A decade under the influence.

The two'by'two photo shows a kid with raggedy'long hair and a glazed near'drunken look in his eyes, who has no hint of what he's in for. Ten pages later the fresh passport gets its inaugural stamp as it leaves North America for the first time, to London via JFK. Even with no true knowledge of the sport, I'm aware that there's a major soccer tournament going on that summer and I'm looking forward to cheering England on from London pubs packed with fans. It's not until I land and see the massive headlines that I realize a horrendously'taken penalty kick by David Beckham has seen England go crashing out of Euro 2004. The only sliver of the games I see is a bore of a final between Greece and Portugal, the lack of action enough to reinforce all the negative American stereotypes about soccer. But the lasting legacy of the event is that the world is introduced to new superstars Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, and at the same time I'm introduced to the world. It's that summer I buy my first legal drinks, at 20 on Tottenham Court Road in London, and then a month later in Huntington Beach, California, minutes after the midnight I turn 21. It's that summer I first see something beyond America and Canada- even if it's merely a toe in the safe'harbored waters of England.

Two Junes later I'm up early to beat the gym rush in Orange County, already 10 minutes into a turn on the elliptical when Costa Rica and Germany kick off, beginning World Cup 2006, an event I didn't even realize had been approaching. But from the flag'clutching team entrances, most of the other necks around me craned up at the hanging television screens as well. Timid cheers from the majority as Germany scored after just 6 minutes. Groans from those same people and a yelling vocal minority as Costa Rica answered back after 6 minutes more. Germany taking the lead again after another 5. Three goals in seventeen minutes and the hook was in me. Forever.

I devoured the rest of the tournament. McBride's bloodied cheekbone from DeRossi's elbow (that I still haven't forgiven the Italian for). Ronaldo knocking his teammate Rooney, and all of England, out on penalties, Zidane's headbutt and his shamed walk off the pitch and out of the sport forever, Italy raising the trophy just a half hour later as champions. From there I began to follow my favorite US players, all of whom played for the same small club in London, Fulham FC.

My remaining years in Los Angeles, the addiction became something to travel for, near and abroad. All the trips down the 405 to Carson for the LA Galaxy, starting with Beckham's first game to the seasons of spending far too much on field'side tickets with my friend Jared. And when it looked as though Fulham was so terrible that they would be relegated, dropped to an inferior league in England's football hierarchy, I flew from Los Angeles to London for a long weekend, determined to see them play a match at their home stadium at least once in the top tier. It was London again, me somewhat more knowledgeable this time about the sport and the city itself, but still a total novice when it came to travel. Soccer was the motivation for the trip, but not the totality. It was Fulham that catalyzed my journey, but it's one I remember for getting to sit in the House of Commons during a Parliamentary debate, for flea markets by the Thames and an absurdly cramped Couchsurfing experience. And conversations over endless pints with my friend Jenn who came with me and my other ones I caught up with there. Being back in London after 4 years and seeing Rooney and Ronaldo play together in for Manchester United in person just gave the trip its symmetry.

A year and a half later, when I used my passport once again, it was on a daily basis. For 19 weeks that fall and winter of 2009, I memorized its number like a second identity, its blue and red pages rarely leaving my pocket. My four and a half months of backpacking started in Russia and next took me to Estonia, where I watched the Premier League season kick off in a packed Tallinn bar, with newly'met friends, including an Everton Toffee from Melbourne and a Liverpool Red from West Virginia- Dave and Jonny. Their hometowns separated by ten thousand miles, and their allegiances by only a hundred'acre park in the same city of Liverpool. Weeks later it was a seeing an unforgettable 4-3 Manchester derby from the stands at the "Theatre of Dreams." I started checking off the iconic stadiums with the same diligence as Europe's great cathedrals. Old Trafford, the Camp Nou, San Siro.

The list of how football intertwines with my backpacking is exhaustive, and that's only a sliver. Soccer has followed me on my travels both due to my love for the game, and its unique place in world conversation. Its all'pervasiveness makes it perhaps my easiest entrance into a Venn diagram with strangers on the road, akin to discussing travels with strangers when back home. When we backpackers discuss our journeys and are getting tuned out by others, what we're really discussing is self-discovery, introspection, self-awareness. Perspective. And when we're discussing football, we're discussing goals and golazos but also legacy, rebellion, historical context. Why FC Barcelona's motto is Més Que un Club, calling back to the days when its supporter stands were the only venue where the people could voice anti-Franco chants without repercussion. Where we were when Landon scored in the 91st minute against Algeria, to send the US into the group stage in South Africa. Our communal eruptions of celebration, and the instantaneous kinship when we recognize our team's badge on someone else's breast. Its corner flags provide tentpoles, allowing us a venue to discuss why we love the things that we love.

This decade of speedballing, of having my three chief narcotics of soccer, traveling, and alcohol coalesce into one, reached its triple milestone this summer of 2014. The same summer the world's largest tournament, the World Cup, came back to football's spiritual home of Brazil. I wish I could say it was a lifelong dream to attend the Cup, but that would be a lie. When it came to the States in '94, my father asked the 11 year'old I used to be if he wanted to attend one of the LA games at the Rose Bowl, and the little shit thought only briefly before giving a negative shrug. That moment, the 3 seconds of my indecision and juvenile thought process, is one of the more complex regrets of my life. The untaken Yes would have meant attending the World Cup with my father, and given me a few hours, like many afternoons of then, that grows more potent in retrospect. Loves and admirations both intrinsic and intentional. A pinot memory that aged into something priceless much later, even if I could never appreciate it remotely at the time. But the well'bent No I've folded over mentally in the two decades since I spoke it is what set up this trip. The decision that became my obsession, to attend the World Cup in Brazil. For my experience of the event to be not a fogged recollection from preadolescence, but made as a world'weathered adult. Eyes and arms and heart and passport wide'open to a new experience on a barely'met continent. 

Eight years of longing and three years of saving delivered me to Brazil in June, along with my one of my oldest friends, Derek. Like Jenn joining on the Fulham trip, my crazy just contagious enough to recruit a traveling companion. Our World Cup experience would be one game at football's Vatican, our Hajj to Rio's Maracanã, followed by one United States game, so that our cheers could hail from our hearts as well as our lungs. And so we spent seven days at the world's greatest tournament; one where, unlike the Olympics, everyone is watching the same exact game, the many'practiced leg whips and deft, improvised genius applied to the same lone ball in unison.

