. Art lover and art maker, Fiona is fun and funny, charming and candid. As they say in Spain, tiene un buen rollo. I’m happy that she has happened into my life and that she is making Málaga her home after living many years in nearby Ronda.

I’m also thrilled to have finally connected with Inés, a neighbor who is from Bilbao in Northern Spain. I would on occasion run into her in the elevator in the building where we both used to live. At the time, she was only spending part of the year in Málaga and the rest of the time in Bilbao where she taught Euskera and Spanish. Now that she’s in Málaga year-round, we finally in recent months started to arrange coffee dates so she could practice her English, and I could practice my Spanish. Being from the north, her accent is different and much easier to understand than that of the Malagueños. I deeply appreciate the gentle but direct way she corrects my grammar, because, honestly, I love grammarians. And Inés is a rich source for learning about Spanish culture. She’s also informed me that she likes to talk politics and “odia a Trump.” Common ground!

Just as important as meeting new friends in Spain is meeting old friends from the States who are traveling in Spain. When I lived in Seattle, one of the ways friends and acquaintances entered my life was through writing residencies. In 2015, I spent eighteen days at Ragdale among a lovely group of artists. It happens often in such situations that you experience several weeks of sharing laughs, conversation, and work, a kind of intimacy that later settles into Facebook likes and occasional brief and rushed sightings at AWP conferences. But sometimes life conspires (and you enthusiastically conspire with it) to reunite for a sparkling four hours in Madrid, which is where I met up with poet Virginia Bell and her husband Ben after they completed a Sevilla-to-Granada bike tour. I took the train up from Málaga for drinks and dinner with them. It had been ten years since we’d been able to have an in-person conversation that was more than a fleeting hello in the crowded and limiting space of a writing conference bookfair. But over rooftop drinks in the Círculo de Bellas Artes we were chatting as if we’d seen each other yesterday. It was my first time meeting Ben, a total delight.

It was the kind of evening I savor for catching up on the present, musing about the future, and getting glimpses of the past. For instance, Virginia spent a year in Madrid as a university student studying Spanish Literature. I could immediately picture this lovely woman as a twenty-year-old, ethereal and poetic, browsing bookstores, sipping a cerveza in a bar, roaming narrow stone streets named for Siglo de Oro dramatists, and continuing to assemble all the molecules for the poet, memoirist, editor, and teacher she would become.

Here you can read about Virginia’s work, including her latest poetry collection Lifting Child From the Ground, Turning Around, her co-editorship of RHINO Poetry, and her co-editorship of the forthcoming anthology The Overturning. (Disclosure: I have an essay in that anthology.)