Window in the Skies

I don´t know how to write about last night. I don´t know how to capture in written words the sensations, the softness, the strange innocence alight in it all. There were so many stairs down to the hot springs, I almost slipped a dozen times, or did slip and caught myself right before falling, laughing out my fear. No one who really knows me would be even slightly surprised.

There were no lights down, but Julie was properly equipped with a high-tech headlight from Kwok. I thought a lot about falling, as I always do in high places, as I did on that strong horse in the Bariloche mountains, when the stones shook under its feet. What is it that I am so afraid of? And why is it that I keep wanting to climb mountains (volcanos), to ride high into the horizon and make myself look down. Its the vallies, pampas grass, animals that from afar are leggo-sized and docile, up close warm and wild-eyed (could this be me, too?).

There were 7 hot springs, the first and last with their great heights of steam simply the best. Phillip (the German guy who we met on the bus) and I went to find the other hot springs, walking directly in the wrong direction, finding one shallow, cool pool and a rushing river. Somehow, the cold did not bother me last night.

The guide convinced me to try diving into the river. Climbing over the frigid, round rocks, slipping, catching myself, tiptoeing across a tree trunk laid down as bridge, piercing the surface, screaming, wriggling out of the water, being pulled to my feet by warm hands and feeling suddenly warm all over. With my heart racing, my hair full of ice and the whip of autumn air. Looking out on that river, hugging my knees, a window in the sky.

I don´t love skies, baby blue or of bad-moods. What I love is being above or within, singling out the stars pointing south, clouds that cry out the humidity, the humility too, of our harshest days alive. What I love are horizons, other beginnings and no ends.

I fell asleep on someone´s shoulder on the way home. So safe I felt in that small white van, with the open window winds on my closed eyelids, the dry hum of a radio voice alight with life, washed skin against my cheek, something, somewhere, somehow fully human and whole.