In Patagonia

It really was a stunning landscape, with all the elements you'd expect of the bottom of the world. Fierce winds blew in off nearby glaciers, and when the clouds weren't out, the sun kept the temperature somewhere confusing between hot and cold. It was dry and rocky in parts, and green and lush in others, peppered with llamas and condors and an occasional cougar. Every lake lit up with a different shade of blue, and one morning absent all wind, at a lake they said was always choppy, it was clear as glass, mirrored, a mountain rising up above and descending below.

Chatwin's In Patagonia accompanied me and gave context to the otherworldly terrain of Torres del Paine, and I'm reminded of the great value in returning to human life as it evolved to be. Stay away from the cell towers long enough, and the brain rewires to its natural state, where you sit comfortably gazing at nothing, or talking to the stranger on your left, rather than reaching for a phone screen and falling into the abyss that comes with being better connected. Here there was so much to see and absorb, an aching to be present, and I found myself later, well on the other side, longing nostalgically for the period of time in which my devices did not work.

There's also a blur of faces from a whirlwind week, some that months later still come to mind. There were the Chilean tour guides running on seasonal rotations that extend outward forever - they either have life figured out, or not figured out at all. There was that wonderful couple embodying happiness and love telling me, the first person ever outside the doctor, on a bus ride across nowhere, that she's pregnant, only later, in an email, to heartbreakingly tell me she miscarried for the second time. There was the beautiful, misplaced, and very taken British girl on my last time warp of an evening in Santiago, looking me in the eyes knowingly, saying so much without words, then saying that fateful final line - "I hope to see you in another version of life" - that then leaves you speechless all the way home. And of course, everything is buoyed, always buoyed, by that one particular friend who knows me on a level perhaps no one else does scattered into memories around the world. Life is injected with excitement and chaos, always, when we manage to link. She will always be integrally associated with lofty thoughts of Patagonia, laughing, laughing without end, laughing until you cannot breathe, laughing until the moment you say goodbye.

When the story of me is written, when I one day look to assign meaning to the swirl of atoms and star dust and energetic currents, it will be these kinds of things that form the substance of the argument I tell the withering version of myself. It's the formation of these bonds in bubbles across the world I want etched into the annals of me.