June 30, 2021, 7:26am: The voice of Natalia LaFourcade pulsed through my mind as the puddle-jumper soared into the desert sky. If you are able, please listen to this song while you read: It honors the cadence of this post, Hasta la raíz.

March ’20- May ’21: We’ve all been on airplane mode since the pandemic started. In the U.S., we’ve been fortunate with the quick and vast vaccine roll-out, in spite of how unseriously we responded to the virus as a country. Now we can walk into cafes without masks and live our lives like we haven’t suffered the loss of entire colonies of souls. It’s almost like we weren’t pulling our hair out for over a year wondering when we could switch out of airplane mode and back to the illusion of normalcy.
I wore a mask on the plane as I have done every day at school, but I am officially over them. Side note: Packing feels harder as I get older, that or my travel muscles have gone totally lax in the global inertia.

(A few hours earlier, June 30th): a kind soul who I’d never met offered me a ride to the airport. I put a post in the RPCV (Return Peace Corps Volunteer group-chat) a few days before and I waited for her car, anxious that she wasn’t real or maybe the favor-granting equivalent of a catfish, but she rolled up right at 6:15. As a single teacher in a city where I’m still making friends, I can’t tell you how special it is to know people who are willing to give you a ride to the airport at inconvenient hours.

I pulled open the door and noticed that she is older than most volunteers (but not old, mind you, not for a second). I felt indebted to her the way a baby bird who falls out of the nest owes their rescuer at least a Frappuccino, and of course I didn’t remember to ask her to go to Starbucks until after we passed it.

“I’ve got my coffee, this new Keto diet I’m trying” as she sipped from her metallic, rainbow traveler. She is from Louisiana, which is where Amber is from (who I am visiting in Denver!)

We merged onto I-5 and I mentioned the Decolonize Peace Corps movement and how I was talking about with friends just the day before.
“You see, I am so thankful for Peace Corps. I joined the Peace Corps after I got divorced and sold all of my things, and it truly changed my life. I see things so differently now. Systemically there is so much that could be better about Peace Corps, but it did so much for me”
(Be patient with me here as it was before 7am… but I am paraphrasing as best I remember).
She spoke with the kind of aperture I aim to possess, but also with immense strength I am still hard-pressed to achieve. AfterDivorce-SoldAllHerStuff-PeaceCorps-Grandmother-Second-Marriage-TucsonForGradSchool– I had to see this woman again. I will make every effort to meet her for coffee after we meet. We also share a background in teaching, so we bonded over the similar woodsy notes in both our coffee blends (well, I still needed coffee at this point, bear with me).

Night before flight, June 29, 2021: After a year of Zooming in and Zooming out, the heat had set-in in Tucson and I had one day off (Memorial Day) before summer school started, for which I am making the materials (read: work). I had four dogs under my roof (side hustle) and was bending my body like a round of Twister to keep them all separate for their odd eating and walking habits, making sure one didn’t escape or eat the other one, or eat the other’s food or pee on the carpet while my back was turned.

So when I bought donuts for 1st period for the last day of summer session 1, the A/C went out in the school and they sent all the students home. Guess where we were having class? ZOOM.

I asked the few students who logged-on if I could drop donuts at their house and asked for their parents’ permission. After a whole year of distance learning, I couldn’t believe I was standing on a student’s porch with 9 donuts, in the heat of mid-day June no less.

June 30, 2021:
I packed all of these energies: masked 8th-grader vibes in big-grown bodies, what-the-heck-do-I-do-next-year teacher doubts, 4-dogs in my apartment and 107 degree heat into this puddle jumper. No thank you, American Airlines, I will not pay $30 to check my measly bag (after they fished out the store-brand peanut butter). If you think sealed, crunchy peanut butter is a liquid, try eating a spoonful and see how long it takes to swallow.

