La Güera Dreams, Despierta, Makes Lists

March 12, 2017Kaelyn 1 Comment

It’s 6:01 a.m. In reality, it’s 5:01, but that strange human invention, Daylight Savings Time, starts today. This is not a time of day in which a güera is generally awake, let alone productive. But I was dreaming…

Of work.

Yet I woke up as if from a nightmare–hyperaware and breathing fast. I tried to go back to sleep for a while, but my mind continued to race. It was like my brain was trying to use the limited information it had to figure out why I had woken up the way I did. It felt like it does when there’s an earthquake, or someone’s calling your name, or something is happening that shouldn’t be, and your brain is sending emergency signals to your body to WAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUP, but the body is slow to answer, wrapped too heavily in shroud-like sleep.

What had happened?

Then it hit me, and the possibility of sleep sailed away on a silent wind.

I’ve been home for a year. Today.

If that was me then, who am I now?

Let me break it down.

Things I like: dancing, roller skating, hot dogs, scars, kissing, strong coffee, stronger beer, belly laughter, my body, artistic expression, 90s fashion, being underwater, the word “fuck”, people watching, friendship, honesty, hirsute men, tattoos, language.

Things I don’t like: shaving, high intensity workouts, the disparity in effort to orgasm between the sexes, applications, standardized testing, things that look unlived in, disrespect, intolerance, gratuitous violence, abuse of power, debt, ignorance.

Things I like: shirts that say things, costume jewelry, lying in bed, lying in bed with books, lying in bed with boys, religious art, leather jackets, outdoor markets, intelligent conversation, lingerie, driving, spontaneity, baking, chicken wings, playing sports.

Things I don’t like: sports fans, traffic, diminutive pet names given by strangers, catcalling, shaming, religion, the word “nut butter”, romance (mostly), the absence of critical thought, pain, malls, small talk, cages (generally), alarms, being afraid of–

So, who am I, a year after coming home?

I’m very much myself, a little less afraid than I was before, less inclined to be “nice” and “accommodating”, a little more sure of where I might be heading. I’m also more aware of my weaknesses, my strengths, and also that nebulous area where the two blend seamlessly together.

I’ve been very close to the bottom several times since I’ve been home, but here, at dawn, a year from stepping off the plane from Colombia, a year from dancing alone in the rain in the middle of thousands of people, a year from racing down the streets of Bogotá both thrilled and horrified that my taxi driver ran every red light…

I’d say things are coming up roses.

Lines Written in the Days of Fading Brightness

February 29, 2016March 9, 2016Kaelyn 1 Comment

I am fast approaching the end of all this, having arrived at the sodden tea leaves swirling round the bottom of my cup. I eye them half-heartedly. But as much as we would like a roadmap, such things belong in stories and not here, on this cynical–though wondrous–plane we inhabit. Home and all it entails is looming once again on the horizon. I sit here, or rather, I wander slowly back along the road I arrived by, and watch its approach. When it hits me I’ll know it’s time to squeeze who I’ve become back into the Kaelyn-sized space I left, knocking down walls and splitting seams in the process. Another paradigm shift in the making, another cliff’s edge that in all seriousness I should be toeing anxiously, despite my travel-tested wings, yet all I want at the moment is to lie in a hammock with my book and order some delivery Thai (beautiful dream). In the shadow of big changes, it’s the small appetites we turn to and seek to sate.

I started this journey from behind a desk, ducking my head whenever the boss went by lest his dreadful vulture’s eye fall on me. I will be ending it back in the city of fears realized–Bogotá, Colombia, where I was once mugged twice in a week. But so much has happened in the meantime. For one thing, I think I’ve had my fill of reggaeton for the rest of my life; also light beer; also the Ecuadorian tax system; machismo; Zhumir–the small and inconsequent gripes that accumulate after any longish amount of time in one place. But the good, the wondrous: I’ve found soulmates and peace and friendships, flames that will be rekindled in different places around the world again and again; the scent of palo santo; the new meaning of the word chola, which now evokes ebony velvet braids and swinging skirts; a lit match will always bring to mind three women from three different parts of the world whose laughter rang through Cuenca’s cobblestone streets. Now, a day after I’ve finally left Cuenca, and all the things that have made up my daily life, I’m in a place called Mindo, where it’s raining so hard it seems the river is going to rush through my windows and maybe wash it all away. It has me thinking about endings. All things end, and all begin, but it is what comes between that makes things what they are.

I’ve left and come back home so many times now that I could do it without thinking. But I do. Think, I mean. It’s like finding my old racing suit and being surprised, bemusedly so, that although tighter in some places, it still fits, still serves its purpose. It hurts though, in a subphysical kind of way–hurts because, without even noticing, you’ve expanded and become so much greater since you’ve been away, and then you’re home and in the same size space you left, and all the beauty and all the substance you’ve brought with you must struggle to make a place for itself.

Homecoming hurts, but it no longer feels like a punishment, an event requiring a large inhalation of breath and a considerable lung capacity to hold it until the worst is over. I left that baggage along the roadside somewhere, along with my penchant for over-processed white bread and glitter eye shadow. Homecoming has alchemized into something less sinister, not quite gold but far from lead. It is a sloughing off of one set of responsibilities and a shouldering of another. It is family dinners and small comforts, it is a sense of no longer having to look over my shoulder quite as often, a brushing off of whatever remnants of projected cultural shame have managed to settle into my hair and skin. Home is where fewer, though by no means no one, question who I’ve chosen to be.

I have no idea what kinds of things I will begin, continue with, and end this year. No idea what version of myself I will be when I look back a year from now. I don’t feel anxious or fearful, but nor do I feel excited, exactly. I think the overriding feeling is curiosity. I can predict only slightly more about this next phase of my life than I could when I decided to travel South America, and later live there. In spite of having lived most of my life in California, anything could happen there, just as anything could, could have, and sometimes did happen in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

At the risk of an excess of imagery, permit me one more. Coming home after an extended absence is a bit like jumping out of a plane—you’re pretty confident the terrain will be familiar on landing , having been an unwitting (oft unwilling) student all your life, and you’re reasonably sure your parachute will open at the appropriate time. Yet there is still risk, still a palpable tinge of uncertainty, albeit wearing the home team’s colors. We cannot know what exactly will be waiting for us when our feet once again sink into the soil of home. We cannot know if the person we have become is quite as willing to live among the ghosts of the people we were before.

