November, 2014
9 p.m.
I need food.
I leave the hotel ... cobblestone
roads curl off in multiple directions. (Technically, it’s not
cobblestone; it’s some other
kind of pieced-together, stonemaking thing.) I turn around
... stare at t he hotel entrance,
try to burn the memory of how
it looks into my brain ... then
choose a path and start walking.
The stone paths are narrow,
people-filled. I look up: a strip
of sky sits high atop the endless patchwork buildings. I
walk past bakeries, cafes, restaurants, clothing shops, more
bakeries.
Every now and then the paths
empty out into big, rectangular
plazas filled with outdoor restaurants and towering statues
... sometimes cathedrals, sometimes fountains.
I walk, alternating between the
paths and plazas, keeping an
eye out for a suitable place to
eat.
In one plaza, I stumble across
a large, seasonal book fair: two
long rows of stalls filled with
a huge variety of books – antique printings, rare editions,
old maps, popular novels, retro
kids’ books, etc. I’m moth-tofire drawn to it and spend a
stretch of time looking around.
I slowly circle the entire thing
50
three times, people watching,
periodically picking up books,
hefting them, squeezing them,
and putting them back.
Before leaving, I purchase a
pile of tattered comic books.
Then it’s back to snaking
around between the buildings
of Seville. I make an effort to
head back the way I think I
came, but things are already
looking unfamiliar.
New plaza ... I sit at an outdoor
restaurant ... I
choose something from the
menu that I
don’t recognize.
Fingers crossed
for something
strange to
come out, but it
ends up being
comfort food:
pork, potatoes.
It’s nice, but I
was hoping to
see something
uncomfortably
weird on the
plate.
and make games out of noise
and frenetic movement. It’s just
high-volume, high-energy kid
time in the plazas. Running,
jumping, glee-screaming.
When I’m ready to leave, I try
to choose the right way to go,
but my brain never gives me
that kind of information.
This is the relationship between my brain and directions:
to me (at all times), everything
just looks “straight ahead,” like
a permanent, one-way line that
Two hours later, I’m still wandering through new, unfamiliar, not-my-hotel places. Lost.
It’s infuriating and embarrassing, but not scary. Some places,
getting lost is scary – woods or
driving on unfamiliar roads.
Some places will swallow you
whole for getting lost. But
Seville is a world of people
and stone, all inscribed with
warmth.
I page through
comic books
while I eat.
I look around a
lot and people
watch. Plazas
are fun at night
because they’re filled with
dozens of screaming, freerange kids. Parents hang out
on the sidelines, chatting. The
kids stick candy into their faces
ZOOM Autism through Many Lenses
spatial sequences, the world
refuses to organize itself into
map spaces; instead, it just
floats incoherently around the
fixed point of my eyes.
Most people are able to see the
difference between “here” and
“there.” I just see stuff revolving in a never-ending kaleidoscope (only instead of glitter or
gems, the kaleidoscope of my
perception is filled with reality). So, in the plaza, I slowly
look around. Cobblestone
paths kaleidoscope away in all
directions. I randomly choose a
path and start walking.
reality is constantly fitting itself
into. Because of this “straight
ahead” thing, visually, I can’t
see direction. No matter how
much I look around, memorize
Eventually, I just take the hotel
key card out of my pocket
(which has the name of the hotel on it), flag down a taxi and
show it to the driver. (This is a
trick Girlfriend taught me after
she noticed my tendency to get
lost anywhere and everywhere.
Before traveling, she usually
devises tricks for getting me
unlost.)
I show the taxi driver the hotel
card ... he speaks in Spanish for
a bit. I don’t understand. He
points at the card and holds up
ZOOM Autism through Many Lenses
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