Goodbye.

Saying goodbye is always hard.

Saying good bye in front of a bustling morning market, with rumbling car engines and women hollering about gelatina & tamales, to a woman who has taken amazing care of me for the past 2 months was almost impossible. There was no way to affectively communicate to her how much I appreciated her care and attention. With tear filled eyes I hugged her tightly and quickly hopped in the combi to avoid an explosion of decidedly non-macho behavior in Latin America.

I fell in love this summer. With my Peruvian host mom. Her laugh, honest and loud. Her love of her land, from chickens to cuy to peas to potatoes and culture.

Each time a Peruvian asked me, what was your favorite part of Peru, the answer is exceedingly easy: the people. Ruins are not really my thing. Weaving is interesting and impressive. The food here is good, but the the people, the genuine love and care shine through so clearly that I cannot possibly name any other reason why I'd want to return.

When you leave love behind, the love of a mother, a sister, a brother, of aunts and uncles, of a family, of dogs and cats and chickens and cuy. Of moonlight and dustclouds, love from cooking smoke and cold showers, you want it back so bad, I want it back so bad that you cannot really imagine it otherwise. A part of me feels like this was the first time a family has really loved me, unconditionally, directly, in ways American families, my American family doesn't. Why would anyone leave this?

The taxista who drove me to the Cusco Airport asked me how Peru compares with the USA. I told him that each country has things the other does not. I said that we do not value family back home, like you do here. I asked him, if his grandma was unable to live by herself anymore, where would she go? With him right? He said absolutely. Not like that at home. We ship 'em off to homes for the elderly, where we cannot see the descent into old age. I told that we don't live with our families from around age 18. That I live 3000 miles away from parents and brothers, that I am accustomed to not being around them. That we value independence more than we value families and that something is lost there, something precious. Something I saw this morning when the aging, dementia and arthritic tia bid me farewell.

She cant talk. Well, she kind of talks. She grunts and mumbles sounds that are Quechua in origin. She never learned Spanish. So, we hardly understood each other. We even fought a bit. For the past week she has had a really bad cough and I kept trying to get her to drink warm water to calm her throat down but she, as the old often do, has lost most of her taste buds and only likes extremely sweet or extremely salty food. Drinking plain water is a punishment for her. When I would try to get her to do so, she would respond by grunting loudly and trying to hit me with a stick. A kind of communicating.

Her dementia is pretty far along, so when leaving this morning, she was watching TV and I thought it'd be best to not bother her, but Katy told her I was leaving and she got out of bed, shuffled down the stairs, fast, to see me off. The fastest I've ever seen a 65 year old Andean woman with arthritis move. Ana Maria was stunned that she was moving this fast. She wanted to say goodbye and to ask for pills for her headaches. I was shocked. I was saddened. Im sitting in food court at the Lima Airport, eyes brimming with tears, because of an old woman who might not ever remember me again but whose face filled with genuine emotion when i was leaving today. What happened there?

I've never really lived with anyone older before. And that was touching.

I know how Dhyana feels now. When she talks about Alejandro's family. It makes sense in a way it never did before. We both come from broken families. Her's broken, physically and emotionally. Mine, together physically but broken emotionally. When you find a family that is together, something clicks, some stupid fucking evolutionary button or desire that you never knew you had pops into place and you see things clearly, maybe for the first time. That capitalism, the quest for individuality and freedom is destroying something greater and stronger than money.

Im alone in this airport. I don't ever want to do this alone again. I felt lonely last Thanksgiving, made a promise to myself that the next Thanksgiving I'd be with friends I really cared about and that I would put the effort into building those relationships for the next year. I'm moving back to Shotwell in a week, that is where my SF adventure started. In that backyard. I've built some amazing friendships last year. Laid some ground work for a family. I missed those people powerfully on this trip. I missed my home. I found another home. Found another family. Realized how much I love my real family. How much I love my friends and my home. I do not know how to reconcile the two.

My glasses clink on the polished metal table. My head rests in my hands with curls spilling over my fingers. Im so tired of being alone. And I am so happy to coming back home.