The tea leaves can’t tell me anything. I can’t tell the future. I can’t even objectively analyze the past. But I have myself, my will, and I continue, as always, to cling relentlessly and with immeasurable force to the ever-changing form of my dreams.

“And therefore
Who would cry out

To the petals on the ground
To stay,
Knowing as we must,
How the vivacity of what was is married

To the vitality of what will be?”
-Mary Oliver

La Güera in Her Labyrinth

September 28, 2015September 28, 2015Kaelyn 3 Comments

I’ve been abroad for more than a year now, and in that time I’ve seen and done amazing things, things even my dreams would have fallen short of. In some ways the world is not so very different, regardless of which square foot of space you are regarding it from. We get up in the morning, we find a way to make money, we feed ourselves. Hopefully, we laugh and love and revel in the midst of doing what’s necessary (though these things are necessary also). But there are lessons to be learned by leaving one’s home and the people that give that word meaning. Travel is the most effective teacher I’ve ever known. It is both the ruler rapping knuckles and the reward of having your good work acknowledged as such. It is being named Prom Queen and getting your period without knowing it in P.E. I have learned many things in the last year — of the strength of bonds between people, of the importance of openness and tolerance, of fear, of how following dirt roads in the dark of night sometimes leads to paradise, and of the power of that moment in which your whole being is screaming at you, fight or flight!?, and you choose to fight, thus learning simultaneously the extent of your vulnerability and the transcendence of your strength. But just as in the macrocosm that is life, in the microcosm of travel the lesson is never ending.

People who know me see many things. I like to think that what they see is generally positive, but I am not so near-sighted that I could even for a moment convince myself that that is all they see. More than once, people who I wouldn’t have thought knew me very well have said something to me that shows just how useless it is to try to hide our weaknesses. It is not an insult, not a criticism, this thing they say, but rather an observation, and it is one I know to be true: I keep people at a distance.

I consider myself an open person. I try my hardest not to judge people on their beliefs (though I will judge them by their actions); at the very least I try to understand before I allow myself to form a judgment. But I spent so long as a child and a young adult hardening myself that it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that now, at 27, there aren’t a labyrinth’s worth of road-blocks, dead ends, and trapdoors I have erected on the path that leads to my heart. In some ways I am the story of Jason and the Minotaur flipped on its head. I, or at least the truest, most open part of me, has for years stood in the middle, trembling at the sound of cloven hooves on stone.

When I set off for South America last year, I made goals for myself, some of which are evident in my first post on this blog. But there was one that I did not write about, because it was evidence of what I see as my biggest weakness. The goal was simply this, to consciously and lovingly attempt to knock down the self-created barriers to my heart, from the inside out. The patriarchy tells women that the right man will make them whole, will heal their hurts. This is beautiful and saccharine-sweet, but it is a lie. If anything, the right person or people might be able to create a detour and circumvent our barriers, but this does not assuage our fears or heal our wounds. Only we can do that. And so I set out into the world in order to find my vulnerability.

I think I did, but I think it’s true name is strength.

I found physical vulnerability in my trek to the Ciudad Perdida in Colombia as well as in the attempted muggings in Bogotá (for some of that harrowing tale, click here). In these cases, I looked within myself and found strength I didn’t know I had. But it wasn’t only physical strength that helped me overcome these two very different challenges. I have a wonderful, capable body, but behind that is a level of determination, of will, that is more beautiful, and more lasting, than even my physical self.

In the end (and I am far from the end, but at least up until this point), it was this same determination, that same iron will, which allowed me to begin to be emotionally vulnerable as well. With my head on my lover’s chest, I whispered him a poem I had memorized, which like a needle served to pierce the marble veneer encasing my heart, allowing him to see me in a slightly deeper sense. Even with an end date already near at the beginning, I allowed myself to feel, to be emotionally challenged, to have layers of protection and heart-padding stripped away, until I stood before him, more clearly myself than I have virtually ever been. I have a long way to go, and I know that I will never wear my heart on my sleeve (as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.”) but for me, this is a major accomplishment, one which would have been nigh on impossible without the already heightened level of vulnerability that travel, but especially solo travel, brings.

Even with this achievement, however, the lessons that travel, that living abroad has planned for me are without end. Living, traveling, experiencing… it is all wonderful, the good and the bad. Sometimes we try to hold on to the good so tightly that we fail to see that it withers and becomes wraith-like in our embrace. As a traveler, you constantly meet new people. You find best friends from countries you’ve never been to, guides in unexpected places, and, with a little luck and a lot of openness, even love. Sometimes these things have infinitesimal lives within our own incredibly brief lives, a candlelight compared to a roaring bonfire. (“…It cannot last the night/ but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—/ it gives a lovely light.”) To travel is to acknowledge that everything is fleeting. You say goodbye, sometimes promising to meet again, but most likely you never will (although of course there are many exceptions). This brings me to my latest travel lesson…

If you are a successful traveler, you will not only learn to make room in your heart for new people, places, and experiences, unthinkingly filing them into the amaranthine vaults of memory, but you will also learn one of the hardest lessons of all… that in order to keep those good things beautiful and free (while always maintaining in your heart the possibility that one day they will come once again into your life), you must be able to let them go.

A Mexicana Goes South of the Border, Cuckolds Mexico for Chile

August 23, 2015August 21, 2015Kaelyn 1 Comment

Quihubo, amigos!? Despite living in Ecuador, I’ve been working so much that La Güera hasn’t gotten many chances to stretch her legs, but good things are brewing so stay tuned. In the meantime, here’s a guest post from a very close friend, Michelle Plascencia. She and I met while working together at a hostel in San Francisco, and since then have gotten ourselves into many an adventure, from terrorizing the quiet redwoods of Big Sur to bar-hopping in San Francisco’s Mission District and everything in between. I even followed her through South America (or at least as far as Peru) without ever actually catching up to her. She’s a wanderlust soul sister to the fullest extent.

