Here

You can’t know what this experience will mean to future you until you are future you. – John Green

These days, while I eat breakfast, I look over at the calendar hanging on the wall and play games with the numbers. 7 days until I turn in my research project. 20 days since I arrived in Chapod. 14 days until I leave for home.

           

            It’s not to say that I’m not happy here. It took me this long to write a blog post because I figured you were all tired of hearing about how much I like playing games with kids and drinking mate. So I’ve finally decided the other side deserves some space as well, because it is a true and present part of my experience.

            The truth is I want to come home. Home is in reach now, but it’s true too that I’ve been ready to come home since about a month into the trip. And I do feel a little guilty about that. I know that when I’m sitting in a Spanish class in the Martha Miller Center at Hope College – an image that feels like a dream now – I will miss this. And maybe I will think why didn’t I appreciate all that while I had it?

            Maybe. But it’s also probable that months from now, when the emotions I am feeling right now have been recollected in tranquility (to borrow a favorite concept from William Wordsworth) I will understand them better; I will know some, though not all, of what I have learned and I will be grateful for it.

            So what about now? How to keep from feeling sad when there are only a few days left to enjoy this part? Or maybe not. Maybe the sadness is okay, not because it will be better soon, but because it has its own value right now.

            One of Daniela’s favorite activities in the evenings is looking at the photos I have on my computer. Cuddled up with me on the couch, she’ll leave fingerprints on my computer screen as she finds me in every photo. “Aquí estais tu,” she says over and over, using the Chilean verb form for familiars and loved ones: Here you are.

But me, I’m looking at the backgrounds. Its something I learned to do the first time I left home. We always look at the focus of a picture: the person or the action that was worth capturing. But photos (especially ones taken with point-and-shoot cameras without focusing capabilities) capture more than that. There’s the moment, and then there’s the world behind it.

I notice that in a photo of a sandcastle at the lake, the rowing shell is rigged on the shore: someone went rowing that day. In a picture of my sisters and I decorating the Christmas tree, there’s a can of Diet Coke on the table. My sister Katie’s, because she’s always drinking Diet Coke.

They’re silly, these little details. But right now they’re everything. They’re my world. And I don’t mind longing for them. “To look at seeds and believe He will feed us?” Ann Voskamp asks. To be satisfied by future hope? To be content with photographs, weariness and counting days.

It aches like sore muscles, painful but satisfying. I have accomplished something: I have made it this far. These new places, people, routines and surprises. They have become reality. But I am dreaming again; I am always dreaming. I am dreaming now of home.