For almost four months now I have been wandering. Lifted out of my life, gratefully, and set back into my body in a foreign land, a foreign language, hoping to create the space and unstructured time to do some things that I did not get to do before you left. I had wanted to sit with your body longer. I had wanted to wash your body, say goodbye in that ancient way, give you all my best wishes for your journey, wait with you while you left. Everything happened too fast. Police time. Coroner's time. Cultural time. Too fast, all of it, and your father and I in a fog, unable to resist. I could not reverse time, go back, but I thought if I could just sit still in my mind, I could take the remorse out of that part of the loss at least.
So I took myself away. I gave myself months where I knew no one and no one knew me. I gave myself no schedule, no expectations, nothing at all to hang onto, floating free. Foreign signs, foreign meanings, foreign food, foreign news, foreign humor, foreign innuendo, foreign geography, foreign climate. I went as high as I could get and let the clouds that walk around the Andes lift me up and carry me along. I learned to talk to them. I talked to rocks. I talked to rivers and I talked to birds. Always, I talked to you. Sometimes I felt you there, but leaving. Sometimes I felt you there in a new way.Sometimes I felt you were really and truly gone. Always I have felt your absence in my life and I still do, the presence of it, the weight. The shape of that absence changes, like everything does.There is nothing like keeping company with clouds and rivers and wind to unlearn the old vocabulary of death.
I walked for hours; I walked where they told me I should walk and where they said I should not.I smiled at people and they smiled back. I hiked up and up and when I got to the top of the highest ridge I could see from where I had started, there was another ridge and another higher still. On the equator you can do this for a long time without snow. I was usually lost, but it never mattered. Once I lost my reading glasses in a river while I was bent over looking for stones. I could not read the trail map that I used to get into the woods, nor could I read the few small signs. I had gotten so used to walking and wandering and not knowing that I never got scared, just kept at it until I was out of the forest and in a town. When I got to the town, women were sitting out in front of their houses and the sun was going down. There was such beauty in their relaxing, in their greetings and questions. You cannot be lost when you are wandering. I thought about how this applied to your life, what you must have seen when you took that drastic turn, where you ended up, how you were transformed.
Some days I woke up into a sadness so profound that I could only walk out into the world and keep walking, hours and hours, until all the life around me pulled me into some kind of rough embrace. Other days, I would wake and feel that great sky of solitude I floated in, the peace of it, the room I had to write to you or just to think about you, about me, about what is and is not and what is outside of that concept. Always there are the clouds here. You can be in them, under them, over them. The most amazing thing is to be over one layer and under another, and the two of them moving in different directions. I have never thought of clouds as beings. Now I do.
It is almost time to go home. I am trying to get accustomed to that thought. My concept of home has changed. I feel at home wandering. I did get to sit with you, but it wasn't enough. Perhaps it could never be enough.