On February 6th, 2014, I boarded a one-way flight for Bogotá, Colombia, with an open mind and heart, ready to let the spirit of travel guide me. I was an anxious twenty-something filled with wanderlust, but I was in many ways ready for this aimless journey.

Little did I know that I would have a love affair like none I had ever known — with Chile: its culture, its people, the landscapes, the lovers, friends, and connections that were so indescribable. You know that feeling when your stomach is filled with butterflies? Chile filled me with this unexpected fluttering for four months.

South America is filled with culture and beauty. Each country has its own spice and flavor. As I made my way south through Colombia, I was fortunate enough to meet Elliott, in Popayán. I instantly felt a bond with Elliot, a connection that was refreshing to a solo female traveler. I was nervous about crossing the border alone into Ecuador, but Elliot — a male, Chilean, travel guru — held my hand as we stepped from one country into another. He understood why I was traveling alone, but was also compassionate about my fear. We parted ways again in Quito, from which I continued on to Baños in the south. I was thankful for Elliott’s guidance and had faith that I would be blessed with more characters like him on my trip.

I made it to Baños, the moment I like to refer to as the pinnacle of my trip. This is when I first felt it — the loneliness of traveling, the excitement and hesitation, the frustrations felt at times when I didn’t know what to eat or where I would feel safe. Transylvania Hostel became my home for seven days. This is where I met my great friend Camila, my roommate in the dorm, and another solo twenty-something female. Camila, born and raised in Santiago, Chile, understood my love for travel. She also understood why I was doing so alone, why I wanted to be alone. The hostel was filled with solo travelers, groups of Chileans, dudes from Argentina, France, and the U.S., including sweet Alex from Indiana. We were a mixture of everywhere. We shared many moments together, surrounded by the mountains in Baños, but we all knew what every traveler knows: that the journey continues. Camila and I parted ways and exchanged information so we could keep in touch, but what does keeping in touch really mean?

I made my way down to Máncora, a beautiful coastal town in northern Peru, accompanied by Alex. After a few days of partying and lounging oceanside, it was time yet again to say goodbye. I parted ways with Alex and boarded my 17-hour bus ride from Máncora to Lima, Peru’s capital. The bus ride was filled with emotion, excitement, and loneliness, the latter of which overcame me when I realized I was saying goodbye to a lover that I would probably never see again. Sure, we can keep in touch, but will that spark, that bond that we once shared, be the same?

I stepped off the bus in Lima and was immediately bombarded by taxi drivers clamoring to take me here or there. I didn’t even have my backpack yet, but I already had 15 offers for cab rides. This is when I met Indira and Sebastián. When they noticed my overwhelmed facial expression, they immediately asked where I was going. It turned out we were going to the same hostel, so we walked away from the terminal and the gaggle of taxi drivers together. They were a vibrant, friendly Chilean couple. Indira was a calm spirit, while Sebastián was a louder, macho kind of guy.

I quickly became the third wheel while traveling with this kooky couple, but I felt more like a friend to these new companions who were on the same travel high as me. They would smooch on each other here and there but then they would get into screaming battles while I simply observed, simultaneously taking it in and losing myself in my own thoughts. Their relationship was close to home, as my parents are professionals at yelling battles and making up. Being around them was comforting. We traveled together to Arica, Chile, where they were taking a flight back to Santiago — the same place I was going, only on a thirty-hour bus ride. I was supposed to meet a dear friend of mine there. Indira and Seba walked me through everything: where to find reasonable bus tickets, what to do when I got there, etc. They gave me their addresses and phone numbers for when I arrived, before making sure that I got on the bus and waving goodbye from a distance. Indira and Sebastián… what a whirlwind of love they were.

I finally arrived in Santiago and felt like I was home. I stayed with Camila (my roomie from Baños) and was as welcome as if we had been friends for years!

I later met up with Indira and Seba, and it was as if we were on foreign lands together again. They welcomed me into their homes where we ate almuerzos, laughed, and later smoked a porro (joint) in Barrio Brasil.

Keeping in touch had a new meaning to me now. It was a real thing. We actually did and still do keep in touch.

As always, the journey continued, and I soon found myself in Punta Arenas, Chile, very unprepared to trek Torres del Paine. Full of ambition, I went to the well-known Erratic Rock to get some pointers for the hike. I was fortunate to cross paths with Osvaldo and Keko, two Chileans who were also prepping for the big hike.

“¿Vas sola?” they asked.

“Yes,” I responded hesitantly, “I am going to rent some gear.”

“Ven con nosotros, po!”

“¿En serio?”

“¡Claro! Nomás vamos nosotros dos y tenemos todo. Nomás traete tu comida. Aquí nos vemos a las 6 a.m. mañana.”

Five days later, we returned with endless stories, laughs, memories, and experiences that the three of us would always share: the moments we trekked in the rain, wind, snow, and sunshine and even rotated who would sleep in the middle to keep warm. The memories that created the kinship I instantly felt with them. The hike wouldn’t have been the same alone. As I hiked eight hours a day with Osvaldo and Keko, I imagined doing it alone. The magical moments of the breathtaking landscape would have been the same, but the happiness I felt as we approached Glacier Grey wouldn’t have been as magical if I had been alone. Sharing these moments with strangers felt wholesome. Once we got back, I headed back up north while they continued south into Argentina. As always we urged each other, “Keep in touch!” We embraced and parted ways.

I was finally heading out of Chile and into Bolivia. I stopped in Pisco Elqui, Valle de Elqui, Chile, a small town tucked away in the Andes. I attended a yoga class at Centro Tierra Pura, a holistic healing center, and was mesmerized by the energy there. I felt as though every moment prior to my arrival had been aligned to guide me to Pisco Elqui. After gushing about my instant love of Pisco to Loto, the owner, she immediately offered me a room to stay in in exchange for helping her while she traveled for work. I was a solo female wanderer, no plan or itinerary, and everything that I had experienced in Chile had brought me here, so I said yes. I was able to participate in meditation ceremonies, yoga, and other holistic healing practices.

