I’d been living in Nepal for a year, and on a rare clear day in June’s monsoon it was time to leave. I’m impatient even in the least trying circumstances. I remind myself it is experiences I want to accrue, as creating memories is the most valued treasure I can ever own. It reminds me that I live in a culture of accumulating and retaining “stuff.” As I pass each chapter of adulthood, I make an effort to not have my possessions own me, and sell or give away items that I no longer use. This feeling comes back into memory from time to time.
#SEE US TWITTER MOMENTS ABROAD FREE#
It felt free and foreign at the same time.
I was carrying everything I needed on my back. At that moment, I had no car, or home to lock up. I was at the start of my backpacking trip in Australia, and realized the nakedness of not possessing any keys. Or perhaps it was my ears straining to hear a soft jingle-jangle. Maybe it was when I reached my hands into my pants pocket, expecting to feel a cold jagged edge, followed by the trail of soft braided leather, only to come up empty. I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I was struck by an odd sensation - a vulnerability - as though I was missing something essential. She replied, “I wish I had the money to study and become an accountant so I can help my family.” We would wait until the desert had had its fill. It ebbed and flowed in its own careful way, oblivious to timetables and connections on buses to sprawling suburbs. As stillness settled over the train, I realized we were guests on that lonely stretch of desert. From the corner of my over-sized booth, I peered along the tracks stitched arrow-straight all the way to the horizon, where the purple-grey bruise of clouds began.
#SEE US TWITTER MOMENTS ABROAD TORRENT#
The torrent of water could be powerful enough to derail a moving train. “It’s a flash flood,” I heard someone say. Where there had been slabs of fissured earth and pale dust, a web of frothy rivulets as dark as cinnamon and as moist as chocolate bled color into the ground. I looked up from my book in time to see the sky crack open. A smattering of frenetic droplets began to obscure the café car’s arching glass window as the Sunset Limited slowed to a stop. We were on a train somewhere in west Texas when the rain came. These MatadorU students were able to pinpoint that well-known feeling down to the very moment they first felt it. And when we do “get out” into that new and unfamiliar place, the influential moments rush in - those that remind us we’re alive and we’re lucky.
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