We see those things over there, those recalcitrant instances of the past, and we continue to reside in the moments our present so fervently yearns for, why? Isn’t it a bit mistaken to be there and not here?

We see ourselves external to our bodies, with smiles and wine, with sweat and determination, with eyes devouring every inch of the landscape possible, and oh, the dull present of a keyboard, the enclosures of break-out rooms, the flat feeling of an electronic screen across us, across oceans, across countries, across neighborhoods, across our very much wanted love for warmth. How do we know a year has passed?

If it wasn’t for the clocks that keep track of it, we are still in March. Life, then, isn’t just the seconds that pass us, but the moments we treasure. Perhaps that’s why we’re there entrapped in cold, distant reruns.

Here is a bite of mine.

I’ve been running for some time now. What? Five years at least? You see, life as a Latin American is not all put there in place for you; we fight for every bit of it we can and some of us already have determined what we’ll do and be before we can even get started. Fortunately, however, the latter is not my reality; I am a second-generation with the weight of my brother’s achievements as an engineer in front of me. By all means, I’m the one who repeated 7th grade because I was not ready for that private high school, the one who is not as brilliant in math, the one who barely passed the examination test to get into University and didn’t get to study biological sciences, but English.

And yet I did…

I started this university race focused on that idea of becoming in 2014: What do I want to do by studying English? What do I want to be and where do I want to live? One day I’m in a class and someone passes a flyer for scholarships to the U.S.

“Man, my dad always said I should travel and get to know the world before even considering getting married.” I guess I should try it out.

I attempted getting the scholarship when my English was good enough, which required lots of practice. I didn’t get it. Once again, life saying, ‘you’re not that good. Stick to your roots and do not leave this valley.” After my mourning period, I doubled down. I practiced again and again until I finally got in for the Fall of 2017. This inept guy, maybe not so much so, was going to Illinois.

I’ve repeated this many times, but I don’t think time runs as fast as it does in the States. There’s something about their obsession for meritocratic work, their focus on getting college kids away from alcohol consumption with truckloads of readings that makes fall turn into winter in a snap of a leaf, and suddenly it is there blossoming again.

That year I felt grateful. Grateful to the sky, to my parents, to my friends, grateful to the colors of my first fall and the snowflake perfection I had never seen. Such innocence! So does enjoyment come out of innocence? Is pleasure about ignorance and the drawing of a new spontaneous circle, as Emerson would say?

In no time then, I was back home hating everything I missed, wishing the time would come to graduate and leave to meet my long-distance girlfriend in Finland and start that new life with her. Because life is as capricious as it gets that year was very long indeed. I met incredible people who I was about to push away due to my sole focus on leaving again, a focus on living in the future or the past. Anything! Anything but the dull present!

Finland came, and life was as exquisite as it gets; the long summer days, new smells from the fields surrounding the trailing tracks, new flavors, lots of love, new people… A whole world to devour and be(come). School starts and days are shining even through the minimalist fenestration of Finnish buildings. Fall comes and turns forest ablaze, the red of my heart in lung-shaped trees. Winter, though quite mild, sparks in me as it is my second winter only, and suddenly I want to make snowmen and play like a child in snowball wars. Later down the road, spring takes its time, combined with the indoor entrapment of a thing call Coronavirus. And the latter just came in to make summer the sweetest reunification with friends, new nights awaken, new mesmerizing people… and feeling the way we so desperately yearned to feel. Feeling, at last, alive and warm.

Perhaps I forgot the order of things, or I had been attempting to keep my way straight for too long, but the ineluctable time came for me to derail. So I did. The cold got to me, the darkness too. Fall turned yellow perhaps, but I don’t think I saw it. I was trapped indoors keeping courses running, work, a relationship, friendship, an economy, etc. A life that I had manufactured, the exquisite life I wanted to be in... And skipping the emotional burden of that which is pushed to a very dark corner of my mind, that which I aim to obscure and brighten up all other corners of this memory library, snow finally felt on the lakes and stayed during that accursed 2020. Only problem was, I was already on a plane leaving this life I had been swiftly and diligently constructing.

Scumbled eyes, scumbled spirit. For once directionless, I stopped.
The valley turned itself into my cradle, these mountains, pillows I had not appreciated in a while, a permanently blue sky, my ceiling.

I want my roots to swallow my limbs,
I want green leaves to dance on those trees across the playful sun.
I want the dew on me too.
I want that softness of my colonized land.
I want the kindness of our people.

I sought for light, for brightness, for intelligence, for more on that of becoming.
I viciously hammer down walls of who I was, leaving behind rituals too vital for some.
I believed I was wrong.
I convinced myself of the ‘right way.’
I questioned myself to be such a primitive being, and not thinking progressively.
I swore to be that, which I was not.

It suffices to assert that light is not out there, that time doesn’t run out there, that life isn’t all out there. I continue to be a mixture of reruns and those roads lead me to places I don’t want to encounter, some of which I’m not ready to tap on without feeling self-disgust. It’s a process to look behind the shoulder and smile at one’s mistakes, especially when they so drastically change who you were and what you stood for.

I am aware that I ran as fast as I could to be where I thought I should be and to become what I thought I should become. And now that I’ve crashed, I can respond to the question of “where to next” with a “here, and now!”  because it wasn’t about becoming; it was about being and carrying that essence forward as wholeheartedly as possible. With that integrity, no darkness will opaque your light.

Let us live the free fall of the present and slowly detach from that which is no longer ours. 

Photo by Author in Nandanyure Beach, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. 2021