Last days in Coyoacán + First days back at “home”

Unlike vacation travel, every time I’ve spent time living in another country, it feels like both a lot is happening to me, and nothing at all. In many ways, I’m going about my days normally –checking email, working on freelance projects in a cafe, buying groceries, taking the metro. And yet still I think I can feel myself growing though I can’t quite articulate how. And then suddenly, it’s the last days of the trip and I immediately know that I’m no longer the same. The conversations and thoughts and feelings I’ve had here have now carved a new small space in my soul that will be difficult to translate back at home.

Whenever I return from a trip abroad, I worry about this: what can I truly carry with me once I’m back? What will actually be integrated into my “real life”? So often, so much of my experiences traveling end up tucked away, since those who stayed can’t necessarily relate to or understand it. I always feel the loss in that inevitability, that those who did not join you on your travels can never quite know the intense and beautiful things that happened to you while you were away. No one will really know about my mornings and nights writing on my lovely wooden desk, the bouquet of purple and yellow and blue flowers I bought myself to cheer me on from the corner. No one will really know about the five hours I spent in darkness drenched in sweat during a temazcal. No one will really know about Itzel. 

To me, this is how all my periods of travel have felt like: like deeply felt, but frozen, time. Like periods of — as Alain Arias-Misson said — “intensified, brilliant life” that somehow still never feel quite as real as the life I return to. It’s a time spent completely present that then, upon returning, can become invisible. 

That all being said, it feels so, so healthy this time to at least have some semblance of a “home” and “real life” to come back to. Unlike every other time I’ve lived abroad, I came back this time to my same house, my six housemates welcoming me with a lavish potluck in candlelight as I attempted to recount my stories. I had a whole community of people in Oakland to return to, and that in and of itself made this returning easier.

I keep thinking of the final passages of Gloria Steinem’s book “My Life On the Road” where she writes about making peace with her love for travel only after she had also made herself some kind of home: “I could leave because I could return. I could return because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a world of ‘and.'”

I return this time even more committed to that world of “and.” I am again reminded of how sacred my travels are to me, how it is one of the few things in my life that feels entirely my own. My last few days in Coyoacán — as the last days of every trip abroad — were cast in such a shade of nostalgia, as I suddenly begin realizing every single thing I’d miss: the man who sweeps the leaves from the alley garage of our house each morning. The cobblestones on the roads that protrude so far from the ground that they massage my feet when I walk in sandals. The mercado with the constant crowd around the woman making tlacoyos, her bare hands covered in leftover blue dough. The man who plays accordion songs each day in front of the church. Even after all this time and under different circumstances, I get such deep joy from simply observing such things while living in a new place. It all still feels so comfortable for me, like its my natural state of being to spend days walking among foreign things. In a strange way, it feels almost as instinctual as my time spent “settled down” here at home.

And yet, there is also something sacred about about waking up to mornings that I know: the large window in my bedroom showing the classic Oakland winter gray, wispy sky, a slither of sunlight peeking above the rooftops of the houses behind me. There is something sacred about friendships so secure that you can chat as she cleans out her refrigerator, and feel totally yourself. There is something sacred about friends, who may have no idea what just happened to you, but know you as you’ve always been, and love you as you are when you’ve returned. That feeling of home creates its own unique kind of presence. It reminds of that L. Mathis quote about stability: “It’s not a great light bathing you each morning. It is quieter. Softer.”

Like Gloria, I also no longer can accept that we can’t have both — both moments of grounding community, and moments of packing up and exploring on your own. Gloria ends by saying “This balance between setting up camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both. My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.”