The cheap but true answer is that it was everything I wanted. Rio was the biggest party I've been to in my life, with an energy and happiness so pure that it ignored language, homeland, one's innate timidity. We Americans screamed deliriously on Brazilian sand for an Argentinian striker's injury'time curler past an Iranian keeper. Messi delivering his distinct magic yet again. We joined in with the Belgians, and local Brazilians, in cheering on the Red Devils' flair against an unimaginative Russian squad's mundane plodding. If there was a complaint of the trip in recapping it to friends after I returned, it was that I didn't feel like I managed to see Brazil, but rather that I'd been to a country that was hosting the World Cup, which just happened to be Brazil. But such complete surrender, a total shunning of anything of the world outside the tournament festivities, is in itself something only Brazil could achieve. A country used to indulging in its passions, rallying and recruiting for its most central one of all.

Coming back from the Kentucky Derby two years ago, I overheard a group of friends at an airport gate near my mine discussing going en masse to the Cup as their next shared adventure.  A group of strangers instantly recognizable in that they were almost identical to the one I had just left. We six friends that had reconnected at the Derby, a mixture of age and gender, united by a thirst for experience. Part eavesdropping, part savoring the last of that trip's sensory, I listened in. "If we're gonna do it, it has to be Brazil. After that it's Russia... and then what, Qatar? You think we're gonna be in our late 30s and be like, Hey we should go to fucking Qatar?!" And I knew exactly how they felt. It had to be Brazil. 

Two years and seven weeks later, Derek and I shuffled with the communal motion of a packed crowd toward a subway station in outer Recife, the one closest to the Arena Pernambuco, where Germany had just defeated the United States, 1-0. We thousands, victors and losers, all left ecstatic. The result we'd just watched ensuring that both nations were moving on to the Cup's knockout stages next week. In 18 hours, we would be at the airport heading back above the equator, ending our time at the World Cup. In those last hundred yards before we reached the turnstiles and the trains taking us farther away from this moment, screaming children pressed up against the fences lining the way to the station. They screamed at us like we were rockstars, clamoring with the same furor as though we'd earned the jerseys we wore, rather than purchased them. They asked for pieces of memorabilia from us as their souvenirs; the minority calling for the absurd such as jerseys, but most of them for simple buttons, flags, bandannas. Some craned out arms and palms and hopeful smiles, content with just our touch. Brief high'fives. The children were mostly under the age of 10, the youth of the distant suburbs of a third-tier town in a developing nation, one criticized for its crime and its economic polarity. In the months since I saw them, they've lingered as part of my World Cup experience, just as much as the street parties in Lapa, or massive watch parties on Copacabana. A resonance I thought had to do merely with their exuberance, the unique feeling of importance they'd allowed us visitors to feel in those last steps within their suburb. Or they echoed in my emotions because they weren't the children that had attended the game, but the ones who were content just to see the spectators pass by, to watch as the world, for once in their lives, came to them. Or maybe because they were just slightly younger than the age I was when I said no to my father, chose not to attend a World Cup in my backyard. The child I was, the antithesis of their emotions, their excitement subbed for my insensitivity, my ungrateful lack of appreciation. 

But those guesses are only partially true. Those children of São Lourenço da Mata still echo because at age 10 and 8 and younger, they were born at the same time I first traveled. Their lives coincide precisely with my following of soccer, football, futebol. If my exuberance for the sport and for the world I've come to meet a border check and passport stamp at a time could be personified, that excitement given hands and happiness smiles and passion a voice, it was those that stretched and called out to us this June, from the World Cup in Brazil. 

The two'by'two photo now shows an older man with a determined look in his eyes. And though the Brazil visa is the first stamp of his newly-issued passport, the retired book that preceded it, one warped and swollen with use, means he knows what he is in for. He is in his early'thirties, but also in his preadolescence. Still coming of age, in a life that will inevitably decay and expire long before his passions do.

Wave after wave.

She and I are already in the ocean when the rain starts, so it's of little consequence. Our clothes are up above the high tide line, discarded peels that we'll return to eventually. With the rain chasing the tourists and locals vendors away, there's no one along the beach who would want them and we have nothing of value with us, save each other's touch.

We came to watch the sunset, the last of our week in Costa Rica, but the storm clouds stretch lazily down to the horizon, and we have no hint of where the sun is behind them. Turning back from the gauzed horizon, we see three little girls along the sand, playing a wordless game. Only occasional chirps of their laughter make it to our senses above the sound of Pacific waves crashing between us and them. They stay for a handful of minutes, a few turns of their game, before the sprinkling speeds into downpour and chases them home, as it has already done to those far older. But the lone boy is more determined, more patient. Like us he's merely in swim gear, the cord around his ankle tethering him to a surfboard. He hugs close to the talismanic shore, staring like us into the abyss of the Pacific. I follow the path of his eyes back into the nothingness and the everything of the water, and under its surface I retake my lover's hand. We watch the waves swell in our direction and brace ourselves against the smaller ones, diving beneath for the larger. We sometimes stand, and sometimes kneel on the sandbed, our motions borrowing a fluidity from that which surrounds us. 

A 30'minute drive up the same coast is where we spent our last day, the hours preceding this obscured sunset, snorkeling briefly in the water off Playa Conchal, and galloping along the sand atop sprinting horses. A far longer drive north above this same coast is where both my love and I spent our childhoods, our adolescence, our early years as adults in California. The same Pacific Ocean that served us on weekends, on days we cut class to chase a better tan, unknown to each other completely, but both out there, experiencing the same unending pattern of breakers of our shared ocean. The Pacific of Kerouac. Of Steinbeck and of Didion. Or of a younger me. In not just Newport or Santa Monica but Kaanapali and Port Douglas and Ko Phi Phi. Even those different, foreign coasts still part of the same vast blanket of water to return to again and again and again.

As the rain picks up even more, we sink to the always'changing surface and watch the rain hit the ocean, water pebbling water, with our eyes just above it. A liquid typewriter to chronicle the afternoon forever into our memory. The mood behind our eyes undulates, from wonder, to gratitude, to a lust so pure it feels scandalous. In love with not simply each other, but this moment, and this pocket of coast and ocean. This set of waves. This life.

