March 23rd
Yesterday, I saw a video of a man standing on a ledge. He was already submerged underwater, and in front of him, the pool dropped off for another one-hundred feet. No light reached the bottom, and for a couple seconds, I simply looked over the ledge with him, waiting. Then he jumped, his arms spread out to his sides, composed and pointed as he faced the darkness in front of him.
He fell slowly, deliberately. I watched as he became little more than a silhouette as the water went from blue to black. In less than a minute, he had disappeardd, enveloped by the shadows he sought to penetrate.
That's what it feels like to leave.
I don't feel like I'm breaking through a barrier or bursting through a door that had been closed to me. I feel like I'm fading away slowly. It's a gradual and gentle drifting into the unknown. Each moment is bringing me deeper, each step farther away. And the strangest thing is that I'm letting it happen. Leaving isn't an event- it's a process. Each step forward is a chance to turn back, a chance to surface, breathe, and swim back to shore. I didn't watch enough of the video to see if the other man ever came back up, but maybe right now isn't the best time to find out.
This morning, I had a cup of coffee with my dad before he left for work, and I took each sip a little slower than the last. Then I said good bye to my dog, who might have thought I was going to the store or on a run. I closed the door behind me.
My brothers drove me to Miami, and somewhere beyond the tanned tourists and wafting scent of spf 50, there was the Atlantic ocean. But we didn't stay long, and we didn't get out of the car. The airport was the other way.
Soon, my one-way ticket was tucked into my passport, and I was looking out of my window over the runway. Excuse me. It was the guy from 18H. Are you going to use that blanket?
No I wasn't, but I kept it anyway. Planes get cold, and this was a long flight. I could always change my mind. Somewhere beneath me, the wheels left the tarmac, and I left the country.
Leaving is surprisingly passive. The only thing I could do was let go, unwind my grasp around my sense of the world and be swept away. And so I fell. I flew. I moved, weightless as I waited for an unknown country to ground me again. Waiting for something solid.
March 25th
The first day in Chile felt like a continual push outwards, a stretching of the boundaries that delineated this new reality. I woke up to the sound of strangers shifting around me, suitcases zipping and unzipping, and the slow creak of the bedroom door. I didn't move for a while, and I didn't open my eyes. I just lay there, unwilling to acknowledge that the day had started, that I couldn't go back to sleep. My time here had actually began.
Seeing what was around me would make it real, and I wasn't sure I could face that yet. My sheets were tucked in around me, fitted to my body in a weak and flimsy attempt to separate me from a world I couldn't begin to comprehend. But the day would begin with or without me, and I have come too far to be left behind. So I began too.
The ladder from the upper bunk shook under my weight, so I jumped the last two steps and went downstairs. A woman with black-framed glasses was at the front desk. Como está? I was fine thanks. Yes, I had slept well. Yes, breakfast would be great, thanks.
After a second cup of instant coffee, I went for a walk, slipping into the solitude of a city of thousands. I rested in the mutual agreement that if I don't talk to you, you won't talk to me. But regardless, my world was expanding beyond my bunk at the hostel. I noted grocery stores and pharmacies, crossed at crosswalks, and wondered whether the buses were going towards or away from downtown. Somewhere behind the haze hovering around the city were the Andes, and this is where I live now. I continued exploring this new world of mine, drawing lines to separate the unfamiliar from the unknown.
Realistically, this world was not new, and besides the strange gringo who kept glancing at street signs, everything is most likely very much the same as it was the day before.
But I can be objective later. Right then, in that moment, I felt like I was carving a city out corner by corner, street by street. Everything was new, and everything was worth discovering. This is what it was to travel: a continual act of being lost and being found. A constant push against boundaries.
So I turned another corner and continued.
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