Booty

“Booty-shaking skirts were now sweaters, books, and pens.” All I’d wanted was for the first word of my authorship to be “booty.” It represents how writing a book would take me not only back to Ibiza, alongside the music that permeates it, but as my authentic self, represented by the island’s freedom. The ecstatic, pulsing joy that comes out at my hips; the nights that reach for morning. Ibiza takes on each point in the sky: House in taxis by day, Chillout as the sun sets—burning melancholia into the retinas of dancers—and Trance by night until it rises again. The waves connect these transitions with siestas on the sand, salty, lemony lunches, and bicycles on Formentera. All of this is the prequel of my coming book, Nights in Santiago, the story of how I risked everything to move to Spain permanently. After four years of writing thirty-something drafts, I’m currently pitching to agents—agents who aren’t flirting with me like most of the DJ’s and producers had, making promises that never stuck. The only thing that stuck in Spain was the sweat from dancing regardless. Such is the journey, the journey one must count on and take in, but these are only stories now—my life is being lived in proximity to myself. I look back but I also look forward. Today, I’m staring across something that has called to me even longer than Spain had: France is my horizon.