The day I left Guatemala began with a beautiful morning. Smog and haze from the capital had not yet blown in, leaving every detail of the three surrounding volcanoes visible from base to peak. Fuego, our ever-active friend in Antigua, remained calm without any moderate eruptions. Tuktuks rattled along the cobblestone streets. You could smell fresh banana bread outside Doña Luisa. Things were like they were the day I arrived.
Then in a rare display of Guatemalan punctuality, my taxi driver showed up 20 minutes early and we were off, ascending the hills that surround home before descending into the hustle and bustle of a sprawling Guatemala City. A few hours later Cuba was outside my right side window and a few hours more I landed where it all began.
The transition feels stronger, maybe harder, than those before and it has kept me quiet since the day I left. Driving along the same suburban roads I have driven more times than I can remember, I thought about 24 hours earlier passing miles and miles of poverty-stricken shanty towns that themselves surround gated communities of the few but powerful European ancestral elite. While buying a suit and a new smartphone, I thought about a ten year old I saw once lugging firewood on his back alongside a highway near the Honduras border. It is contradictions like these that characterize Guatemala as a whole for me and when other things feel far away as they are now, those polarities still feel near.
I love the story of a 16th century Spanish explorer who, during his travels through the Guatemalan jungles, stopped late one evening to rest under the stars. He awoke with the sunlight the following morning to giant stone temples covered in thick vegetation -- the ruins of ancient Mayan cities long ago abandoned and swallowed. I walked those ruins one Saturday morning, 500 years later, and found myself taking comfort in the very normal fact that I am but one person of many who has come and had to say goodbye.
No comments:
Post a Comment