A brown pelican traces shapes in the air above our heads and dives down chasing spotted prey. I see it bring its empty mouth back above the water and I do the same, looking just beyond the bird to the south and spot the little boy again. He's laying on his board in the coming waves that are too gentle to surf. He stoically faces a line of boats that have anchored near shore for the night, their skeletal lack of sails making a crude ruler of the horizon. And as she and I clutch each other closer before going back to shore, the red sun blinks reluctantly through for the two of us, for the pelican, and for the boy. For those who waited and didn't abandon it because of a little rainfall. He turns back to us and we three share waves and smiles and calls of "luego" and we step out of the water, leaving the ocean to him. 

Strange pilgrims.

"It was as if God [...] was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay."  - Gabriel García Marquez 

"Oh.... ¿Hotel del gringo?"

"Sí, sí... hotel del gringo."

It's by that name, not its official one, nor the detailed address I repeatedly give that the other mototaxi owner knows where I'm asking to go. He then instructs the confused younger driver, the one I'm behind on the moto, and after the simple directions we're back off again. Two more turns and it's still my visitor's eyes that spot it first. Hand-painted yellow butterflies around the English words "Gypsy Residence." Like my "sí, sí," my confirmation of "Esta aqui" is muffled through a mouth shield. I take off the motorcycle helmet and pay him an inflated tourist fare, the crumpled green and red pesos equivalent to $3 US instead of $1.50, and I approach the gated door of the man I already know as Tim Buendia.

It's a decision I had to explain away two dozen times. Why instead of the Caribbean beaches, hammocks, and huts of Tayrona, I chose a meandering trip inland to a city of about 25,000. A sharp two-day detour away from Northern Colombia's worn backpacker circuit to a town with one hostel and no hotels. An odd pilgrimage during my first trip to South America to the hometown of the author whose liquid words brought the continent texture to me and made it an imbued land rather than an empty box to check. The too'aged writer who melted the houses of Aracataca into the ethereal atmosphere of Macondo- Gabriel García Marquez. I came to the streets that inspired him so that I could see something of what he saw. And while he long ago abandoned Colombia for Mexico, the nostalgia of Cataca for the labyrinths of a more northern modernity, something of what existed then still echoes. The pedestrian miracles that made his realism a magic one, biographies imbued with the impossible.

Tim is the town's only hostel owner as well as its only English-speaking tour guide. He came in 2008, opening his Gypsy Residence two years later, at a previous location on the farther outskirts of town. At some point, he abandoned his Dutch last name for the more surreal surname Buendia- that of the lineage woven in García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And while I don't remember where I first read the article that mentioned a hostel had opened up in the small hometown of García Marquez, or Gabo as he is lovingly known, I knew immediately what it symbolized to me- the coming end of the South America's solitude. The creeping'in of the Twenty-First Century, a second coming of the Banana Company's arrival that changed the lives of those generations a century ago, when international interests entered the grove villages of this removed continent with the new imperialism of unrestrained capitalism. One that brought a barely-concealed slavery and pillaging of both land and culture, flooding broom'swept casas with payment in the form of vouchers for kitchen appliances rather than a living wage. Massacres of still undetermined numbers when the machine guns held by white hands spit metal into brown skin by the thousands, for the galling crime of demanding a day off and pay above the poverty line. The United Fruit Company left long ago, both the Macondo of Gabo's stories and its inspiration of Aracataca; I saw its buildings decaying from behind a fence that kept myself and generations of the town's true residents out. But with South America hosting both the World Cup and Summer Olympics in the coming 3 years, with airline routes expanding and Europe growing increasingly domesticated and homogeneous with every passing EU session, there's no doubt the world will turn increasingly to South America for a rush of the unfamiliar and brave. An influx of visitors that will make English more prevalent and will for the first time divorce the unfathomable from the everyday.

But as of this December those crowds have not yet arrived. And for the two nights I'm staying in the town's only guest lodging, I'm also its only customer, the only foreign tourist walking its streets. And while I can communicate basics and rudimentary conversation spoken in a constant present-tense, my three years on Bs in Spanish lessons aren't enough to keep away the solitude of my foreign tongue. So the night before I take the day-long tour with Tim, he is considerate enough to take me out for a drink with his wife and eight-month old son. Like me, she grew up in a suburban town in Southern California, so while I can speak semi-passable Spanish to the tienda owners of La Hojarasca, a cafe named after one of Gabo's early novellas that's located next to the house where he was born, it's first-language English I'm getting to know Cynthia with, along with Tim's Western European fluency. We drink fresh fruit nectars more refreshing than beers as their infant son laughs with his impossibly innocent smile, which spreads to the nearby abuelas. The couple's love is a beautiful one to witness, absent of Gabo's darker recurrent themes; without the solitude of the true Buendias or the melancholy of Amaranta's shrouded hand. It's also out of place with the subtle but present misogyny of modern Aracataca- the images of bikinied import models airbrushed onto seats of the motos that snake around the carreras and their hungry dirt. Or like the recently-deceased resident, Perro Negro, an oak of man that fathered 39 children before dying, my guess is from exhaustion. From this stagnancy of gender and antiquated mores, something of their love stands apart. And if such disconcordance is obvious to me in the first few hours, I think surely it's been noticed by them as well. A rift that only amplifies their expatriate solitude. 

The next morning Tim and I set out and turn the circle of focus on the Aracataca I'm coming to know so that Macondo can appear. He's wearing his typical ensemble- a straw hat and an ankle-length sarong, while sporting a walking stick. A wardrobe that makes him "feel like a character in a Nobel Prize winning novel" as he says repeatedly. He urges that I also take one of the dozens of straw hats to shade from the aggressive sun. And while I grant him that, I decline the offer to also carry a walking stick. The first 20 minutes is more a tour of Tim's life than Gabo's, as we stop again and again to chat with townspeople Tim has befriended during his half-decade in Cataca. But it's equally enjoyable as the advertised itinerary, for in that way I meet the town, like the 95 year-old man, ten years older than García Marquez, who used to visit the ice factory by the river to see the workers cut the large blocks of ice into manageable portions. The venue that inspired the iconic opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

