All of Europe was completely clouded. During the flight nothing but clouds and black space sky could be seen through the porthole. The sun had begun to dawn, I wanted to sleep, but couldn’t.
Memories of the past three hours kept running through my head. There were all kinds of feelings: love and gratitude to Vasily Moshkin, who had taken us to the airport, and also there were new, completely unfamiliar feelings.
One-way tickets! We refused to go home, there was nowhere to go back to. And there was no point to. Our parents, our children who had already been assigned to study and work, a lot of relatives and friends were left behind in Moscow. But what do we care about them! We were on the way to Barcelona! The only thing we knew was that the next step would be France and that’s it. The following steps were unknown.
Our nerves were as tense as the engines of the airbus. But there came the moment when the airplane suddenly got relaxed, tilted forward and started to go down into the clouds. Isn’t it the same in Barcelona? The same gray sky that had been haunting me for all the last years of my life in Moscow? It felt like that gray sky, and gray houses, and gray puddles reflected in the gray eyes of the gray passers-by. And only a few objects, such as paintings in museums, actors in theaters have colors in the artificial light.
That grayness reflected my most intense feeling: fear, which I feel each time, for no reason at all, when crossing the Russian border in particular. Though, it had already been passed.
And then suddenly, surprisingly for me, the airplane jumped out of the clouds into a completely clear, sunny, warm and bright Spanish sky. I collapsed in relief. How great it was that in Spain there was no drab that had enveloped half of the globe!
The warm breeze woke me up completely as I got off the plane. The sea air, once it got into my lungs, changed my mood. But the fear still followed me straight to the Spanish border. Only at the moment when the Spanish customs officer gave me my passport with the usual “Bienvenido senior”, the fear was gone instantly. We went out to the airport building, but not where we had already gone – to the isolated area for the arrival of Russian charters, where we had arrived earlier, but to the area where passengers from all the rest of the countries arrive.
On this day ElPrat airport was almost empty, but when I saw those spacious halls, urban buses and sunny endlessly bright turquoise sky, I felt freedom. The journey had begun!
— Do you even realize for a second what we’ve done? We’re out! – I said to Sveta, taking my hat off and rubbing my face tiredly with the palm of my hand.
— Not yet. Give me some time to realize and enjoy this feeling. – Sveta replied peacefully.
We stayed there for a while to realize what had happened, took our backpacks and went into town. The new day hadn’t started yet, but it had already completely worn me out. Anyway, I felt energized now. The sun, sea and air breathed life into us!
Ben Falkovsky