The times spent in Pisco Elqui enriched my relationship with myself and opened my mind to the encounters that life has to offer if you’re paying attention. I learned to embrace the present moment and understand that every moment, happy or sorrowful, is a gift. Sulking in what ifs, would’ves, could’ves, and should’ves tend to bring regret and cause us to forget to live in the present, creating a domino effect that takes away from the enjoyment of the now.

These few encounters that I’ve mentioned here are only a handful of the Chilean people that made me feel at home, made me feel like I could always go back to Chile and be welcome. All these encounters led me to my home in Pisco Elqui at a time and place that I cherish deep within my heart, remembering the moments as if they were dreams.

A surfer in Pichilemu, Chile, told me that there is no such thing as one soulmate. As humans, we are fascinated by the connection we share with an individual. Whether it’s for an hour, a day, or a month, sometimes you feel a connection and sharing those moments together are far more meaningful than waiting and longing for ONE soulmate.

Throughout my trip I came across many soulmates, individuals that enlightened me with their spirit and who allowed my presence to enlighten theirs. We shared special moments and conversations, stared at the breathtaking landscapes of Chile, ate together, drank, hugged, laughed, or simply sat in pleasant silence. Although I don’t keep in touch with all of them, they are all part of the person I have become. They are part of the love affair I had, and will forever have, with Chile.

Michelle is a full-time wanderer and film enthusiast who’s almost always simultaneously training for a long-distance run. After working various film festivals and supporting arts education in San Francisco, California, for five years, she decided to take a leave of absence from her routine lifestyle in the States. Her recent trip to South America sparked a new and unexpected interest — to teach English abroad. Low and behold you can now find her in Incheon, South Korea, teaching energetic preschoolers. It has been a whirlwind of cultural differences and adjustments, but that’s part of the thrill of living abroad, especially in a country that rarely sees a brown-skinned woman. The students, of course, never hesitate to ask why her skin is darker than theirs.

Grasping Bills in Sweaty Fists, We March Towards Isolation

August 2, 2015August 2, 2015Kaelyn 1 Comment

A mural depicting the disparities of wealth in Bogota, Colombia

The other day I went to cash a check at a bank branch in Cuenca I had never been to before. I stood awkwardly in the doorway for a few heartbeats, confused. Like any other bank, there was the security guard standing in front of the impersonal faces of ATMs, there the counter with its leashed pens for signing checks or filling in any of various blanks, and there the bivouac of people waiting to talk to a teller, taught from infancy how to stand silently in line… but where were the tellers? What were these slack-faced people waiting for? I did a double take–at one of the ATMs in front of which a customer was standing, a face peered out of a screen in the top left. She was talking and signaling to the person at the machine, and I watched as the latter put their documents into a tube, sealed it, and stuck it into a receptacle, which then also sealed itself before disappearing. These weren’t ATMs, these were the tellers, but instead of face to face contact, all communication was mediated through a video screen.

I had never seen this, let alone heard about it, which is kind of surprising because, knowing the U.S., it would be one of the first places to implement a system like this. And yet I’m glad I haven’t seen it before and frankly, I hope not to see it again. I’d never considered it before, really. Most of us don’t consciously value the salutations and admittedly superficial pleasantries we exchange with those people we interact so briefly with: bank tellers, waiters, grocery store clerks. And yet in this experience at the bank, I starkly felt the absence of something I had always taken for granted.

I believe one of the universal truths of our humanity is the need for human contact–physical human contact. We live in an age where so much can and has been digitized. Fifty years ago I would have only been able to communicate with my family back in California by mail. Any correspondence would have been in transit for weeks or even months, and, considering that Ecuador’s postal system is lacking even today, would have had a good chance of never arriving in the first place. Now I can talk to friends and family within seconds and I can even see their faces. But I can’t hug them or squeeze their hand or smack them gently on the shoulder in loving antagonism. They can’t comfort me when I’m ill. Lovers can not feel each other’s skin over Skype. Mothers can not kiss their children over FaceTime. Words can travel through the ether of space, but the warmth of our bodies, the unique smell of our skin and hair and breath, and the authenticity of our whole selves are completely lost in it.

It’s the thought of all this that bothers me and leaves me cold when I go to a bank and speak only to a machine, where once I had an exchange with a person, however fleeting and thoughtless. If human contact is one of the most important factors of our most basic levels of happiness and well-being, what does it say about us that little by little we are taking it away from ourselves? What, exactly, is the point of it? It’s simple, unfortunately. It’s done for money, for the care and keeping of it. Money is the how and the why, the justification for that removal of person from person. If human contact is a basic ingredient to our existence, then money is its anathema.

One reason that people travel, in my opinion, is to connect with others. Of course, those who never stray far from where they’ve lived their entire lives connect with people daily too, and yet it is a kind of homogeneous connection, one of comfort, of the surety that comes with an innate familiarity with your surroundings. While traveling, that comfort and surety is stripped away, leaving us bare and raw, vulnerable to the intentions of others. Without the insulation of home, our interactions with others are necessarily more open. We are not standing on solid ground when we strike up a conversation on a bus or in a hostel, especially if the person with whom we are trying to connect does not share our primary language. And yet I think it is because of the fragility of the situation that sometimes the connections we make on the road burn brighter and more fiercely than the majority of those we make at home, even if these connections last no longer than an hour, a day, a week. Just like with love, we have to open ourselves up to an excruciating extent in order to experience more deeply what we have in common with one another.

This is not all travel. This is the kind young people do most commonly, with a backpack and a few thousand dollars and little else, besides a tenuous hope that the time ahead of them will be filled with the many permutations of truth and that they will find their lives filled with a conscious kind of intention they hadn’t known before. But there is also the travel that older and more affluent people tend to do, the kind that includes words like all-inclusive and itinerary and package deal. In my mind this kind of travel is like a bubble. You step into it and then float through foreign places like in a dream, because all real connection and experience bounces off this effervescent barrier you have created around yourself with the help of money, whether this is out of fear or jejune ignorance or willful blindness. These people are often not interested in the infinite connections to be made with people from different backgrounds, belief systems, and socioeconomic underworlds, but rather travel as if they were in a zoo, interested only in the strangeness of the exhibits, but both very aware and very grateful for the bars that keep that strangeness from truly touching them. I believe that what they fear in these would-be encounters is that the world view they’ve built their life around may be challenged and irreparable chinks may begin to appear in a belief system that once seemed so solid. It is easier to keep any such threats at a physical remove.

