We left Paris by train, crossing a good part of France, with that strange feeling of leaving behind something we hadn’t quite finished understanding.
We didn’t have the Tesla yet. There was no route of our own yet. Just an in-between stop, four days ahead of us, and the hunch that something was starting to take shape.
In Carcassonne I was going to meet Gonzalo’s parents. They were bringing us the car so we could keep traveling. That was the practical part. But for me, that meeting carried something else.
Traveling with someone, walking through cities, talking for hours, imagining what’s coming is one thing. Meeting the people who are part of their story is something else entirely. Stepping, even a little, into that place that existed long before you.
Carcassonne was a stop before reaching Sitges, where we wouldn’t be quite so in transit anymore. Another stage was waiting for us there: a house for a longer stretch, a possible routine, a more real way to test what it felt like to share a life in motion.
But first there was this place. An old, walled city, with towers, stone, and that enormous presence some places have when they don’t need to explain much.
As we got closer to the citadel, something I wasn’t expecting happened: I got emotional and cried a little. In that moment I couldn’t fully explain why.
I was coming off intense days, long conversations, a relationship that was starting to solidify, and a trip that was beginning to mean something different. All of a sudden, I was standing in front of a city that had been there for centuries, worn by time and still standing.
But the city wasn’t the only thing that mattered those days.
They Were About to Arrive
We met at the hotel. It was the first time I was seeing them face to face, and I didn’t know exactly how it was going to feel. It could be warm, but distant. It could be polite, but awkward. It could be one of those situations where you’re present, you smile, you make conversation, but inside you’re still trying to find your footing.
It wasn’t that. We went to lunch and, pretty quickly, something settled. There was something familiar at the table, in the conversation, in the small gestures. There were also customs that, somehow, felt known to me.
They’d been living in Spain for 23 years, and yet there was something very Argentine in the way they were together. It wasn’t a matter of accent. It was the after-lunch talk that stretched on without anyone checking the time, the conversation that came and went, and that natural way of making me feel like part of it. It struck me to see that, after so many years, a person can take on another country without leaving behind the one that raised them.
And that surprised me, because I’d arrived thinking I was going to meet “his parents,” like an important scene inside a relationship, and I ended up feeling something much more relaxed.
There was that, too: seeing him with them. Watching another version of him appear. More at home. More from before I came along. A way of talking, of looking, of moving inside a story I was only just beginning to know.
Sometimes stepping into someone else’s life can feel huge. Like you’re walking through a door with too much awareness of what it means.
But that time it didn’t feel that way. It felt close.
The Legend of Lady Carcas
Afterward we walked through the citadel, among ramparts, ancient stone, and streets that seemed to have watched many lives pass before ours.
Carcassonne holds one of those legends that seem invented to survive the passing of time. During a long siege, when the city was about to run out of food, Lady Carcas supposedly fed the last of the wheat to a pig and threw it from the top of the wall. The besiegers took it to mean there were still provisions and decided to withdraw.
The story is probably more legend than truth, but I liked it anyway. A city that seemed to stand only for strength had held onto, for centuries, a story where survival came down to intelligence, to reading the other side, and to making a lot out of the little that was left.
Only later did I think that maybe I hadn’t cried only for the city. There was something in that way of staying standing that, even if I couldn’t explain it yet, felt familiar to me.
By then, everything was starting to connect: the city, the meeting with them, and the car waiting for us. The trip was no longer just a conversation about what might come. It was starting to become a possible life.
The Day They Handed Us the Tesla
Up until that point, the trip existed more in conversations than on the road. The Tesla was the first concrete object out of everything we’d spent months imagining.
When I saw it parked in front of the hotel, I smiled. For months it had existed in maps, conversations, and plans. All of a sudden, there it was. Waiting for us.
That day they handed us the Tesla. I was restless. I really wanted to drive it and to finally feel that the trip was truly beginning.
It could have been just that: a car, a set of keys, and a road ahead. But for me it meant something more. I hadn’t only met an important part of Gonzalo’s life. I’d also discovered that I could feel at ease there, with them, with him, slowly stepping into a part of his life I didn’t know yet.
Today I think Carcassonne was exactly that: a bridge.
Not only between Paris and Sitges, but also toward his story, toward Spain, the country that had been his home for 23 years, and toward a life in motion that was still new but was starting to feel possible.
We stayed a few days, letting all of it settle.
Then we got in the Tesla and kept going.
Next stop: Sitges.
