July 17, 2009

Discombobulation


It's a funny day. Overcast with clouds and a mild caña hangover, too little sleep, but I don't sleep in here, no matter what.

Isabela is different than San Cristóbal. It's smaller and friendlier, so I feel like I know everyone. I biked home from class the other day--my classroom is out in the middle of a lava field, next to the gas station--and on the way passed all the reminders that I have been here long enough to develop familiarity. There was the yellow dog that always barks at me, the couple that makes out under the street light, the heavy woman walking home, the ten guys that are always sitting around a table waiting for someone to buy beer, my neighbour Reuben--drunk, waving a cigarette and shouting MAH-REE!, Pancho the water delivery man who flags me down to ask if we need another bottle tonight, the surfers that hang out next door, and the two men in wife-beaters who are apparently stay-at-home dads, because they are always sitting on the stoop with one or two small childen playing next to them in the dirt. Oh, and then there's the place itself--the clouded pink sunsets on the volcano, the silty flamingo pond, the palm trees and curling purple flowers in empty lots lining the beach...

I get home and think that I could stay.

Then I wake up and find an email titled Hi and Wedding Ceremony. It's from my Turkish language partner and friend, an amazing, beautiful, smart girl that met me every week at the Vancouver Public library to laugh about the un-translatable degil mi? in Turkish, and English's absurd dependency on the word get. And to talk about culture and relationships and our attempts to steer our lives with decisions. It seems this beautiful young woman has just made one of these life-steering decisions. She wants to invite me and my family to her wedding in Turkey.

And just like that I know Galapagos is an episode, and I won't stay.

It's been months now and I feel like my identity here is as washed out as a watercolour. I used to be an oil painting! Here I'm mellow, I'm patient, I'm happy...but I rarely talk about Saudi, Nepal, Turkey, Romania...the places I've been, the people I've met, the encounters that changed my understanding of what it is to be a human living on Earth. I don't know if this old identity--the one that is linked to my dear Turkish friend and the memory I have of her taking me home so that her mother can read my fortune in a coffee cup--is waiting for me at the airport baggage claim, or if this Galapagos sense of myself is going to linger.

Like I say, it's a funny day.

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