The trip home from Peru took nearly two days and felt longer than the clock could explain. Cusco to Lima, Lima to Atlanta, Atlanta to Albuquerque: that is a clean itinerary on paper and a much stranger experience in the body when you are coming back from altitude, carrying the emotional residue of Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, and trying to fit yourself back inside domestic scale. Travel home is never just reverse logistics after a trip like Peru. The return is its own passage. I knew that while I was in it. The airports felt like thresholds more than transit points. I was moving toward home, yes, but I was also moving away from a landscape that had changed the size of my thoughts.
Part of the strangeness was physical. I had altitude in my system still, exhaustion in my bones, and the peculiar lag that comes from crossing not just time zones but emotional registers. Peru had been vast, ancient, and demanding in the best way. Returning to a more ordinary frame after that does not happen instantly just because you board the next flight. For days afterward I kept expecting the horizon to be bigger. New Mexico accommodated that expectation better than most places could have, which is one of the reasons I am so grateful to live where I do, but even New Mexico is not the Andes and does not try to be. The body knows that before the mind does.
I was also returning with Book 2 complete, which gave the whole travel sequence a second layer of meaning. I was not just leaving Peru behind. I was carrying something finished out of it. That can make a return feel both full and tender. There is relief in completion, but there is also a quiet grief in leaving the conditions that allowed the completion to happen. The Airbnb table in Cusco, the high-altitude mornings, the way the mountains kept correcting my sense of urgency—those things had become part of the book's ending. Coming home meant trusting that the work would remain mine even after the landscape that helped midwife it was no longer outside the window.
The Measure of Time
Wounds cut deep, no gentle trace, Minutes crawl, time’s slow pace, Days to weeks, years unfurled, Scars reveal a hidden world.
Coming soon — included in Echoes: Heartstrings UnraveledThe Measure of Time belongs here because the return was full of time in a very particular way. Airport time. Recovery time. The time it takes for a meaningful trip to stop echoing through the nervous system. The poem understands that duration is not neutral. It shapes what heals, what stays marked, and what reveals itself only slowly after the fact. Peru was one of those trips. I did not understand all of what it had given me while I was still there. Some of the meaning arrived on the planes home. Some arrived in the first days back. Some is probably still arriving now. The poem's relationship to time matched that truth exactly.
Even landing back in Albuquerque had emotional weight. New Mexico was familiar, welcome, and mine, but I reached it carrying a different interior horizon than the one I had left with. That is part of what makes a return meaningful. Home stays home, yet you arrive to it altered enough to notice it again.
I unpacked slowly once I got home. Coffee, quiet, New Mexico sky, the relief of being back somewhere genuinely mine. Those details matter because they completed the arc. Peru gave me scale, altitude, and a finished book. Home gave me the room to realize what the trip had actually become in me. That is why the return needs its own place on the timeline. Coming back is not a footnote. It is the part where experience starts turning into understanding, and understanding is often where the real journey begins.