Dear Reader,
Today's guest is Camilla Sten, a thriller author and comedian, living in Barcelona with her husband and two evil, fluffy cats.
Camilla's new thriller is The Bachelorette Party and she says it is not based on her own bachelorette party, which was in fact both lovely and murder-free.
She'd love to hear from readers at [email protected].
Enter the drawing to win one of three copies of The Bachelorette Party. Email: [email protected]
(photo credit: Elvira Glänte)
The way I remember it, it never once rained the summer we met. It was the start of a drought that would last for five years. But at the time, it just seemed like we had won the lottery.
We met the summer of 2019, in Barcelona, on what was then called a "digital nomad trip"--a name that even then made me grimace in deep, millennial cringe. We became acquaintances, then friends, spending long, hot afternoons drinking sangria and eating patatas bravas on the street like the tourist clichés we were.
Barcelona seemed, to us, like a place too lovely to be real. I remember, late one evening on someone's balcony, discussing how famous European cities always disappointed a little. Like a tinder date who looked nice in pictures but turned out to have a strangely high-pitched voice in person.
Paris was stunning, but smelled terrible; Berlin was too intense; London was too stressful.
But we couldn't find fault with Barcelona.
There was something about walking through the city at night in July, the heat of the day still emanating from the cobblestones, the salty breeze from the Mediterranean sneaking through the slim, Gothic alleyways, that made you feel every single second of the three thousand years of history beneath your feet.
Strolling over Placa Catalunya at night, seeing teenagers whispering secrets and sharing hand-rolled cigarettes under the trees made you wonder if it had not looked almost exactly the same in Roman times; if it would not look just the same in another three thousand years.
But we never pictured ourselves living there. And we couldn't picture being together, either.
He was American, and I was Swedish, and there were more than two decades between us. Surely there could be no future for us outside of this place and this moment. It was a summer fling, that was all, after which we would return to our lives, far away from the warmth and laughter and culture of Catalonia.
He'd go back to Texas, and I'd go back to Stockholm, and it would be a lovely memory. Something to look back on and smile wistfully.
The only hitch in the plan was that, once home, we missed each other.
Five years after we met, the drought broke on our wedding day. We served patatas bravas at the reception. Despite having lived here for four years, we still haven't managed to shake the feeling of having won the lottery.
-- Camilla Sten
Enter the drawing to win one of three copies of The Bachelorette Party. Email: [email protected]
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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