We feel like we won the lottery, with an anxiety mixed with joy and disbelief in our sheer luck. The anxiety is the agony that strangles you when something is too good to be true, that it might not be true, after all, or that something bad could happen, will happen, must happen, that they won't accept the winning ticket and that the fortune will escape us. We didn't won the lottery. What happened is that we found our flat in Madrid, and it is, by all possible standards, literally the best flat in Spain.
It took us ages to find it, we've been looking for months (leaving at Elena's parents place in Tres Cantos meanwhile), and we met with many a deception of a great place fleeing in our face at the last moment. For this one, we acted swiftly, reserved it the first minute it popped up, paying three times the caution in the process, possibly four; today we visited and it was love at the first sight, something that surely never happens with online dating.
But here it is, when we climbed the stairs and reached the terrace, we met with Madrid, we met with Castilla, we met with Spain, we met with the World.
It is a 360° panoramic view, perched on the Plaza Mayor, with a vantage point on the mountains of the central system, covered by snow at this time of the year, with the Puerta del Sol so close, you could almost touch it, with the statue of Felipe III at your feet. I was overwhelmed by the view. I was dizzy, turning round and round around myself, from the Gran Via to the Royal Palace, to the Iglesia de Santa Cruz, to the Casa de Correos. Unable to be in awe by the sense that this could be ours, that we could be allowed to come back here, that we could leave a few stairs below, that we could sleep by the sky of the Plaza Mayor, I was feeling the urge to leave, to go down back in the flat itself and breathe again, and pray that please, let us stay here. We haven't signed yet... I am in constant fear that they will get it from us, that I won't be allowed to feel like meeting God again on the roof of Spain, that they won't let me be a bird, be a cloud, be the sky.