The tour takes us through scenes from Gabo's life and his novels. The train station, his grandparent's home with the workshop for the hand'hammered golden fish, like those of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the Cataca river that germinated both the town and its name. To a horse'drawn cart that Gabo rode in in 2007, as he was slow'paraded around the streets of Cataca in what will almost surely be his final visit to the place of his birth. It now sits rotting in the "forest of magic realism," another of Tim's charmingly grandiose go-to lines. And the more we walk through Aracataca, the more of Macondo that seeps through. Our meandering pace through dirt streets is slowed even further by the darting of roosters being raised for cockfights, past blue'eyed dogs and stray pigs foraging through weeds and Caribbean shrubs. Walking with the soundtrack of a looped radio commercial shilling for a clothing sale ahead of the coming holy day. Through minute cups of lemongrass tea at dusk with a parrot inspecting the mismatching china from shoulder. Our strides trickle lazy like the brushstrokes of the residents who are repainting their houses, as they traditionally do every December in anticipation of the New Year- a tradition in Aracataca and the hundreds of small villages like it throughout Colombia. Tim and I eventually walk through the mostly waist-deep river, its soft sand forming to my beaten soles still sore from my trek to Ciudad Perdida. With school on holiday, children are spread along the banks and in the stream. A group of five boys huddle as one of their number preps a future meal, gutting and skinning a dead animal we eventually recognize to be a large iguana. Like almost everyone else does, the boys stop to look at us, we two bearded gringos in straw hats walking in tandem- a John, a Jesus, and a River Jordan. The lead boy gestures to his chest with the knife that simultaneously magnifies and dwarfs him and puffingly proclaims, "Soy macho." The boyhood need for masculinity more dear than the life of the endangered reptile he's beheaded. But we smirk and walk on, because we're neither native to this land, nor its moral judgments. And because to our left, two other boys are sprinting along the top of the water, their soles turning the liquid to solid and back again with each frenetic step, racing ethereal in the afternoon. There must be hidden sand just below the surface, but these are the children of Macondo, and so I'll never truly be sure.

Given such abundant magic, visible even to a brief visitor like myself, it's difficult to comprehend why the crowds are not already here. With so much of Marquez's inspiration prevalent, why for now its only pilgrims are strange. Only those that dream the very deepest. Those longing to indulge in and exercise their solitude. Aracataca has weathered the occupation and abandonment of the banana company without growing callous and modern, neither from internal industry nor external influx of tourism. But several times during our walk, Tim and I stop to purchase tiny bags of water. Little overstuffed clear tubes the size of a lone enchilada with corners we bite and tear to puncture. This is the only thing I can drink out of, as well as what I must brush my teeth with at night. The river we walked in, which somewhere along the line holds the discarded heads of iguanas, and torn bicycle tires, and forgotten t-shirts I can somewhat read through the opaque brown liquid- this is the town's water supply. Which is either untreated or so minimally it's effectively useless. Years of corrupt politicians skimming money and broken campaign promises have anchored the mundane to the magical, married the tedious to the divine. It's failed to bring the basic necessities to its citizens by not creating an effective water treatment plant. And it's also kept that money away from the dusty sites of García Marquez, choking the nascent tourism it claims to desire. It's a large reason that Tim's Gypsy Residence is the only hostel in the city, and why when he closes it in February, in less than three months, leaving Aracatca so his wife can pursue opportunities in California (a more northern modernity not unlike Gabo's Mexican expatriation), Macondo will once again be accessible to the outsider only in the pages of books.

Tim tells me that his move away temporary and I want to believe that is true. While I'm wary of a South America flooded with outsiders watering down its cultures, I still don't want to be one of the last Gabo-loving gringos to walk the sand beds of the Cataca or to stand in the cemetery atop crude but honest'built crypts at sunset, seemingly at eye-level with more African palms. I'm rooting for a middle-ground, a preservation of the balance that exists now; not because it's perfect, maybe simply because it's what I'm used to. Tim has an optimism that the town will grow, that the needed tourism infrastructure will be laid, and that at that point he will return to Aracataca and be able to showcase Macondo once again. New Gypsy Residence and all. I support his decision to leave completely. Not only because I want his son to have the comparative luxuries of a California childhood, or for his wife to be back near her roots, but because I want to read the book Tim plans to write about his time in Aracataca. For him to develop fully for readers the city that I can only begin to hint at here. And because I know from my experience of thirty years and forty countries that when there's a chance for our burden of solitude to be lifted, we must take it. If genuine, such authenticity can keep away our otherwise suffocating and melancholy reality.

My last night in Aracataca, I sit reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on a wicker bench in the Gypsy Residence. A few hours earlier I'd walked the museum grounds of Gabo's childhood home that also served as his birthplace, as the spore from which Macondo would later spring. Passages from his novels and his memoir that begins in the very house I'd stood were affixed to walls in large acrylic letters. Not many, but some of these individualized letters were fallen, missing, a small hint that kept bothering me for what it symbolized. That still'sandy infrastructure that had also allowed a regal cart to rot in an African palm forest a few miles away. From twenty feet in front of me Tim calls out "We've lost one of the great leaders of our time. Nelson Mandela." After taking time to think of his legacy and life, I inevitably returned to the lens of Gabo. The eighty-six year old author who is now living in Mexico, with the ruin of dementia feasting harder, his writing career most assuredly over. I thought about the future day when I'll make a similar proclamation about him. Is that what it will take for Aracataca to become a more popular destination? Death what is needed for proper recognition? Am I a pilgrim in the days before a flood? Or one decades after it's already crashed..... Given the poorly-planned infrastructure, the semi-corrupt government, the apparent declining importance of literature in younger American and British and world generations, the inescapable breath of solitude this city exhales, I come to accept that this city may never become the destination that either Tim or myself believe it should be. That though South America will surely come in from the obscure, the distanced, not every city will come along with it. That the life of García Marquez and the city that cradled him may pass undeciphered to dust like Melquíades' scrolls.

Shortly after we walk that afternoon through the ancient former ice factory we meander towards one of the central monuments the town has built to García Marquez. Like most of the tour that 95+ degree day, we aim for shade when we can, squeezing onto narrow sidewalks and crouching our 6'4" frames beneath overhangs of green life. Tim shows off his resident knowledge while he still can. It's depressing to think how few more people will receive a such a passport into Macondo.

"You know what kind of tree this is? Look at the fruit." I silently evaluate the tiny green baubles of potential until he finally helps me out. "Mango."
"Mango? That's surprising- mangos are a heavy fruit and those are very thin branches."
"Yes. Not many mangos survive."

Blood sugar trek magic.