Money is capable of many things. It can open up vast vistas of opportunity and fight off death and old age (though not for long), it can buy comfort and style, but one thing it has never done–because it is antithetical to its very nature–is bring people closer together. Instead it creates walls between us, invisible strata that separate us from one another. It was with the intent of protecting money that someone came up with the idea to have bank tellers sit in undecorated, impersonal rooms and talk to customers through a video screen, pushing money into space-age tubes of plastic in exchange for documents, and sending them to the other side through bulletproof glass, because in the eyes of those who consider the true currency of life to be monetary, it is those flimsy bills that need to be protected and valued, as opposed to the emotional, marvelous beings on either side of the barrier.

Solitude as Sustenance, or, Singing the Pain

June 15, 2015June 15, 2015Kaelyn Leave a comment

The United States has always boasted a highly individualistic culture. Children generally move out of their parents’ home once they reach 18, people are encouraged more and more to pursue their own goals (men have enjoyed this privilege for ages–women only recently), etc. It is not at all like Ecuador where being single, for example, is regarded as anomalous or where the heteronormative trajectory of life is all but holy writ (i.e. get married, have kids, live life for said kids, rinse and repeat). But even in the country that coined the term “rugged individualism”, the idea of solitude, of being alone, remains a point of fear for many; so much so that they would rather settle for mediocrity–in relationships, in jobs–than risk ever being or feeling alone.

But for me, solitude is something I crave, something necessary in order to maintain a sense of balance in my life. I’m a very social person–there are few things I enjoy more than sitting with friends, talking and laughing without restraint. But there are days, like today, where I wake up and think “Today I want no one’s company but my own.” It is in this state of solitude in which I am at my most productive. I write, read, cook… I even clean. The solitude fills in the cracks I hadn’t even noticed and makes me feel level. This has worked for me in many different stages of my life and in many ways allowed me to become the (arguably) whole and sane person I am.

During the Dark Ages (high school era), I would often go to the beach at night, alone. Sometimes I wrote angsty, hormone-riddled poems (and sometimes good ones) or cry or punch the steering wheel, or open the window and close my eyes while breathing in the salt-tinged air and listening only to the ceaselessly crashing waves. The ocean always made me feel small and, consequently, enacted the same magic on the size of my problems. I did this at moments when I thought I might burst from the tension, anger, heartbreak, and sense of betrayal that shaped those years and so severely warped the way I interacted with those around me, making me question who I thought I was. True solitude can be so difficult to find as a teenager, and yet if I hadn’t found a way to do so, I would have been lost.

Years later, in another–possibly darker–period, I would wander alone through the streets of San Francisco. I went to movies by myself, to restaurants I had wanted to try, to coffee shops, bookstores, and bars, both upscale and divey. In these places I watched other people as they often watched me, the young, pretty girl sitting alone over a latte gone cold or a half-eaten plate of bolognese. I tried to read in the lines of their faces and the shapes of their bodies whether they had the same scars as I and, if so, how they had moved on from the point of injury. I allowed food and leftover pain pills and the laughter of strangers and the penumbra of empty movie theaters to fill the yawning emptiness inside of me. This brand of solitude didn’t heal me, but there are times in life when distraction is salvation, and it gave me that.

Solo travel takes solitude to an entirely different level. It becomes unavoidable–interminable bus rides, rooms in hostels in strange border towns, the knowledge that you are carrying all you need with you on your own back with no one’s help. This kind of solitude is one of the greatest of life’s teachers. Nothing else will tell you so much and with so much brutal honesty about your strengths and weaknesses. It breaks you and then puts you back together, like a bone, stronger at the site of the break. It is the scariest and most rewarding kind of solitude I can think of–a drug that never leaves your system.

But the solitude I woke up seeking today was of an entirely different strain. If that latter period of my life was darkness, this one is pure light. I am putting every fiber of myself towards finding contentment and joy and my spot in the world. I am beta-testing dreams I’ve had for as long as I can remember. I’m pushing the boundaries of my own independence by living unsupported and unfettered in a foreign country. I have people in my life, both new and well-established, who love and accept my most authentic self and I theirs. My moments of solitude now are not about holding myself together but about letting the world in and allowing myself to be grateful for everything I have been given and have gotten for myself. They are moments of quiet joy, of tactile pleasures, of enjoying the capabilities of my own flesh, of acknowledging my own inherent power in creating and defining my own experience. Solitude is finding my center and using it as a baseboard for launching myself once again into the unpredictable nebula of the next moment.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco… And London: Finding Home

January 30, 2015September 1, 2015AmandaRichardson Leave a comment

Hello friends and fellow viajeros! I’m working as hard as I can to get pan-continental again, but in the meantime I have asked a few people who share my passion for travel to write about their own experiences, so there will be some guest posts intermixed with my own. I thought some fresh voices and perspectives would be just the thing. This week’s entry is a topic near and dear to my heart, written by a friend even nearer and dearer. Enjoy!

Having lived in one place until I was an adult meant that, as a teenager, I had yet to experience home as an abstract term. It was a literal thing, nestled in the hills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Though I traveled quite a bit as a child, I never found that indescribable feeling I now know as harmony — that feeling of being connected to a city without knowing how or why. It wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco when I was eighteen that I experienced the sheer joy of falling in love with a place. Sometimes I tell myself that perhaps it was because I was on my own for the first time, or because I’d found the quintessential group of friends. But I know deep down that the “City by the Bay” captured my heart in more ways than just perfect timing and quality people — it was my home, and I still very much consider it that. But soon after moving to San Francisco, I inexplicably found myself at home again… in London.