I found my window seat next to a woman with two masks over her face. I raised the window visor and stared out, “Hello landscape, my old friend.” The vast ocean of sand washed over me, the undulating desert. Something found me that I’d been missing. With the pummeling anxiety of a fledgling Spanish teacher working with (some) trauma-touched youth while navigating dating to maybe find a partner (that’s an organic, cage-free maybe) as I enter my mid-30s, the contents of such baggage seemed as far from me as the time I thought I had bed bugs to find it was just folliculitis.

The feeling that stopped me in my tracks wasn’t happiness, it was calm.

Yes, I thought.

I do my best existing in transit.

The lyrics of Natalia LaFourcade wouldn’t leave my mind.
I love her because she is centered in the songs, which is very much outside the norm of traditional Mexican music centered on the other: heartbreak, family or la patria. But Natalia is different. She fills all of the space with herself, her voice and her experience, not with braggadocio but with passion and honesty, however powerful or frivolous. She is brave.

I let the feeling of calm inhabit me with the lands of Arizona into Nevada. I felt the ease of inspiration as anxiety lifted. I started to think things that only come to me when I am at peace, simple metaphors that make meaning of my journey like the film of dust obscuring the view out the window at the clear sky. Is it life itself that is hazy or unclear, or the lens with which we view it?

This is ridiculous but, I think if I lived in the sky I could easily accept that nothing lasts forever, being vulnerable to weather, air currents and the close quarters of other people. It’s on land with the illusion of shelter, stability and “my own space,” that we forget we are just passing through. Oh well, even birds have nests. Maybe we all need a postal code.

I tried to close my eyes but got distracted when the engine all but shut-off as we reached altitude.

I don’t have flying anxiety thankfully, I’m just content to be far away from the planet, but this sensation felt like the plane decided to collect for early retirement.
Then my seat neighbor somehow knew I was nervous and patted my leg.
My worries melted away.
She said: “It is scary on small plane.” She said: “big plane, no problem, but this is not the same.”
“Exactly!” I effused behind my heart mask. I hoped the red heart on my mask expressed my gratitude, because I still felt too tired to talk.

“Where do you live?” she asked.
Oh no.
“I live in Tucson. How about you?”
And so, we talked. I leaned in often and asked her to repeat because I couldn’t hear her very well through the two masks. She apologized for her poor English, which I assured her was very good. English is a truly challenging language to learn and she spoke it very well. She lives in Tucson but in a suburb far away from me. She is traveling to Thailand because her mom died four months ago.

I felt the heaviness of this death coupled with the shut-down. I hope my eyes showed her my feelings with only half of my face. I wonder what Thai traditions exist around death and honoring the dead. It was her mom’s time, she said. My roommate speaks Thai, which is really freaking cool but not helpful at all in this moment. Still, I can say one word he taught me:

ผู้หญิง (it means woman).

I didn’t tell her that though. I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Or maybe it was just the exhaustion, let’s be honest: I spent 2.5 years embarrassing myself every day in Guaté.

Flight attendants edged closer and I had my order ready: coffee with cream, no sugar, please and thank you. She ordered apple juice and smiled: “I need sugar, help me wake up in the morning.” I noticed how beautiful her ring was as she reached for her drink, a solitary diamond nestled in a gold band adhered to a wider gold band. It was on her middle finger. As if she read my mind: “I put this on my middle finger from the travel, finger gets bigger”

As I am talking to this kind, warm ผู้หญิง, I feel bad for feeling tired.
After she finished a sentence, I echoed “yes, I know” or “exactly!” and turn back to look out the window. I was just too -something- to reciprocate anything, which is not like me.

I smiled and said: “I’ve been to Thailand, Songkhla.”
“Really?” she responded in genuine surprise.
I didn’t think it was too unexpected, Thailand is an international destination. But maybe it is?
She asked me why and I shied away from the truth, a mission trip. I firmly disagree with religious mission trips but I’m still grateful for the opportunity it gave me to see the world.