If you notice them at all, first you notice the leaves. Tiny green confetti conveyoring across the jungle floor, crossing the narrow ambiguous path that leads me to and from the terraced ruins of the lost city. It's the surrealism that grabs your attention, the leaves marching along on their own, at a stutter pace like frames are missing from the projection, until you bend carefully down to see the cluster swirl of fire ants, little burning clouds along the ground as they transport the leaves seemingly without end. An internal existence of motion and burden that appears charmingly impossible when viewed from the outside.  

Even though I knew it was a projected construct of my own, just the harmonious nuance of nature when viewed in detail, I couldn't bring myself to step on them, again and again and again. Actively avoiding what to most others would be a total afterthought. And so they became another reason for constant awareness. The unending vigilance that is the trek to and from Ciudad Perdida, the Eighth Century lost city in Colombia's Sierra Nevada mountains that I wanted to be my first experience on the South American continent. Something primal that few areas on earth could offer and a chance to experience a continent chronologically. To examine its roots before exploring the myriad paths they've stretched. 

In addition to stepping over the ants I was stepping carefully around muleshit, horseshit, through caked clay mud that hasn't solidified for over two months during the constant downpour in the rainy season that just ended. This while stepping on rocks slick with streamwater and destabilized from the steps of other hikers. But for the first three days, these were afterthoughts. Far more of my focus was on the impossible vistas, the mountains upon mountains and falling curtains of tree tops in the distance. And also on the spaces far closer to me, the overhangs of kudzu vines strung like permanent lightning above our frequent swimming spots. The god'stature leaves the size of canoes dwarfing us further. Reaffirming our existence as transitory in comparison to the unbroken eras of barely'touched life we plunge through. It wasn't until late on the first day that difficulties arrived with the fabled afternoon rains and rather than firm steps we slide through an orange muck, fellow hikers around me falling constantly. My footing miraculously holds, at least on that first day, even though I'm taking leaping strides and windmilling arms for balance, drawing some wry looks from another of the American trekkers.

"Sorry.... I'm having far more fun than I should be."

We reach our first camp by the last few minutes of daylight and spend the dark hours with cold cans of cerveza Aguila, colder showers, and tightly-packed hammocks that rock uncontrollably in the freezing night. We wake before the sunlight does and set off only as it's beginning to reveal the land around us. In our views of that second morning, dozens of pockets of sunken clouds lay attached to the earth, like dew on a grandiose scale, and their reluctant release takes most of the day before it finally occurs. This ten mile leg includes the most vertical stretch of the path and coincides with the most intense heat of the entire four day journey. The tangerines we stop for raise our blood sugar enough to keep us fueled, the dusty powder leaving the orange flesh as it's peeled just as reluctantly as the morning clouds. It's on the second day that we see the first of the indigenous peoples, beginning with a cherubic set of children in rough ponchos. We're told by our guide Nicolas that our presence as tourists is viewed by them as a necessary evil. While part of our fee for the hike goes towards government programs for their health care, we're bringing our modernized ways to a place still sacred to them. Deciding what Instagram filter best suits the site where eighty of their shaman are currently gathered in prayer and discussion. We see a cluster of their straw huts, an infrequently used village occupied during various ceremonies they hold. While the Irish and American girls try to coax the java'eyed children into photographs, I'm distracted by the coca shrub Nicolas has pointed out, growing conveniently on the fringes of the ceremonial huts. Because while technology and culture divides us irreparably, narcosis bridges, as it always does. And as I slowly chew a small handful of the leaves, that familiar numbness warms the bottom of my face and for the next several minutes, the greens and blues around us race to my eyes more sharply. 

The next I see of the indigenous is in the afternoon, a group of three women with their hands clasped in either prayer or revulsion as they stare shock'faced at the blood pouring down my shin. Whatever luck I had earlier in the mud I used up because when I finally do fall late in the second day it's from my poor footing on a narrow ridge of rocks. The speed and height of the fall, along with the weight of my backpack, allows me to turn a full revolution sideways in midair, before my left knee cracks audibly on another line of rocks, leaving a rapidly swelling bump and six scratches along my leg. When we reach the second camp about 90 minutes later and I clean the wound I see that one is particularly deep, an instant scar. Enough so that if I were back in New York or even the coastal city of Santa Marta, I'd go in for stitches. But since I'm a 2-day trip into the jungle removed from anything close to a triage, I rely on borrowed antiseptic and naked hope to avoid infection. So along with the mud of the too'troden path, the loads of shit from the pack animals that make the same trek as us to carry food, the omnipresent mosquitos (one girl in our group finished the trek with 80-some bites) and my constant lines of ants, the second half of the trek has the added burden of a limping knee. To those, toes that hammer in with every step as we walk back down, stopping my weighted momentum in every footstep. Add ankles that turn constantly after they've turned just once, as they swell to the size of my calves, purple and yellow with more blood pooling beneath the surface of my skin.

Our four day path is far more arduous than my cocky self-assuredness was anticipating. Given its remote location and the effort involved in reaching it, my surprise isn't in that Ciudad Perdida lay hidden until 1971; it's that it was discovered again at all. It was grave-robbers fueled by legends of buried gold that found it, three centuries after it was abandoned and some one-thousand three hundred-years after it was initially settled. Our group once again recrossed a river to reach it, this time up to most people's waists, before ascending nearly two-thousand stone steps to the terraces of green'furred stones. The site itself is fascinating, if simple. This is not Angkor, nor Machu Picchu. The terrace stone foundations are all that remain, the straw and mud huts that sat upon them eaten long ago by time. A military encampment with twenty or so soldiers overlooks the site. And while the uniformed teenagers and with their massive rifles do not want to be photographed, a few of of them eagerly take ours when asked politely. After our descent and recrossing the river yet again, beginning our boomerang path back the way we came, the first thing I encounter is a butterfly swarm. A dozen tornado'round in front of me, like García Marquez's Mauricio Babilonia is walking among us. The Colombian jungle foreshadowing the next journey to follow my current one.

What the butterflies failed to signal was the difficulties ahead. To the list of physical burdens is the mental one that comes with the idea of retreat and covering retrodden ground. Of staring down at my feet for footing in descent rather than the stunning panoramas enveloping us. Add to it as well the burden of guilt we feel when passing our last set of indigenous people. A boy and girl, both younger than eight, they stand in one of the few flatlands of the journey. They boy looks at me sternly. I haven't seen my reflection in 4 days, so I'm not sure what it is he sees, if anything beyond my white skin. As I near he barks "Dulce?" in the tone of interrogation. He remains silently unimpressed after my reply of "No tengo." We all stop just 2 minutes later for more tangerines and small bananas and breathlessly an exhausted voice addresses the group.

