Thoughts Under a Bridge

155th day on the road. It suddenly occurs to me that, technically, I am an unemployed homeless man. With a motorcycle, a laptop, and a ChatGPT subscription.

I am sitting under a bridge crossing the Río Totalán, which at the moment is completely dry. I had mackerel with tomato and pasta for dinner, and the very first spoonful felt immediately comforting. The taste and smell were deeply familiar in an unfamiliar place.

I realize I haven’t cooked for several weeks. I think the last time was back at Sunrise Hostel in Tamraght. Since then, the journey has been mostly takeaways: meals eaten on the move, snack bars in Tétouan, a quick kebab in Tarifa yesterday. So this is the first proper dinner I have cooked since leaving the hostel.

It is a very peaceful evening here. I found this place by accident. I took a wrong turn and ended up on what is essentially a dry riverbed that seems to have become a sort of informal car park. A few camper vans are here. Dozens of pigeons are nesting under the bridge — noisy, restless, losing eggs, feeding their young, turning the concrete ceiling into a strange kind of aviary.

The first thing I noticed was clothes drying between the bridge pillars. Then I saw a tent with a lot of belongings around it, clearly suggesting someone had been staying here for longer. Brilliant spot. I still have a couple of hours of daylight, and I could cover some more distance today, but this place is too good.

The man in the tent turns out to be a Spanish man, perhaps around sixty years old, with a dog. He does not seem particularly happy that I chose this place, as if he quietly considers it his own territory, but he says it is okay if I stay for one night as his neighbor.

A kind of bond-off between homeless people, perhaps. But then again, why am I assuming he’s homeless? What do I actually know about him? Very little. He speaks a bit of Russian. He has a dog. Maybe tomorrow morning we will talk more.

[We didn’t. He didn’t seem interested. And he was enjoying watching videos on his tablet.]

To be honest, he does not look homeless at all. Why does he live here? It doesn’t look like he necessarily has to. That question circles back to me.

“Why am I doing this?” I ask myself, sitting in my camping chair and looking out at the peaceful valley: a few houses, parked cars, a lit window in one of the camper vans. I’m vaping after dinner, my belly full of pasta and later dry dates from Morocco. “Why exactly am I doing this?”

At first, my mind goes to the old dream — love. But I quickly tell myself I CANNOT be doing this to find a relationship. THIS is not how one arrives there.

[Or is it?]

I probe further: I am taking a break from work. But that’s only something recent. It has only been a year or so that my work has felt like it was sucking life out of me. Before that, I rarely had what most people would call a normal work life.

Suddenly my thoughts jump back many years. That day when I was checking my online banking while running low on cash. I discovered that I had been offered a pre-approved loan. I can still recall the exact emotional flavor of that moment. Appreciation. Validation. Recognition. Satisfaction.

‘This means I am doing well,’ I told myself. ‘This means I am becoming someone. This is what it should be like.’ I saw it as a sign that I was becoming a valuable part of an emerging market economy. As if I had entered the world I had wanted ever since I started working at eighteen or nineteen. I wanted to be a good member of society. Someone eligible for pre-approved loans.

[Those loans later brought enormous financial trouble. At one point, they were quite literally destroying my life. A constant feeling of being trapped. Pressure. Misery. Shame. Such a contrast to the strange happiness I felt when I first saw that loan offer years before!]

And now, I’m sitting under this bridge. Am I possibly escaping a competition? Have I simply quit the race to become ‘someone’? [Is there one, anyway?] Prematurely, maybe? Or worse, have I ultimately failed?”

This sounds a bit far-fetched. I had good jobs by my standards, and I had some by other people’s standards, too. It just didn’t seem to make full sense to me. That lifestyle — career, mortgage, social success, stability — never translated into happiness in any complete sense. But ultimately, one of the biggest absences in my life was simple and painfully human: I couldn’t settle into a stable relationship. Why? Many reasons. At the time, too many were unconscious. Unresolved tensions. Branches growing from the same tree: honesty issues, openness issues, private fears, difficulty speaking about intimacy. Escapism.

[The very things that Kind Phoenix Rises is now trying to heal.]

“Is it as simple as an inevitable outcome of the ever-present adventure calling? Was I born and raised to be one of the explorers? Finding new caves and hunting grounds for the tribe? Is this how I should deserve money and status?”

I’d love that. But that’s too much of a hero story to feel like a comfortable answer to me.

“So, why am I doing this?”

“Because I want to.”

“But why would I want this?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

I just know I am okay with doing this. And I am okay with not knowing why. There certainly will be moments when this answer hurts. Moments when not knowing will feel unbearable. When I will feel edgy, desperate, sad. Too lonely to bear. Maybe even crying. They inevitably come. But right now, tonight, under this bridge, with the Mediterranean air moving gently through the valley — it simply feels right.

So, here I am. Andalusia. A small, quiet, beautiful Mediterranean town. A man with a dog sleeping not far from me. A few camper vans. People walking their dogs. Warm air. A light breeze. The scent of trees and grass. Sitting here and thinking is, rather strangely, the right thing to be doing.

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