This is the time I have the most to say, to write and yet it is the time when nothing wants to come out. There are no words, no sentences, paragraphs, pages to encompass the last week. The, um, highlight (that cannot be the right word) was, of course, climbing the volcano. I was terrified. Horrified. Afraid. I do not think that I have ever been so physically scared in my life. Marching up the side of the ice field for 2.5 hours, I shoke, held tight to Rodrigos hand, tried with all of my might to focus solely on his white footprints and place my own feet directly inside of them. What was I thinking??? I am terrfied of heights! I cannot deny the sense of accomplishment I felt, not when reaching the summit, but when my feet were firmly planted back on lower ground. I had faced my fear for the first and last time. That I know for sure.
We arrived in Santiago yesterday, after 11 hours on the bus, where I tried to sleep, read almost all of the Time Travelers Wife (now, that is what love is). We have a bathtub here. Even a little couch. It is warm and I can hear the fire of engines that always brings me home.
We spent a lot of time in a white house, soon to be a hostel, eating avocados, bread, cheese and these incredible tiny oranges, so sour and satisfying in Pucon. There were straw hats all over the wall and scorching hot water, a definitely dirty kitchen and a barbecue. We cooked Easter dinner, Julie and I, and Rodrigo invited us to stay in Chiloe with him. Of course Julie will go home, then to see Kwok in England. I, too, will go home, but there is always this part of me (the runaway part, the part that has picked up in strength and pace this past year) that lights up at such offers, that thinks warmly of daily bike rides and inhabiting a place that is not my own. But the truth is, I will follow me everywhere.
There was so much more in Pucon, so many other things I will not forget, but many of which I cannot bring myself to write out here and now.
I am excited to explore Santiago, to find great coffee (she says, as she sits in an internet cafe drinking nescafe...). I would be lying if I said that cities do not pull more at my heart than even the most beautiful of towns. We rode up along the Andes, I thought about the day with the gauchos, my mind wandered back to Buenos Aires and that felt like a different time, a different me. While I do, in some sense, want to run away from certain realities that I have to deal with, there is also a part of me that misses, more than ever, the warmest of places (not in terms of temperature but emotion), that can be found only in my own country, that continue to define home for me.
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