Let me add that I’ve had the great fortune of traveling to a wide variety of cities: Lima, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Prague, Tel Aviv, Paris, Krakow, Copenhagen, and Venice, to name a few. All of these places were wonderful in their own way. However, upon arrival to each of these cities, I did not feel that same heart-stopping, adrenaline-inducing, starry-eyed wonder that I felt my first day in San Francisco or London. It was almost painful, this feeling of connectivity to a certain place, almost — dare I say — déjà vu (side note: I do believe in reincarnation, so I suppose it’s entirely possible that I have been to these places in a past life). When someone describes déjà vu to me, I immediately think of my first days in those two cities. Is it possible, then, to find home in a place you’ve never physically been before? The soul is capable of many things — reincarnation being one of them — so maybe that’s what this feeling, this kinship towards a geographical location, is. What is it about a place that envelops you so wholly — grounds you so completely — in its gritty, unfamiliar arms?

When I studied abroad, I’d chosen London as a destination without ever having traveled there. Whenever people asked why, I always replied that I’d been strangely drawn to London. It had been a sudden love affair. I wasn’t expecting to love everything about it, but I had. And not only that: I felt as though I was home. Which, having never been there before, was hard to explain to myself, let alone other people. London drew me in and never let go. Even now, thinking of the foggy parks, the cobblestoned streets, the smoke billowing from chimneys in the winter, the wild geese, the smell of diesel — it brings forth a very emotional nostalgia for a place that I called home for four months, a place I still consider one of my homes. I belonged, truly belonged, in London. I haven’t felt that same sense of belonging since I left.

Flying into London last summer after having been away for two years brought tears to my eyes. Joyful, exuberant tears. The man next to me on the plane noticed. He asked me if I was returning home. My answer? Something like that. London, a place I’ve been four whole times, was my city. Can you explain that? I can’t. Driving up the 101 Freeway into San Francisco, glimpsing the well-known cityscape, navigating the streets so familiar that I could drive them with my eyes closed: emotional, heart-warming, my home. I am home. That’s what I tell myself upon arrival to both of these cities. I am home, I am home, I am home.

Why doesn’t Los Angeles feel like home any more? It physically is; it’s where I grew up, where my parents still live in the house I grew up in. It’s important to note that I love it here. The Los Angeles I live in now is entirely different than the city I grew up in. Maybe it’s just that. I am evolved now, and I have given my heart to other cities, and there is no room left for my hometown. I have so much love for these other cities that there is nothing left to give Los Angeles other than the half-hearted nod that I give to everyone who asks if I like living here. Yes, I do like living here. Sometimes I think I might love it here. Los Angeles is like a familiar friend: comforting, routine, and complacent. Given my history, I should have room within me to accept it as my home, a label I’ve given to two other cities. And maybe one day I will think of it as such. But for now, I can keep dreaming of returning home — to my heart— in San Francisco and London. I left a piece of myself in each of those cities. I won’t feel whole until I go back.

Amanda Richardson lives in Los Angeles, California, with her fiancé and two cats. She is the author of one published romance novel, The Foretelling, with another in the process of being so. She enjoys binge-watching Friends, reading, and playing Scrabble while drinking wine. She travels every chance she gets and spends her idle hours surfing for cheap international flights that she can max out her credit cards on. She and la Güera met when they were thrown together by chance as roommates in the freshman dorms in San Francisco. The rest is history.

La Güera Encounters an Old Frienemy

December 9, 2014Kaelyn 1 Comment

The other night, I was sitting on my mom’s couch, flipping between Space Jam and Pirates of the Caribbean and trying to quash a surprisingly insistent desire to be in the company of someone else. It wouldn’t have mattered really who it was, although the closer it was appropriate for me to press my body to theirs the better, but I was overwhelmed with this need for there to be another other with me. I cajoled and wooed a few people but to no avail and so I sat there and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. After so long on my own, why did I feel as though solitude was suddenly a liquid weight that was making me sluggish and, in a way, scared? After a while it dawned on me: I was feeling alone because for the first time in five months I was alone; really, truly alone.

On my trip I had been a single person huddled in the window seat of buses, an individual trying to devour new cities and their personalities through something akin to osmosis, one girl among many in dormitories that peppered the entire northern seaboard of the South American continent, but in truth I was absolutely never alone. And in that moment, with my mom gone to her boyfriend’s and my friends and the man from whom I want what I can not have unavailable, I was alone. Suddenly I was missing the presence of a front desk staff or that of familiar strangers lounging on couches or in hammocks in my periphery. I hadn’t realized that I had been in a constant state of being in the presence of others, but the sudden absence of it completely upset my equilibrium and made me want to hug myself tightly enough to leave marks on my own skin. I had come home to an old nemesis, a cousin to the kind I had felt while traveling: loneliness.

Solitude has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. Anyone to whom reading is a beloved pastime is familiar and friendly with it. But the comfortable solitude that necessarily accompanies reading aside, I have often sought solitude as a way to allow myself to feel things without the filter of other people’s perceptions, to bask in the universality of finding oneself alone in one’s own body, less than a mere speck in the grand scheme of the universe. I could not be without it, but solitude’s more insidious and subtle twin, loneliness, has always been more problematic for me.

While traveling alone, you often feel unprotected and vulnerable as a result of your singleness, more so I think if you happen to be a woman. Solitude and loneliness are the price you pay for the unforgettable experiences and seemingly insuperable vexations, the travel delays and accidental epiphanies. But somehow, for me at least, the loneliness I encountered on the road was manageable, vanquished by taking a walk in my new surroundings or curling up in a hammock and losing myself in a book. I think the fact that I was virtually constantly on the move, changing locations almost as often as underwear, was a salve for whatever pesky loneliness wormed its way into my heart. There wasn’t a lack of arms into which I could have fallen either (that age-old cure), whether they belonged to men who were looking for a temporary fix, competitive in their need, or to those whose goals were more long-term, which manifested in a possessive, often jealous desire. And I did fall once or twice, but I always kicked the sheets off the next day with a revivifying understanding that what I was looking for was not a cure for loneliness, but something much deeper. I neither wanted nor needed to find someone to “permanently” assuage my loneliness as it could only serve to complicate.