"Did any of you give that boy candy?" It's the Irish girl, the one who eagerly coaxed the ponchoed toddler into a few photographs in her first encounter with a native. "I gave him my Oreos and he just stared at me. He wouldn't say thank you; he didn't even smile at all." I stay silent as well, thinking tiredly of the narrow line between touch and contamination. Of how Nicolas also said there are some tribes in these mountains that have never been contacted by the modern world. Their only external interaction is with a very small number of the shaman of the other indigenous tribes, and even then on extremely rare occasions. I finish my banana half and wonder which of the two interactions will resonate with the Irish girl longer.

After the pause to further refuel, we take up our backpacks again and continue the wending path down the mountains. As usual, I hang toward the back of the bunch, not out of lacking physical ability but my recurrent casual meditation. Savoring the last few painful kilometers of my first excursion in South America, in the form of photographs taken and views appreciated as I breathe slowly. We bunch back up towards the end and again my eyes look down to find the proper footing, seeing another swirl of the interminable population of ants, their leaves turning sharply like green kabuki fans. In their lifetime they'll only meet an infinitesimal fraction of those with whom they share a fate. From the others they are geographically unconnected but burdened by the same instinct. They live, doing what comes naturally to them, one of the only activities they know how to do properly. All throughout the jungle floor of the Sierra Nevadas, the ants march along, their weighted burdens poised above them, as the line of trekkers walks above them carrying their hiking packs through the mountain path.

Hollywood way.

The drive starts at El Coyote on Beverly where I'd eaten lunch with my mother two decades earlier, though this time it's a Sunday dinner to close the weekend with an often'missed friend and a few others, a surreal turnout so utterly Los Angeles with introductions of names followed by the soap opera they're currently on but I have to leave early for my red'eye flight out of Bob Hope Airport and after one Pacifico and chips with heated salsa I walk out the door of the storied Mexican restaurant that's down the street from my old apartment on Curson with the view of the Hollywood sign from my rooftop and the piece of curb down below where I'd said my last goodbye to my first love, and now I'm now navigating these known streets with a different car, a red Corolla rental rather than my black Prius, up Highland where on my first trip to California my mother bought me my first two comic books at a newsstand, issues of The Punisher and a reprint of Spider-Man's first appearance, outside the Ripley's Museum I went to with my father on our first ever father/son outing and in which he got self'conscious after weighing himself on a giant scale, a solid 260 pounds of vulnerability, and the rental climbs across Cahuenga by the Hollywood Bowl where I first saw Radiohead play back when they were my favorite band and I make a right turn onto Barham Boulevard and pass the Oakwood Apartments that were my first home in California, when I was an eight year'old addition to the swarms of child would'be actors playing in the complex's pools as our mothers laid in deckchairs comparing audition tallies and Disney casting calls, the lettered buildings so close to the Warner Brothers Studios and their massive vertical billboards rotating with the latest movies and syndicated shows and it's after those that Barham which is now Olive veers right before my quick turn left to drive up Hollywood Way where the first street I pass is Riverside which means a left turn would take me to my old apartment, my favorite one growing up, that one I wish we hadn't left, and a right turn would eventually take me past the okay one we lived at after, during high school at Providence which is just two blocks closer along that same street, but tonight I'm not veering, no tonight I'm running out of time and I have to go straight, and it's straight up Hollywood so I can rush back to New York City away from the friends that gave me the best weekend I can remember and one that dwindled too fast and I think for the first time about what it would be like not to go back and never have to say my "I'll be back in a few months" that I cling to like a mantra and this shit usually gets easier if I turn up music but on the radio KROQ is in commercial, so I'm listening to something unfamiliar on Star and thinking of two nights earlier while driving on the 10 when it was my great friend Nicole's voice along the airwaves telling her listeners across the Southland she was going to play Chvrches for her friend Josh who's visiting from New York and ten minutes later announcing "This one's for you, J2" before Lauren Mayberry oh'ed us into "The Mother We Share" as my welcome home but here tonight it's both a band and a DJ's voice I don't know who isn't greeting me but instead letting me know I'm listening to a local showcase called Close To Home and that the time left in the show is awkward because it's not enough for a full song but too long to just talk and ramble so he plays another one by the band I just heard because the short ones, the quick ones, they're their specialty, and I see the lights of the airport already which I don't want to accept because even with everything familiar already behind me I don't want this to ever end and I try prolong it but I realize that it must and that no matter what I can't.

Story of a city on the evening of a war.

At first the Dempsey jersey draws some double-takes. Some palpable disbelief. A few smirks and tongue-in-cheek nods, like I'm playing with fire. Hope you know what you're in for.

In Bosnia, football is deeper than religion. It's identity. Sarajevo has only a little of what could be called street art, but it's filled with graffiti. Ugly scrawls like prison tattoos mainly marking territory, name'dropping for what in England would be called firms, or in America simply gangs, dedicated to football teams, with larger clubs having several competing ones. In many cases identifying with the team is secondary to your supporter affiliation, your barra brava. In Mostar I thought the "Red Army" tags I saw everywhere were holdovers from the Croatian War, or the Serbian forces from the onslaught of the early Nineties. War'cries still audible from decades ago. The truth is the same basic idea, but wrong timeframe. The Red Army is the supporters group for FK Velež, one of Mostar's two football teams. I know this because I met one of its footsoldiers. My hostel owner's nephew who drove a small group of us around Herzegovina explained that FK Velež is the club for Mostar's Bosnian supporters, traditionally unapologetically left-wing (he openly expressed his deep love for General Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia who died a good decade before he was born). Velež is the bloody rival of HŠK Zrinjski, Mostar's other football team- this one supported by Croats and the extreme right-wing. A city's people divided by loyalties only ostensibly about the football on the field, but more'so a way to suggest the War is more dormant than truly completed, aggression merely sleeping. The frequent riots and clashes between the two groups, the fact that he changed out of his Velež shirt when crossing into a Croat and Zrinjski neighborhood to avoid instigating a fight, pretty much supports this.

