Funny, Sad

Over dinner we chatted in that funny, sad way of people who have known each other since high school about the same things we used to talk about when we were young that now make us feel old. I sat there laughing and talking with my friends while ardently wishing for more moments like those. Yet life happens, priorities change, responsibilities intervene, and we are no longer at liberty to simply while away the hours in each other’s company. The trip we’ve been planning for almost a year now—and which I really look forward to--isn’t happening anymore. That dismays me. But the thought that we are increasingly drifting apart dismays me even more.

Love blurs your vision

"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made."

~ Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 1988

That Day We Went to Parque Tayrona, Colombia

I clung to the shoulders of arguably the most handsome Colombian I've ever seen, as we roared down the highway on his motorbike. Soaked in the hot, Caribbean sun, with the wind blowing ferociously through my hair, I felt a delicious sense of recklessness diffuse through me.  Trucks and buses flew past us and we raced through the countryside, its structures looking forlorn yet defiant in the oppressive heat and the shifting dust.

Tayrona National Park is located in the Northern Caribbean Coast of Colombia, 34 kilometers north of Santa Marta. It covers 15,000 hectares and protects 27 species of fauna and flora that are found only in the region as well as 56 endangered species.

Still flushed with excitement, we arrived at El Zaino, the entrance to Tayrona National Park, and joined the hordes of bewildered backpackers figuring out how to get tickets. It was confusing: some were queuing up at a badly lit counter while others were watching a video on an old TV mounted on a wall; a few were listening to a man giving an introduction to the park while the rest were just milling around, unconcerned with the chaos around them. Nobody speaks English so we had to rely on our limited Spanish to make sense of it all. 

We managed to pay for our tickets and board a shared van that would bring us to the start of the hike at Cañaveral. With us in the cramped van are a lone traveler carrying a backpack that looks bigger than her and a Colombian extended family whose members are all dressed up for what appears to be a formal event and are talking over each other with voices raised. My Spanish wasn’t that good to discern the details of their conversation but it was good enough to grasp that they are arguing about entrance fees. The backpacker, who is also a local and looked rather embarrassed by what’s going on, tried to engage us in some small talk.

La Piscina

Though I wanted to know the conclusion to the unsubtitled telenovela unfolding before my eyes, we got off at the trailhead and started walking. For an hour and a half we walked along wooden boardwalks and narrow dirt paths through thick rainforest then down big rock outcrops to reach La Piscina, a pristine white-sand beach fringed by large boulders and palm trees. I was puzzled why, despite its beauty, the beach is almost deserted. Later I found out that everybody else was at the party beach, El Cabo San Juan del Guia, a thirty-minute walk away from La Piscina. 

From that exhilarating motorcycle ride to the chaos at the entrance of the park and the drama inside the van to the hike to the beaches of Tayrona, it was a faultlessly beautiful day indeed.

I am bursting with the hopes of a generation

“I was born of both stability and chaos. I have seen nothing and everything. I am twenty-four but feel ten thousand years old. I am emboldened by youth, unfettered and hopeful, though inextricably tied to the past and future by my beautiful brother, who is part of both. Can you not see that we’re extraordinary? That we were meant for something else, something more? All this did not happen to us for naught, I can assure you—there is no logic to that, there is logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason. Just give us our due. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart! Can you not see this? I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know, and this is all my own making, I know—not the fault of my parents but all my own creation, yes, but I am the product of my environment, and thus representative, must be exhibited, as inspiration and cautionary tale.”

~ Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000

When an Invite Comes Along

An invite comes along once in a while and my immediate reaction is I don’t want to go. Please leave me be. Most of the time I’d rather stay home by myself instead of having to put up with the requisite small talk and appear interesting and interested although inside I’m languishing in boredom or berating myself for going in the first place, or both. Why do I have to be with people who ask how I am but don’t really listen to or care about my answer? Why do I have to suffer the company of those who ask about personal matters whose answers they think they are entitled to but are actually not?

She recognized loneliness when she saw it

“She didn’t stop him. She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.” (Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 2017)