But every so often I would feel pangs of misplaced yearning, a sense of loss for something that I had never had any claim to. For instance there was a boy in Peru, to whom I refer as my Prince Charming, who took me in hand and kept me there when I had to get stitches in my leg. Before the “incident” we had learned bits and pieces about each other, including the fact that we were going in opposite directions. That’s something you become accustomed to when meeting people along the way, in hostels and on tours: there is a sweet temporariness to any relationship, an innate understanding of both the beginning and the end (though some things surprise you). You know before you’ve spoken a word that your roads will lead you different places, and this meeting is only one tiny topographical point on the map. But somehow, this boy I hardly knew held me together and instead of crying I spent the night laughing. Later on, wearing his shirt and breathing in the smell of him, I felt a sweet nostalgia for an imagined future. But it was only a passing thing, as opposed to a more clinging kind of regret.

While traveling it is easy for me to remember and find comfort in the fact that I am, at this point in my life, too wild and erratic and impulsive for someone to hold me still long enough to pin their hopes on me. It is at home, however, where that confidence falters a bit, the devil-may-care attitude fails to carry me through, and I begin to regret in a small but powerful way that I am not a person to whom longer-term relationships come easily, simply because of that pesky fact that you kind of need to be physically near a person for it to work.

Now I’ve been home for two weeks and in that time I have watched, to my chagrin, the shape of my itinerant loneliness change into something more sedentary, and therefore heavier. There is something about being back in familiar surroundings, where most things seem to have changed very little that tends to make my singlehood rankle, where suddenly something in my subconscious rears its ugly head and seems to say “Single? Still?” It is obvious to me now that my priorities are travel and experience and wonder as opposed to romance and the kind of comfort one feels waking up in the half-light of morning to the sound of someone else’s breathing and the warmth of someone else’s skin. Unfortunately, the fact that I have mentally decided this has little to no effect on my heart and body’s desire for the latter. This is evidence to me that there is truth in that hackneyed and often annoying refrain: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” In the end (and also in the beginning), it all comes down to choices and at least I can take comfort in the fact that I have made mine.

This loneliness, this feeling of need, is a price I am willing to pay for the marvels I have seen and for the limitless experiences that await only my courage.

The Self as the Horizontal Line that Connects Worlds

December 3, 2014Kaelyn 1 Comment

Coming home is always strange, and the strangeness of arrival multiplies exponentially the longer you are away. There is no action without a reaction, and so every single thing that happens to you while traveling changes you, usually in such a small way so as not to be noticeable as it happens, but at the moment your feet touch whatever ground constitutes that amorphous and abstract place called “home”, one simple truth hits you with the force of something that has been building speed for eons: you have changed irrevocably while your home has not.

I think you subconsciously believe that the world changes and develops with you–it does, but in such ways that we cannot see them in our solipsism–and so evidence to the contrary kind of sets us back for a moment. In my case, I feel profoundly altered after my five months abroad, so coming back home to find everything where I had left it was–is–jarring. And yet within hours of stepping off the plane in Los Angeles, it also felt as though I had fallen back into the folds of normalcy. It was as though without knowing it I had split into two people. The one (la Güera?) had, only days ago, popped a couple of Valium and threaded every available limb through her luggage in order to survive a 19-hour bus ride from Máncora to Lima on a bus designed for people with a leg span half hers, had licked the juice of beef hearts from her fingers as she ran for a taxi, had split her knee open as a consequence of mixing salsa dancing and blood bombs (as sinister as they sound). The other me (E. Kaelyn Davis?) had continued her life here without interruption, driving the 405 to the 5 freeway and back again (between her parents’ houses), calling in pick-up orders for banh mi and ramen and pad see ew, playing Scrabble and Mexican Train with her family, drinking IPAs and flirting shamelessly in seedy but somehow endearing dive bars.

It’s such an odd feeling, because if there really is only one me, how do I reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of Orange County, California, organized so cleanly into its city blocks, with its traffic laws so reverently obeyed (relatively speaking), and the wonderful, wild, and often chaotic world that I’ve inhabited the last half a year in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru? How can two such tangible and living realities, realities in which I have a place and a purpose, exist in one dimension of time and space?

I am no Stephen Hawking. I don’t understand the complexities of dimensional realities. I couldn’t even tell you now what the formula for the theory of relativity is. The only thing that I know is that there is only one similarity between these two places: me. Of course they exist without my being in them. Millions of people’s lives continue without my ever even suspecting that they exist. But it seems that we can only truly grasp reality if we are part of it. They say that the human brain is absolutely incapable of imagining its own nonexistence. We can not imagine not being. This is the essence of solipsism: the idea that the self is the only thing that can be known, truly understood, to exist.

This idea of there being two of me, one that contains me and the other as a sort of space holder, is comforting. Perhaps when I return to Cuenca in two months, I will feel as though I have slipped back into the Kaelyn that never left her subequatorial paradise. Obviously this is all a physical impossibility, but the people whose lives we are part of carry us around with them so we are never truly absent. Thus it is only a slight stretch of the imagination to visualize a kind of shade of ourselves inhabiting places we have walked, lived, laughed, waiting for our real selves, our consciousnesses, to come back and make them whole again.

Maybe this is what we mean when we say we’ve left part of ourselves somewhere. Maybe it’s more than just a figure of speech.

Just maybe.

The Jouissance of Worldly Love

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014Kaelyn 2 Comments

The mountains surrounding Quito, Ecuador.

I have accomplished many things in my life, though it is no more nor less than many people I know. I have done many things that I have been told I was “supposed” to do: graduated from college, found “real” jobs, moved out of my parents’ houses. I have also done many things just for me, the most important of which is the impetus and theme for this blog: traveling through South America. But in spite of all the many things I’ve done, I have come to realize that I have never been in love.

Taking a dip in the Cuyabeno River, Ecuador.