Everywhere I go in Sarajevo, I see Vedran Puljić. His image is stenciled all throughout the city like an obscure Che Guevara. In the Baščaršija, on buildings across from the cathedrals, south of the Miljacka River, and sprayed huge on a heartfelt if artistically-lacking mural upon the city's Olympic stadium. He's dead, of course; no living person stirs such genuine loyalty or iconography in a free society. He was a supporter of FK Sarajevo, 24 when he was killed, apparently by police, during massive hooligan rioting between two firms in 2009. Couple that allegiance with the implied open rebellion against police authority, a romanticized subversiveness, and you not only spawn a dangerous legend, but announce to the observant visitor what it is the people around you hold dear.

So yeah. I knew what I was in for. Maybe not the same as traveling to an away game at Azteca (no bags of urine raining down from above) but every second I had on a US soccer jersey on the day they were playing the Bosnian national team, I was, by definition, the enemy. Because empty name aside, there's no such thing as a friendly. 

Game day was my fifth and planned final day in Bosnia, a country I've been strangely protective towards since it came into existence in the early Nineties, and that I'd only come to love more when actually visiting it. The elderly hostel owner had taken to me immediately, playfully chiding me for Americanizing how I pronounce my last name, away from the traditional Polish inflection. I was welcomed back from an overnight trip to Mostar like a prodigal son, with kisses on my cheek and a proud announcement she'd not only kept my same bed reserved but made sure my other four dormmates were now women. "Like a harem. Just for you." The city's bars were simple but absurdly fun. Tall tables set out along the sidewalk, even on the opposite one across from the actual bar, people huddling around with an open sky above and the city around, a palpable enjoyment of summer and the optimism such heat brings. On my second night out I met 3 members of the US team I'd be watching in a few days who had just arrived in Sarajevo from their various European clubs. I wished them luck in the game before giving them advice on bars around the city. An hour later, we then met Bosnia's star player, Edin Džeko, and watched as cars double-parked abruptly in the narrow street so kids could run out from the passenger seats for a picture with him. The food, the scenery, the breathtaking women, everything a perfect payoff for the twenty years of anticipation toward finally coming to Sarajevo. So it was difficult for this city, filled with everything I'd come to love so quickly, to be against me, even if it was just for the evening.

The cab never shows so the four of us walk the mile and a quarter uphill to the stadium. The American, British, and German girls with me all adopted Bosnian gear, my lone US shirt lost in surrounding royal blue and yellow, rivers of Džeko jerseys weaving through the bullet'ridden streets stronger and faster than the Miljacka. We arrive at the overflowing stadium shortly before kickoff, but still with time to pregame at one of the two adjacent bars, since we recognize our hostel owner's son at one of the tables. As we got closer to the stadium, to gametime, the novelty factor of the Dempsey jersey wore off and rather than smirks from the occasional passerby, it was stares from packs of scalp'shaven men, whispers and neck'cranes and more whispers. We finish our bottles of Sarajevsko and start off toward the stands, saying goodbye to the dorm owner's son and to an older man in full yellow and blue gear who'd been speaking to me exclusively in Bosnian and laughing at jokes I could guess at but not comprehend. I offer my hand with an "I think you'll win 3-1... We'll at least get one... Good luck," and he returns the shake with a smiling "See you after the game" and when I try to pull my hand away he won't allow it and then repeats, this time minus the smile "See you after the game." I nod a deadpan goodbye and enter the stadium with the girls, and we take some of the only remaining seats which are the rows to the front, less'valued because of the ambulances and sideline boards obscuring the view. Not to mention you're that much closer to the giant metal fences of chainlink diamonds, the old pens banned decades ago in England after 96 supporters were crushed to death at Hillsborough. Walking down to the front, my back is to the Bosnian crowd behind me, my DEMPSEY nameplate drawing even further attention as the only American supporter in our entire fenced'in quarter, one of only about 20 or 30 in the entire stadium of twenty'four thousand. 

When the Bosnian team takes the field there are flares, and chants like penned'thunder from throughout the ground after each of their two opening goals. The Bosnian fans, and yes my accompanying German, English, and American contingent, stand to drum on the plastic seats in celebration. I just grin the appreciative smirk of the outsider, my loyalties too rooted to join in or to be pleased with the scoreline, but seeing the people of a city I love so happy is an acceptable consolation. At halftime a number of fans go to the section's concession table which is two men pouring paper cups of Pepsi from a 2'liter. When the US scores a harmless goal ten minutes later ("We'll at least get one") there's little distraction from the continued buzz of Bosnian domination. But the second US goal that comes just 4 minutes later is met with anger and immediate looks towards me from the fans around. I don't celebrate externally, I'm reckless but not an idiot. It stays at two'all for almost half an hour, which seems like the perfect scoreline, everyone leaving with at least an exciting game, but then Jozy Altidore scores two more American goals within three minutes, the first an absolutely filthy free kick, and the final consolation goal by Džeko doesn't lighten any moods or make my walk home any safer. It ends 4-3 to the US and despite taking my jersey off after the fourth goal to salvage a little anonymity on the walk back down the hill to the city center, I still get a few "Have a good night Dempsey"s from disappointed Bosnian fans. But thankfully far less stares and pointing mumbles.

I manage to find some of those other elusive American supporters afterward and my celebration goes too long. I miss both my alarm and early morning flight, making it to the check-in counter 15 minutes too late, but just in time to see a contingent of the US team checking-in beside me to redisperse back across Europe. The conversation with my cab driver back to my hostel starts with the game, but quickly shifts topics to the city, the women, the film festival that's about to start and the round'the'clock parties it brings with it. He recommends I stay to experience it and the only thing holding me back from doing that is reality, not emotion. Because I no longer feel an outsider, not the enemy of last night's expired conflict. Still an American and still my Sarajevo and in my last few hours in the city before my overdue departure, these two designations find a proud harmony.

For rebecca.

"To my friends in New York, I say 'Hello,'
My friends in L.A., they don't know
Where I been for the past few years or so,
Paris to China to Colorado..." - One Republic


I was turning around to leave again just eighteen hours after arriving, so that's why I was in the small car. My backpack accompanying me to make for a quicker goodbye. That was the logical decision made in the morning by Miran, the forty-something owner of the eponymous hostel in Mostar that I'd stayed at for a brief night made briefer by the unreliability of Eastern European trains. The ones delayed by the extensive border checks between fledgling countries that loathe one another. 

