Sometimes I visit the
places I’ve been to before. Driving in the afternoon
heat of tourist traffic, I return to a red beach in India where I watched the sunrise with strangers. I think of the silence at the waterline there.
Or as I'm pumping gas, I go to the hill in Baños, where I walked and walked through the green,
through the fields and wet woods, and could see everything from the top: the
way the mountains cut into canyons and water flowed. I'd had a broken heart then, and the shard of it is forever embedded in my memory of Baños.
In line at the grocery store, I go to the streets of Buenos Aires on a night when the musicians were out and we sipped
beer from the same bottle. I leave my life, my job, the things I need
to do, and I send my mind to the places I have been.
Don’t we travel for this? Don’t we all want something we can keep with us forever? Travel teaches us each the same lesson: that our lives don’t have to be the way they are.
No comments:
Post a Comment