Don’t misunderstand me; I have loved and do love many people. I have loved members of my family with the possessive, wonderful, though sometimes internecine kind of love that is so unique to those few whose love you were born into, if you are lucky. I have loved friends who have shared both good and bad times with me, who helped me home when I had made the bad combinatory decision of wearing high heels and drinking whiskey, who were game to spontaneously go out of town when I felt that I would burst from one more day of being in the same place, who held my hand when it was all I could do to hold myself together. I have loved men romantically, too. There is a difference there that is seldom talked about. You can love people without ever “falling in love” with them in that Meg Ryan rom-com kind of way. There’s the love that exists because you care about someone and they care about you, because they see your best and worst parts and love you anyways. There’s a kind of love that springs from the fact that they are the only person who can talk to you for hours on end about things you’re obsessed with (writing, nerdy fandoms, books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [you people know who you are]). More often, for me at least, there’s the love that means you can not even look at a person without wanting to throw them against something and touch every inch of their body with every inch of yours. I know all these kinds of loves. But actually falling in love with someone? I haven’t done that. Why? Because it scares the ever-loving shit out of me. As Diane Ackerman said,

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

I am not the most humble of people but, ironically, I think one of my greatest strengths is my ability to acknowledge and admit to weakness, and making myself vulnerable is probably my biggest weakness. So it is true that I have never fallen in love with a person, but to say I have never been in love is a gross exaggeration, for I have been and continue to be irrevocably in love with something much less transient and even more physical than that latter love I mentioned above: places on a map.

Rose and I in front of Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, Paris, in 2007.

The first time happened more quickly than I could have imagined. When I was 18, my mom traded houses in the south of France and in the process of taking two friends to the airport and picking one up, I spent a little less than a day in Paris. I spent that day eating macarons and drinking café au laits in restaurants some of my most idolized writers frequented. I climbed the towers of Notre Dame and, like a gargoyle, hung over the edge to look as far as I could see in every direction as I considered the mastery of the cathedral itself, which I was then reading about in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I wandered, and was momentarily stalked, through Père Lachaise cemetery, and I left the trace of my lips, on top of those of so many others, on Oscar Wilde’s grave. Everyone does these things, it seems, when they go to Paris. But for me, I left something there which I have never gotten back. Whether it got caught in the cobblestones of the streets, in the scent of roasting meat, in the lilt and arabesques of the language, some part of me became a part of Paris. I went back a summer later for a month and the feeling only became stronger, the hunger for the city and all it held only more voracious. Years and years have passed since I’ve been back, but when I think of that city my hearts seems to pull in that direction, like a compass towards the Pole. At those moments I feel a longing which so many poems and stories describe as the way one feels for a beloved that is out of the reach of one’s arms. Paris holds for me the memories of minds I admire, of written words that have helped form me, of stories that sparked in me my own desire to write. My love for Paris is one of the mind.

Teotihuacán, the “Place Where Men Become Gods”.

The next time I fell in love was even stranger than the first. Strange because although I barely knew Mexico (I grew up practically within sight of it), I had a deep-rooted craving to know more. Like an attractive person glimpsed in a crowd, I thought of Mexico and was caught up in what it would feel like to be there, to feel that language on my tongue, to run into its vastness and feel engulfed. In college, I went abroad for a year to Querétaro, the city that was Mexico’s capital in colonial times. Technically I went there to study, but I can think of little that I gained academically from my time there. In truth, I went there to continue my lips’ love affair with the language, my belly’s obsession with the food, my eyes’ infatuation with the bright colors of the culture and architecture, and my heart’s sight unseen yearning for all of Mexico’s accoutrements, both the bright and exciting as well as the dark and dirty undersides.

On the river in Xochimilco.

Sometimes in life we meet people and we feel as if we had always known them, that somehow this is not a chance encounter but a predetermined reunion. That is how I felt with Mexico. I was meant to be there. It was far from perfect and I missed some luxuries that I had taken for granted back at home but at some primitive, savage level, Mexico and I were meant for one another. In the four years between coming home from Mexico and leaving for Colombia, I would sometimes be walking down the street in San Francisco and my ears would perk up and hone in on any utterance of that language that has become an amalgam of European Spanish, indigenous Mexican languages, and even smatterings of English, and again my heart would beat a little faster. Like hearing the voice of a love that has been lost, the Spanish language calls forth yearnings that feel strong enough to break me in half. Even here in South America, when I hear the Mexican dialect I feel a completely unexpected pang in my heart, a mixture of nostalgia and sadness and irrefutably and undeniably, a sense of being called back to something that I had fallen in love with long before I was conscious of it. I think of Mexico as my spirit country. My love for Mexico is one of the soul.

Fishermen bringing in the day’s catch in Puerto Lopez, Ecuador.

Now here I am in Lima, Peru on my last day in South America. I fly home tonight at midnight. I won’t go into my feelings for Ecuador again (check out this entry for more), and perhaps I am not worried about feeling lovesick for Cuenca because for once I know I will be back soon, but in all this I have discovered something truly important. There is somewhere else I am in love with, and not just for the people in it. This time it is not love at first sight (Paris) or a fierce kind of love that was waiting for me to find it (Mexico). This time it is the kind of love that can suddenly blossom out of nowhere. The kind of latent love that you may have for a best friend, whom you’ve known for years, until suddenly one day you realize you want to do more than hold their hand in friendship.

Sunset in the Sunset District, San Francisco

With no warning at all, the love I feel for this place has gone from platonic to… something else. The last few mornings I have woken up (in Cuenca, in Máncora, in Lima) and all I have wanted was to be waking up in my bed (or any bed as I don’t currently have one) at home in California. California with its gorgeous coastline, with its metastasized suburbs, with its mountains like broken teeth and its lakes like bottomless pools of pellucid tears, its cities as different as anything could be, its hyperinflated housing and its beautiful, invaluable diversity. It is with my home that I have finally fallen in love. I know that I will continue to leave it, again and again, but I will never again forget my devotion to it.

Morro Bay, California

It is easy to fall in love with places. They ask nothing of you except an open mind. By loving them, you do not also give them the power to destroy you. By loving them, you are only finding pieces of your own heart that you never knew were missing. And though one day I hope to find the courage to fall in love with a person, for now my love for places, for Paris and Mexico, for Ecuador and California, is enough.

My love for California is one of the heart.

California, la güerita is coming home.