I took a train rather than a bus from Sarajevo to Mostar because of Rebecca West. Her six-week journey through then-Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second Great War is retold in the extensive and impossibly-dense Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; it's the essential book for any serious traveler to the Balkans, despite now being eighty years old. Reading it in modern day means you're doing so for its philosophy, its musings on how life once was before the contamination of the contemporary reached the villages comprising her trip. It means reading with the cruel hindsight of history she, for all her wisdom, lacks. As a travelogue, it has little use; in its twelve-hundred pages of minute descriptions, what quaint civilization wasn't razed by modernity was devoured by warfare. That of the '40s, the '90s, or our newest century- take your pick. But I rightly assumed one experience of hers would hold pretty true from her era to mine. I chose the train rather than the far more frequent bus because of Rebecca, and because there are only so many paths a train can take out of a valley. Only so many ways out of the holes we dig ourselves in. Eighty years can pass, but the train tracks in impoverished countries pretty much stay in place. 129 kilometers of travel at the speed of honey, letting her and I both centipede past the same massive earthen sharkfins rising out of jade rivers. Through nature stunning but unstrategic, in the World War she knew would surely come and the civil war she didn't.

Still, because of its earlier delay at the Croatian/Bosnian border, the train is two hours late in getting to Sarajevo and it carries me into Mostar past eleven at night instead of just after nine. Past the point when the hostel's social circles are pretty much solidified, or at least when there are no longer empty chairs left around the table to sit with the large group on the patio. Which was fine aside from the twinge of jealousy that the cute blonde backpacker also staying there was already flanked by other eager guy travelers. Another road fling never to be. So instead of conversation with the blonde, or any of the others, I chose to wander the city by night. Walking on Mostar's shined'by'wear cobblestones convexing streetlight back at my eyes, as I followed a many'folded map from Hostel Miran to the Old Bridge that spans the Neretva River. Stone leaping above the water as it has for almost six-hundred years, save the decade following its arbitrary destruction in 1993 during the Bosnian war, and prior to its replacement in 2004.

I wake in the early of the morning and it's back to the Bridge again, while it's still mine with minimal sharing. Mainly an old Italian couple and a local man walking his dog to have in my photographic foreground. I'm on the banks of the trickling Neretva before the arrival of tourists and the preening teenage boys goading money out of them, promising to dive the 30 meters off the Old Bridge to the water once the collection reaches 25 Euro. I get back to the hostel for their semi-famous day tour, the reason I chose to stay there in the first place. Before we head to a Dervish monastery perched above a river, or to a hilltop Ottoman fortress, or to Herzegovinian waterfalls, Miran splits our group of 15, me and the fourteen occupied seats from the night before, into two groups. And that's when I'm assigned into the small car with the other 2 backpackers who will also be taking the evening train back to Sarajevo. Two early 20s Brits, a redhead named Aidan and his friend that looks like the offspring of Eric Bana and Frank Turner. Along with Miran's also early 20s nephew, and an Argentinian backpacker, our tiny red car keeps pace with the larger van. Sitting in the smaller car means I'm missing out on more commentary from the absurdly colorful Miran, so rather than anti-establishment anecdotes and the more-than-occasional tactless sexism, the five of us talk football. Of Villa and Fulham, of the Bosnian star Edin Džeko, underutilized striker for Manchester City and current god of Sarajevo, who I'd met while out drinking a few nights before. Of how Džeko donates constantly to Sarajevo children's programs and hospitals, as he too vividly remembers being a small child during the city's Siege. Our young Bosnian driver is also an ultra- think English hooligan without the beer drinking. Just the fighting and flare'lighting, and the confession about how he has to change his shirt between stops because we're entering a mostly-Croatian part of the region where his team's colors and badge could easily provoke violence. Football loyalty being the proxy form of freshly'remembered war. In addition to football, Miran's nephew is also a huge basketball fan, and when he finds out I'm from New York he eagerly asks me about what seeing a game in Brooklyn is like, in the house that Jay built. Of how Barclay's compares to the Garden or to Staples Center in LA. 

For us five the words and jokes all come pretty easy and in between the sights that were advertised is an experience less tangible that wasn't, and a realization I miss one more thing I never realized I lost between LA and New York. It's the simple act of riding in a car with friends. Windows down, sunshine in a heatwave summer, and a soundtrack subtle in the moment that turns Pavlovian the next time you hear it. It was Dre 2001 back in senior year, usually in Vince's 80s Bronco, grabbing breakfast burritos from Corner Cottage or weaving around the Burbank hills. On almost monthly college trips out to Vegas, the year that followed Irwin and I turning 21, it was The Killers' Hot Fuss, cranking "Midnight Show" when we hit the top of the ridge on the 15 when the glowing promise of the city reveals itself and we would hurtle down to the dwarfing Strip with unrestrained smiles. In this Herzegovina summer it's OneRepublic that I don't realize is on until the five of us are caught in a moment of quietude, each looking out the windows with our eyes rather than our camera lenses. A silence not from boredom, or awkwardness, but a communal if subconscious recognition of contentment. Something so basic and ubiquitous that the top 40 song with its rudimentary lyrics is actually the perfect accompaniment. It's a moment we can all understand and we can all appreciate. Its very accessibility is what makes it beautiful. Our five cultures, biographies, and languages all overlapping for just these few car rides and hours but each easily understanding and agreeing. Our Venn being the football and the car ride, the attraction to Bosnia, and the words we take in while also meditating them out, our communal present and our individual futures....

Oh this has gotta be the good life,
This has gotta be the good life, 
This could really be a good life,
A good, good life...

After the song and hours at the Kravice waterfalls, more silent reflection of simple happiness as a particular cerulean dragonfly kept returning to perch unafraid on my knee, it was back to Mostar. The two Brits were also on my evening train back to Sarajevo, the one with far more daylight to see the Bosnian countryside Rebecca had urged me towards. We didn't talk past the casual goodbyes on the Sarajevo platform that mirrored the farewells to our Argentinian and Bosnian brief friends back in Mostar. More afternoon friendships where further communication or contact info traded would only muddy harmonious memories. The discs in the Venn were already slipping apart, towards future cities and soundtracks, but now with another song to bring a vivid moment back. At least for me, hopefully for the other four, and maybe for another traveler in the future. One who is in a car because of a train because of words that don't stop speaking even when the author and her world have long disappeared.