I saw a ship fall off the end of the world today....

I saw a ship fall off the end of the world this afternoon. My family left and the water flattened; it decided to brighten, to submerge itself in melted metallic blue, and I saw a ship teeter at the edge of the horizon, caught against the washed-out sky, and gently fall, disappearing into nothingness.

From the window of the micro I stare out at the familiar buildings and streets as they pass by, noting how clearly they are not part of my vision of home—o sea, no son partes de lo que era mi visión de casa. I can identify with the Cap Ducal; I can see it appear in Padre Nuestro, I can point it out in a postcard, I can call it mine for awhile, but I can’t really escape the fact that it still looks foreign (or, mejor dicho, that it makes me feel fuera de lugar).

Don’t cry, you say; but what have you done? What good does it do to push away all things familiar, to aléjate from home, if it results in that sickening, claustrophobic, inward-crashing feeling vulnerability?

I cringe at the thought of just how alone I am. I feel like I’m floating slowly further from the shore, clinging to the sides of my small lifeboat like in a movie. The Humboldt makes the Chilean Pacific cold, even as the heat of summer seeps ever stronger through the streets. What have I done? I’ve stubbornly ripped myself away from what I know—from comfort, from home—and I just keep ripping away at every thread loosely clinging to the tattered seams. And as the various beams of my support system successively drop to the floor, I find myself having trouble breathing. Now I have to wait and see if all this—the fairy tale family, the host community, the pila of friends, the sense of accomplishment, the competence—is real or, as I’ve often feared, just something that was placed in front of me, without effort or contribution of my own, and will now fall silently away. I’m afraid I’ll wake up a few days from now, look around and realize I’m completely alone in a strange land gasping for air.

It was a slightly dramatic morning-after. Dropping my family at the airport, the COPA goodbye dinner, the ever-nearing move-out date, the fear of finals (and the finality of finals)—it’s all hit me a little harder than I was prepared for. I don’t like that my originally-allotted five months in Chile are almost over—the thought makes me angry, a little teary, and probably crankier than I’d like to admit. But now the thought of actually striking out on my own, instead of living within the confines of a pre-existing, pre-paid support system, is leaving me awake at night. I am, of course, slowly recovering from my bout of crashing bolts of vulnerability. After holing myself up in my room, crouched in the corner hiding from both my Latin American poetry essay and any semblance of the outside world, all of Sunday morning (which in Chilean time translates until about 5:30p.m.), I micro-ed it over to Valpo, had onces in a now very familiar apartment with two very familiar friends, and passed the night away in Spanish. Just like usual. Today I got up and went to class, I continued in my clearly unending quest to get a handle on what the hell is going on in this ridiculous place they call a university, and had yet another doctor’s appointment to try to figure out what the hell is causing my skin to turn against me (this one reached a new level; it left me very iodine-yellow, with several dozen tiny scratches dribbling blood and cutaneous things…very attractive). Maybe things won’t change; maybe they will. Suena tan cliché, but maybe this is where the real test comes. Or maybe I just need to be convinced that I already passed that test sometime back in September.