Dancing With The Future

In the city of noise, three girls walked into a church in revealing outfits, got their drinks upcharged 3 euros, and accidentally mapped the rest of their lives.

Groundbreaking Valencia

Las Fallas only happens three days a year. A cultural celebration involving burning wood, mascletàs going off every few blocks, and a city that seems to have taken a collective agreement to be as loud as possible. We didn't know any of this when we booked the trip. We just showed up, Samantha in a V-cut dress, Charlotte in a sleeveless top, me in a corset, and walked straight into the noise.

From the moment we arrived, Valencia felt like an encouragement, and not always a polite one. We talked about everything we shouldn't at outdoor cafes. We were raunchy, reverent, and ridiculous in the same sentence. We were, apparently, loud enough to be noticed — because our drinks came back upcharged by 3 euros each. We silently wondered: was it the gringa, or the conversation topic?

We noticed ourselves quietly lowering our voices in English on the train. Feeling a particular kind of visible, and not in our usual good way. A small shame we hadn't named yet.

That one waitress's idea to take advantage of our naivety let out something that had been brewing inside us, something that had been hiding its home identity for the sake of assimilation into a new city. We centered ourselves in the knowledge that her behavior was a reflection of her, not the city. And from then on, when anyone asked, English or Spanish, our answer was going to be powerful: los dos.

The universe heard us. Over the mascletàs.

Future Freeze Frame

We walked into a church. The shushes came immediately — shhh, shhh — as they tend to when three women in going-out outfits descend a cathedral staircase. The quiet Catholic guilt of holy shit, I'm in a revealing outfit in a church was real, briefly. Then a camera flashed.

A man popped up with a camera, snapped a photo of the three of us on those stairs, and walked right out of the church. He didn't linger. He didn't speak. He just got the picture and left, like he had been sent specifically for it.

As delusional as it sounds, we framed it as he was assigned to get that picture of us, because this city was about to change our lives; the photo would become the magazine cover of a Valencia origin story one day. Sleep-deprived and deep in the chaos of Las Fallas, that felt like the most reasonable explanation. And, as it turned out, it was about to ring completely true.

The Creative Café

Samantha, Charlotte, and I met during study abroad in Barcelona the year before. Even now, back in Spain, a year later, we are still sitting at café tables learning about each other, discovering exactly why we were meant to find Barcelona at that exact moment. Finally understanding what that means about our own and collective power.

Charlotte said it perfectly: we are always trying to understand ourselves, and the wisdom that comes through us — our combined energy makes it clearer for us to see ourselves through each other. So we entered our opportunity-collecting revelation tornado yet again.

The next day, in what we now call the Creative Café, we realized that somehow, while hungover and sleepy, we had stepped out of the cage of our routine lives. After 4 days of traveling and over cheap coffee + pastries, we created our life paths for 6 euros. And Charlotte coined her famous quote: dancing with the future, in the present.

As if we had channeled the future selves, from the magazine cover titled The Origin Story of the True Lives of Payton, Hudson, and Charlotte, sealed with that church photo, we found not just our next steps but our dream life paths.

Mine: doing exactly what I want to do in finance — helping others remove the biggest stressor in life and creating lasting relationships through it. Relationship strategy, but in the health sector, where I want to deepen the essential understanding for medicine to honor all parts of the human being and find solutions, not Band-Aids.

For Payton: we talked about Payton's Prescription — her eventual podcast, born from her soul-searching as she learns to doubt herself less, using Charlotte's podcast catalog as a guide. And that's when we found Charlotte's Wandering World — a platform dedicated to sharing her love for the podcast world and hosting her own.

And as if she had been listening, a girl I had danced with in middle school, someone I didn't even realize I didn't follow back on Instagram, someone I had no idea was also living abroad in Spain, dm’d me just moments later. To express her love for the blog and my travels. To confirm: the way you and your friends live life to the fullest is so inspiring. The universe, again. Still listening. Still loud. Showing us the clear path we were unlocking.

When I came back to earth and out of the transcendent plane created by our trio, I went to the café bathroom. To hold, for a moment, the strange and total abundance of being twenty years old and knowing, fully, without hedging, that you already have everything. And you came here to simply live out the dream you carefully curated.

And I wrote:

Holy fuck — I'm writing a couple of books. I met my best friends. I met the love of my life. I met myself. I met my dreams. I'm an author, artist, and everything I wake up and choose to be. I dance my heart out every day. My near-death experience gave me back my soul. Nothing scares me other than not staying true to myself. And I'm 20 years old and in a Valencian baño.

Wandering

Later, we walked to the science museum. One hour. On foot. My four-inch heels against Valencia's cobblestones. I gave an AirPod to Charlotte and played Johnny Cash's "The Wanderer" — for her Wandering World. She already has the photos, the content, the self; she just hasn't told everyone yet.

Halfway there, a Valencian man walking with his wife stopped mid-step. Pointed. Said: guapa. I said gracias. He said beautiful, so I could say thank you. The heels were worth every cobblestone.

Then we saw the traffic lights. Valencia puts little figures inside the walk signals — combinations: girl and boy, green and red, go and stop. We stood there a moment longer than necessary. Like the Noah Kahan song “Maine” that we had played earlier that morning — if only, baby, there were cameras in the traffic lights, they'd make me a star — we were suddenly aware of being witnessed, of being seen, of what could happen to our worlds if there were a record of these conversations.

We imagined it. Then we kept walking to the science museum to find it: the most futuristic building we had seen in all of historic Europe, the exact right place to ask the question Charlotte had been carrying all trip. How do you dance with the future while you're in the present?

Los Dos

Our answer to the waitress. To the guapa-beautiful man. To the boy-girl traffic lights. To every moment that asked us to choose between two versions of ourselves. By the time we arrived in Sevilla, los dos had become the answer to everything. Stupid and perfect.

The Airbnb wasn't ready yet. So we decided, spontaneously, casually, the way you only decide things when you've been living outside the plan for several days, to take an Uber to Cádiz. The oldest city in Spain. Possibly the oldest city in Western Europe. Sitting at the very edge of the continent in Christopher Columbus's burial grounds. An hour and fifteen minutes away.

The ride, the place, all of it was stunning. So peaceful, we fell asleep on the beach. All three of us. With our stuff — keys, IDs, everything just sitting there. For three hours. We basically dared the pickpocketers of Spain. They declined.

Then we tried to order an Uber home and discovered that Uber doesn't operate in Cádiz at night. We quickly became delirious. Samantha said we should've had José, our Uber driver that afternoon, hacer los dos. Take us there and back. He would have, no question.

The equivalent is being in Los Angeles at 10 pm, getting an Uber, and saying: Let's just pop down to San Diego real quick.

Thankfully, the restaurant called the Mafia was actually completely reliable and came through, getting us a taxi back to Sevilla, barely hiding their amazement at Americans. The trip had been providing all week. Of course, it wasn't going to stop now.

And somewhere between the oldest city in the world and a restaurant named after organized crime flagging us a taxi home, I thought about a girl in a café bathroom in Valencia — me just days before, but she already lived so many more lives. I thought about how wonderful it is that a found girl can still get lost. She already has everything and still has no idea what is coming.

Both are always true. Los dos, if you will.