I left for Peru on a Tuesday, with two humans and one regret.
The humans were L., a love interest who had quietly become one of the steadiest friendships I had, and J., my best friend, the kind of person you can travel internationally with and still be on speaking terms after the second flight delay. The regret was Pipes. Pipes is my dog, and Pipes does not understand customs declarations. She watched me leave with the patient, slightly-betrayed look that dogs reserve for suitcases. I have apologized to her at least eight times since. She has accepted six of them.
Cusco at altitude is its own argument. You step out of the airport and the air immediately makes its position known. You either learn to take half-breaths and walk slowly, or you learn the hard way that gravity has been calibrated for sea level and you are not at sea level anymore. By the second afternoon, J. and I were debating the metaphysics of stairs. L. had elected, wisely, to nap.
The city itself does not perform for you. It is too old to bother. Stone the Inca laid is still doing its job underneath stone the Spanish laid on top of it, and both are doing their job underneath the corner café where the three of us ended up at a small table by a window that opened onto a street that had been a street for longer than my entire country has been a country. Humbling is not the right word. The right word is orienting. You sit there and your scale resets.
Echoes in the Hush
Echoes in the hush, a whispering breeze, Secrets unfold in the stillness of night. Shadows sway beneath the moonlit trees, Silver beams fall, cold and bright.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →The poem I drafted that first night was about Pipes. It was not what I expected to write on day one in Peru, and I let it happen anyway. Place gives you the calm to think about whatever is actually living inside you, and the thing living inside me on a hillside in Cusco was a small auburn dog two thousand miles north waiting for me to come back. That is not a Cusco poem. That is a Cusco-induced poem, which I have come to believe is the more honest kind.
L. and J. read the draft over coffee the next morning. Neither of them suggested edits. Both of them said something quiet about their own animals. Travel does that — strips off the layer where we pretend we are sophisticated about loss, and reveals the dogs, the parents, the rooms, the names that have been shaping us all along.
We had two more weeks ahead of us. The mountains were still to come. So were the sacred sites and the long bus rides where someone always falls asleep on someone's shoulder. But Cusco gave me the first true sentence of the trip, and the first true sentence of any trip is the only one that really matters. The rest is filling in.