An Ode to Mallorca

I sat on a big, limestone cliff with my legs dangling over the edge, watching the sky turn from a milky amber into a pinpricked blue-black. Despite the cool evening air, I felt a heat rising from my skin—the byproduct of spending all day in the sea since sunrise. I could still taste the grainy salt on my lips, feel clusters of it dried on my eyelashes. As the sun dipped below the horizon, I listened to the even splashes of a solitary swimmer making her way back to shore.

That’s when it occurred to me that it was happening again. I was, after ten years away from Mallorca, falling in love with the island all over again.

I could feel it in the way my insides seemed to melt when I was anywhere in or near the water, everything turning into a puddle of warm honey. The way something big was expanding in my chest, aching almost, until it felt like I would either shatter into a thousand tiny pieces or transform into something new and beautiful, like wings emerging from a cocoon. It felt like an inner blooming. 

The truth is, I’ve always fallen in love with places too quickly. I’ve done so in the same way I’ve seen friends fall in love with people—madly, desperately. The way they trip into relationships, head first with reckless abandon. 

There’s a word for this kind of love: topophilia, or the love of place. But it’s more than a simple liking or appreciation—it’s a kind of deep connection, an indescribable bond you feel with it, an all-consuming kind of love. 

Author Peggy Guggenheim puts it this way: “It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing leftover in your heart for anyone else.” 

Said another way, in the words of author Alec Waugh: “You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.” 

Now if this is indeed true (which I believe it is), then Mallorca was the first place I ever fell in love with. To this day when I talk about Mallorca, it’s difficult to describe what exactly makes it so unique. Yes, the landscape is undeniably dramatic and visually stunning. But so are many places in the world. There’s something else—something infused into the fabric of the island, that makes it unlike any other on earth. 

Maybe that’s what makes love so mysterious, so all-consuming after all—the fact that we can’t understand it. We could spend our whole lives trying to excavate the meaning of love, and by the end still only have dug an inch deep.

* * *

As I sat on that limestone cliff watching the sea swallow that big orange sun, I found myself growing nostalgic. I had just arrived on Mallorca the evening prior—my first time back since I lived on the island nearly a decade before, and I savored the process of becoming reacquainted with it. 

It was as if my body and mind had stored away a deep familiarity of the place—far away on a dusty shelf of my memory, and it had to find its way again. Like searching for stones in the dark. 

But rather than a kind of remembering, the act of rediscovery was more like experiencing everything for the first time. My Spanish was rusty, the words tripping and falling over one another, and the vowels didn’t sound quite right—they started and stopped and stumbled along. I would walk by a bakery and smell something warm and savory and wrack my brain trying to place the familiar scent. I passed by favorite cafes and Tuesday tapas spots and familiar apartments, all the memories flooding back to me. It felt good to remember—the way the island looked and smelled and sounded. The way it felt to fall in love with it.

Soon, all the fading, sepia snapshots that I’d carried around in my memory for the past ten years began to come to life in vibrant color. The unmistakable clear, turquoise-blue Mediterranean water, the limestone cliffs crowned with tufts of green shrubbery, the layered silhouettes of the mountains at sunset. The water lazily lapping against the belly of a seaside cave and the dripping sound from the roof above—all the stalactites and stalagmites creating an alien landscape. The centuries-old stonework, the wide open fields, the groves of gnarled olive trees. The charming cafes, the intimate amber-lit plazas busy late into the night, the narrow and winding cobblestone streets. 

It occurred to me then that the feeling of returning to the island wasn’t unlike seeing an old love—the familiarity, the fondness, the feeling of your heart both tensing and melting in that first moment of reconnection. Nostalgia is one of the few things in life that can feel both cathartic and painful at the same time—a big, beautiful, messy cocktail of happiness and sadness and longing that can feel overwhelming at times. 

The other thing that struck me was how that nostalgia seemed to warp time, both shrinking and stretching it simultaneously. Being back on the island, I couldn’t help but notice how much had stayed the same—the hole-in-the-wall bar on the corner; the small seaside cave at my favorite beach that you could only see if you swam out and to the right just so; the same musician playing his guitar near El Calvari, the case popped open and coins scattered at the bottom. 

And yet at the same time, I was struck by how much had changed in me. There is perhaps no measure of growth quite like going back to a place that marked a pivotal moment in your life and to feel, almost tangibly, just how much space separates the “you” now from the “you” then.  

I began to think about all the big and small ways my world had transformed since I had lived on Mallorca. A global pandemic. A health journey that I never saw coming. New jobs. New relationships. Loved ones lost. Lessons learned. The reflection, self work, and growth along the way. All the joy and pain and happiness and frustration that comes along with it. 

Looking back at the person I was ten years ago, I can’t help but think how young I was, how green. How little I knew. But then again, that’s precisely how you know you’re moving in the right direction. There’s a quote by the author Alain de Botton that says, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.” I would make a slight tweak to that: “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t growing enough.”

Returning to a place steeped in memory gives us a first class ticket to remembering who we were back then. And falling in love with a place anchors us in the present moment. When we find ourselves in the push and pull of both simultaneously, we are forced to confront the space between then and now and to come to terms with our trajectory. Are we moving in the right direction? Are we proud of the person we’re becoming? 

Maybe that’s the whole point of nostalgia after all. To give us a glimpse into where we’re headed. To give us a chance to take a hard look at ourselves and recalibrate if needed. 

Maybe, the whole point of looking back is simply a means to help us forge the path ahead.