The Individuals

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

--O me! O life!, from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

Dear my faraway friends,
With just one month to go--one month, how simple it sounds yet how complex it will be!--I have to ask myself about purpose, for this is the time when experience starts turning into retrospection. Is it possible that I have not held my loved ones in my arms for all of this Cartagenan eternal summer; that I have not witnessed the changing of the seasons nor the lives of my dearest friends; that I have not upheld my duties to English and have instead embarked upon translating my life into Spanish, so fully and so intently, for all this time? I try to remember the November I know, the November I have lived for twenty-two years, the November of dancing orange leaves and cool afternoons with vibrant sunse, yet I find this difficult: with the sweat beading down my shoulders and the tiny shorts and bare feet I sport, I only find an open window, with the sounds of deeply-indulgent bird choirs and light summery breezes, and a spinning fan blowing the lukewarm air in circles around my bedroom. I only find a gray-blue sky with lovely green leaves pecking through the lush brances of the fresh verdant trees, and autumn is impossible. I have said before that in Cartagena time does not exist; the notion is wholly eradicated in a world where nothing ever changes. It is merely a debated concept (as it is in the universe as well, of course), like love, the meaning of life, and the idea about what snow might feel like to a Caribbean costeno. My time has become suspended in time, pushed forward to its limits only by the longings in my heart to feel what my body always feels come November and the months on the calendar.

I can't judge time by the semester here at Tecnologica, nor by the alleged progress of those students I have been directing towards an interminable and often useless goal. The humanitarian is not so anymore--instead, philanthropy has become an ideal of spirit, an edgeless image of morale, that has seemingly become defunct in my new world. I can't judge time by the number of emotional moments that have touched me, the sights that have altered my consciousness, the souls who have truly touched my life, or the many instances I have felt alienated and outcast due to my own self-consciousness. For it is, you see, being here in this passionate yet simply society has taught me that passion comes in many forms and wears many faces. My passions, for example, are so eternally distinct from the passions of the Colombians; they are, in fact, so absolutely refined on two scales that the only proper way to divide them is to give them their individual languages: my passion, and their pasi'on. Time, like passion, moves differently here, moves like the waves, the rain, and the hot nights.

Yesterday I met, for the second time, a philosophy professor from Bogota here at the Tecnologica. Standing in line a tthe Alcatraz Cafe, waiting patiently for our daily dose of white rice, squashed bananas, chunk of meat, and fresh juice, he turned to me and asked me if I would help him give a lecture on the importance of literature in our lives. Knowing that my job was on the cusp of its contract, I thoughtfully declined yet asked him to please dine with Bua and I, so that we could share some simple prose and lose ourselves in the art of discussion. After talking with him, I discovered that some people are closed, like a cabinet full of secrets that not even a trained locksmith can break, while some, like myself, are open like glass doors, flooded with too much information and left without a filter to put escaping emotions in their right place. This philosopher was, in many respects, as open the windows in my bedroom.

I often find that closed people, while often mysterious and unnaturally alluring, also frustrate me, because I have trouble finding my limits with them and I have trouble shutting the floodgates when necessary or overwhelming. Open people, on the other hand, share a unique connection: they have a passion to share, a desire to be heard, to speak, to agree with the moving world; to hear their own voice, the sounds of their minds, their enigmatic thoughts and their loquacious pain, joy, and confusion, if for nothing more than to simply purge the overload within. And in these moments, when we are simply speaking but not editing, that we throw out the tiniest, most insignificant utterances--the things we do not analyze but merely feel. And it was then that he did that--I think of the last line of a beautiful novel, the slipped I love you, the powerful opening to a grand speech, the accidental telling of a guarded secret--and actually presented the truth of Cartagena, the truth I was searching for.

I've had troubles here, he said, wiping his brow of sweat, finding people here who share the same spirit of me. People who share the same spirit? How profoundly gentle, how real, how honestly delicate yet obviously true! How long must someone search for something he or she desires before a change of scenery is imperative to health? Sometimes we find what we are searching for before we even recognize that we've been searching for it. Sometimes, though, we can't seem to figure out what it is we are waiting for. I know I've been waiting for many things, often too many things, because I am the kind of person who takes charge of her life only to end up waiting for the finale of the episode.... Is it merely that happiness and contentment comes from finding people with our common spirit, with that abstract concept of soul embodied in the search, something that is so separate from the body and the biology?

The Colombian spirit, is, ultimately, not something collective nor predictable--how could it be? The spirit, that elusive force that drives us to fall in love with places and people, is a private prisoner inside the billions of bodies among us. Yet I couldn't get that one sentence out of my head as I drifted through the crowds of Colombian students around me. The professor also said that he can only touch his students throught the power of passion, by truly exhilarating them with shock and awe; things I haven't yet learned to do in the classroom. He reminded me that the Colombians are truly, wholly passionate people, filled with their pasts and their beautiful mountains, beaches, deserts, and rainforests--and that if I started to show them that I loved them, they would love me too, and the breach would break. These people are more intuitive than you allow them to be, he added, and that they are dynamic and proud, yet difficult to reach.

How to reach someone? If that isn't the ultimate question! Are we really reachable people, only through common spirits, and are our spirits actually so much a result of our culture, rather than our intuitions?

El espiritu--it really is an extraordinary thing. We all exist, and we will all contribute a verse.