I´m currently located in Valparaíso, Chile, using the computer in my hostel to write this piece. I already have so many things to say about my time in this country, so it´s hard to know where to begin...
... except, perhaps, with the beginning.
I´m going to take an excerpt from my journal about a bit from my journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago via bus (that ended up being a 23 hour ride). I plan to write later about the rest of the journey, Lollapalooza, and this magical place I find myself in that I never want to leave... a San Francisco of South America... an analogy that does no justice to this charming town.
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I swear my back-of-the-shoulder muscle on the right feels bruised. I´m sitting incredibly uncomfortably on my ´semi-cama´ seat doing anything but fulfilling the cama´s purpose. I think I just woke up from some sort of dream, but it took place on the goddamn bus for goodness sake, so who knows if I was in my subconcious or just daydreaming with eyes half-closed. It was embarrassing and painful, however. I hope it wasn´t real. Nonetheless I woke up from what was my two-hours night´s rest to something illegibly recognizable outside my window.
Through the glass that reflected the lines of miniscule bulbs of blue lights along the overhead compartment of the bus, I could see blotches of hazy, pale white. They were everywhere: infectious freckles that speckled the sky. I was suddenly attentively awake and reached for my backpack to grab my glasses, then put them on to confirm my suspicions... the milky way was effortlessly floating just beyond the glass of my lenses and the glass of the bus windows.
After my few moments of intial shock that I could even see that many stars from where I was sitting, travelling at a fast pace, I realized this was a sky I had never seen before. It was the sky of el paisaje, el campo de la Argentina. The lands that lay below seemed to stretch on to an infinite pool of black, where the darkness made it a game of never-knowing. I looked at my watch: 4 AM. I looked up agin, and after lingering on Orion´s belt, spotting Gemini, a planet (I think Saturn) and watching a shooting star go by, I pinpointed why the sky was new to my eyes.
They really were floating. They, the stars. These stars. The stars I almost finally understood. My view was a snowglobe, where someone took a snapshot admist the falling of the flakes, and it seemed as if they would continue to trickle towards the ground and I could catch them on my tongue. But in that moment, they were still. And in that globe, they were truly objects, celestial beings, that lied beyond the globe, our globe.
It was also the first time I think I noticed la profundidad (the depth) and placement of the stars.
(by this time I glimpsed another shooting star in the bottom left corner of the frame of my window)
The ones that were closer were obviously bigger and brighter, but the ones that were far away I knew, somehow, from a different point of view, occupied their own place in the vastness we call space. I´ve always been a stargazer (I have the overwhelming desire to blame my mother for this), and usually when I look to the sky I like to imagine the stars as they are up close and personal, as the giant balls of gas made of recycled star stuff that are incessantly sending us their luminosity, despite the amount of time it takes for their message to finally reach us. And in my new recognition of depth and lightyears put into perspective, even the little guys got this practiced imagery, too.
(and now a satellite has made its way across my frame, slowly but surely)
I desperately wanted to remove the glass, run towards the fields and see the interstellar clouds more definitively. I knew I couldn´t, but still remained dazzled by what shockingly was my very clear view through a bus window. I also had the urge, from the moment my vision was corrected, to yell out to everyone: "Guys! Look! Look at the sky right now! Miren, miren! El cielo, las estrellas!" There must have been a scattered few awake, but I also didn´t mind pretending everyone to be asleep. Because this was a whole new sky for me, and I wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to keep it as my own, as just mine.
I swear I´ve never seen a sky so blue until I came to South America. I swear I´ve never seen the stars so true in space until I sat uncomfortably on a bus, moving West through Argentina. I swear my shoulder really is bruised. I swear another shooting star just passed by.
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