I meandered along the Gothic Quarter labyrinth corridors of Carrer del Call this morning — the old Jewish Quarter of Barcelona, one of the most layered streets in a city made entirely of layers. The buildings press so close above me that the sky becomes a thin blue ribbon between medieval stone. Beneath my feet, cobblestones and Roman walls. Around me, walls that have absorbed the prayers, the suffering, the lovemaking, the arguments, and the dying of a thousand years of human beings who had no idea I would ever walk here. The smells are ancient and immediate at once — espresso, damp stone, a faint floral scent from a window three floors up. The city breathes. It always breathes. And somehow, walking through it, so do I.

I am 67 years old. I have written twelve books. I have spent decades on stages in front of thousands of people. I have spent fifty years trying to say something true. And this morning, as the Gothic Quarter holds me in its seductive, beautiful claustrophobia, I am rambling with a familiar ache.

The loneliness of someone with everything to say.

Let me be clear about what this loneliness is not. It is not the loneliness of obscurity, of having nothing to offer. It is something more exact and more painful than that. It is the loneliness of knowing a door exists — having found it at enormous personal cost, having walked through it while most of my tribe stood back and watched with a mixture of envy and judgment — and then turning around to describe what’s on the other side, only to find that most people are more comfortable with the door remaining theoretical. 

This quote from Morgenstern’s The Night Circus captures my rumination perfectly: “Look around you,” he says, waving a hand at the surrounding tables. “Not a one of them even has an inkling of the things that are possible in this world, and what’s worse is that none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them.

But before you picture me as some brooding artist suffering beautifully in exile — let me say unequivocally, yes, Barcelona is extraordinary. Yes, the Mediterranean light, the wine, the culture, and the freedom are everything I hoped they would be and more. This life is not a fantasy I am selling. It is the actual evidence that the things I have been writing about for decades are not philosophy. They are inhabitable. I live here. In all of it.

But exile is still exile, even when it’s chosen and gorgeous. My remaining friends and family are an ocean away. Every day, I navigate a language I am still clumsy with, a culture that is still revealing its layers to me. There are mornings when the stunning beauty of this place sharpens the loneliness rather than dissolving it. When you know what you know, and you have paid dearly to know it, and you look around and think — who is actually hearing this?

And then a video call arrives.

He is a young man — handsome, polished, the kind of confidence that comes from two decades of standing at the front of adoring crowds and being believed. A minister at a mega-church. Slowly, painfully, privately deconstructing. He read something I wrote a few days ago about being a backslider and a heterodox, and it stopped him mid-scroll. He requested a call. He lives in the United States. He told me that somehow he felt safe with me, a man he respects who lives in another country, outside the blast radius of his particular church world. Away from the church that Hozier sings so eloquently and truthfully about in his song “Take Me To Church.”

And then this armored, articulate young man told me things he had never said aloud to a single human being. About an affair. About divorce. About loving his wife as his best friend while aching for the compatibility she cannot give him. About desires and longings he had no framework for, no language for, and no one — not one person in his carefully curated Christian life — he trusted with them.

He also told me something that hit differently. That a few words I had spoken at a conference twenty years ago had changed his life. Things I said and almost certainly cannot remember saying. And I sat there thinking about all the stones in the Carrer del Call — all those beings who walked before me without knowing I would come after — and I thought: the rings in the water are always wider than we can see.

This is not a confession. This is evidence. That the freedom I now inhabit — the expansion, the depth, the pleasure of a life finally free to discover what it was actually built for after six decades of religious containment — is not a private miracle or a lucky accident. It is what becomes possible when a person finally stops performing goodness and starts pursuing wholeness.

That is why I am writing fiction now. The Mysteries of Barcelona — explicit, sensual, Gothic, alive — is a Trojan horse. Because the people who most need what I have learned will never pick up a self-help book about religious deconstruction. But they might pick up a novel set in this city that breathes, with characters who feel dangerously real, and find themselves ambushed by truth two hundred pages in before their defenses ever had a chance to organize.

(Also, to be completely honest, I wrote it because I have run out of literary erotica that I enjoy. So this is a book genre I wish more people would write. A book about a powerful woman, unapologetic erotica, and the city of Barcelona as a main character.)

Back to the Trojan Horse, the herald’s work is to find the walls where the gates are hidden.

I walk deeper into the Gothic Quarter. The stones press close. Somewhere beneath me, generations of Romans and Spaniards, now networks of mycelium. Somewhere in Florida, a young man sitting with the first honest conversation of his adult life. Somewhere in my heart, the ache that never entirely leaves.

But also this — the thing I have learned at 67 that I could not have told you at 37 or 47 or even 57:

Enlightenment is not attaining goodness or perfection. It’s just fucking being who you are. But to be that, you first have to know who you are.

That’s the whole work. That’s all of it. And some people — not all, but some — are ready to hear it.

Sigo caminando. I walk on.