Like Dreams

Bienvenidos! (Greetings!)

I must be in a dream, because everything I see and everything I feel is like I´m swimming inside an irreal world that doesn´t actually exist in this twenty-first century that we believe to be modern. I am a spectacle, truly a spectacle, a celebrity, a weirdo of the strangest kind! I walk down the streets to the faces of tiny children dropping their toys and literally staring, following me, with their big brown eyes, down the horizon until I disappear. I enter the market to a small, dark world of morenos (dark-haired people) and am literally buzzed upon like bees on honey. Greetings like "Mi amor!" "Linda!" "Mi vida!" "Mi amorcita!" "Gringa!" "Rubia!" attack me like ants on a picnic and fuzz my Spanish from a confident slur into an uncomfortable ¨no, no gracias..." as I awkwardly push away the candies, cooked fish, tropical fruits, jewelry, and chocolates. I no longer eat apples, grapefruits, and pears, but instead feast on mayacuya, frijoles, coroza, guanabana, guaya, avena, yuca, mango, pina, arroz con coco, leche de vaca, y cafe, and a million other fruits, freshly picked from the trees all around me. I´ve been ripped off by a taxi driver who accused me of being too rich for my own good and I´ve been called a "gringa ignorante" by street vendors whose products I will not buy. The buses are loud, crowded, washed in vibrant colors, decorated in shawls, instruments, birds in cages, and screaming children; and the wheels are so rickety that each time I sit by the window my head consistently bangs into the glass. I watch the burros meandering by toting flatbeds full of milk jugs, fruits, vegetables, and a dark man behind the reins. I come home to my pueblo on the outskirts of Cartagena, my body exhausted, my feet aching, my forehead sweating, my deodorant failing, and I step into the outside bathroom, toss my towel over the door, fill up my pitcher of cold water from the bucket, and dump in over my hair. I scrub quickly, squeeze a bit of shampoo onto my hair, and watch the goosebumps travel up my cool skin as the water trickles from the top of my head down to my toes. When I use the bathroom, I take a bucket of water and literally shove the water into the bowl so that gravity flushes the debris away. I speak no English, and my head aches in Spanish verbs, vocabulary, and conjugations I haven´t used since high school. I am a professor, no longer a student, and I have a million eyes and questions following me wherever I go. I am scared, alone, and exotic--and I have never, ever been treated so kindly, so generously, by so many genuine people, in all my life.

I must be in a dream, a Latin-American dream, for where could this possibly be a reality?