“In Vietnam, when I was 5-years old” she said “my dad told me to come outside and see the big American soldier. I’d never seen an American before. I remember he was tall with and big with blue eyes.”
Something about this made me want to cry. Estadounidenses have had too much power.
“My husband now, he American. He was a pilot in Vietnam. I said maybe we saw each other” and she giggled, putting her hands over her double-masked mouth.
She spoke about the wars like she was reading about them off Wikipedia. She listed the names of several wars that happened on her soil in her lifetime, like they were the names of people she sees every day in the grocery store.
At another point in her kind monologue, she said: “I like living in America and I like living in Thailand. I like it in America. In America, everything is convenient.”
It broke my heart in another way that convenient is the first word she used to describe my country. Estadounidenses (U.S. Americans) have a habit of being the most inconvenienced culture because we are used to convenience.
We don’t know what we have traded for convenience.
It stings that there aren’t better qualities to describe us. It stings because I agree with her. I’d like to trade the convenience of isolation for an ounce of company most days.

As we found L.A., the terrain turned to suburbia and the houses looked ordered like gray coffins next light blue ones (swimming pools): the rectangles we use to contain us. The houses marched across the ground like relentless boundaries between us, complete with A/C, dishwashers and Siri, or Alexa.

Why are the voices who serve us female voices?

The closer in to the city, the more winding and unusual the shapes the homes and pools made. They weren’t rectangles now, they were angles and rounded edges and multi-car garages next to winding swimming pools. They still looked like coffins, but not the kind for human bodies. Roofs were not designed with birds in mind. They’re just ugly.

Somewhere between descending and unclicking, she opened her phone to find her number. “I sometime forget” she says and gigles. She shows me her number as I enter it into my phone. I see her name on her phone screen: Wandalee Wander.

I saw three untouched Biscotti waiting for the trash, and I grabbed one. Once an PCV, always a PCV.

Los Angeles airport was a cluster, and we had to wait in line for a shuttle to get to our connecting terminal. Oh wait, I still do that when I call home. Say what you want about Atlanta, I’ve never taken a shuttle bus to my terminal Okrrrr?). I remembered those days in Guatemala when I rehearsed the words in my head before I asked for help. She and I walked together to ask for where she goes next, Tom Bradley, and directions.

But we found help and made another friend who was also traveling international. Her baby boy was tied to her back. “I am going to Tanzania” she said. We stepped onto the shuttle and I took Wandalee’s bag with mine. I stood next to the woman with the baby to keep an eye on our bags. I complimented her nails and showed her mine were chipping. (Nail polish: most women have something to say about it). She told me that her son has never met her mom in Africa and now it is finally time. I wanted to tell her my incoming roommate lived in Tanzania.
How strange is it: my (current and incoming) roommates have lived in all the places where my newfound friends are from, today.

We stepped off the shuttle and asked if we were at the proper terminal. The signs were not helpful but all of the people we talked to were helpful (especially for LA, no cap!) I gave the best directions I could to Wandalee and friend (I didn’t get her name, the one with the child) and Wandalee reached in to hug me a second time, leaning down (almost in respect?) which seemed absurd.
I took a deep breath as they walked away and snapped their picture as a keepsake.

I thought of the women who accompanied my travel: RPCV from Louisiana, Wandalee Wander and our friend from Tanzania and Natalia LaFourcade. All strangers to me when I went to sleep the night before.

Women don’t run the world, but we make it just the same.

It was finally time for coffee. I texted her a message through the ministry of Google Translate while I waited in the world’s longest Frappuccino line. A woman complained and said: “Is this the line? Really?!” I responded: “Yeah, but I’m not in a hurry” (which I kinda was, but I said it to prove a point).
“I mean, yeah, but still..” she responded.
I ditched the caffeine effort when my flight had 20 minutes left to departure and rolled onto Flight Something-Something to Denver.

(Part two to follow here)

P.S. I changed Wandalee’s name, but only slightly to convey its beauty and respect her anonymity, a la vez. ¡Ándale!