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sitting in mountain tops of the andesMy last day at home, I lay sprawled out on my bed with my cell phone open on my chest staring at me counting the seconds of my phone call. It was only five minutes in, and I had already heard everything that I needed to hear. “Wow, this is the best I have ever seen you. Your heart is beaming a golden light. You are healed,” my spiritual healer, Bill, told me. I already knew, but needed that reassurance. After a year and a half of brutal hardship, I felt the shift back into balance, into peacefulness, into my body. I was whole again. After tearful days, angry days, blank days, and fake days, I was finally living pure happy days. Before I left, everyone kept asking me if I was nervous. I always thought long and hard trying to find something I was nervous about, but I wasn’t. I’d say most people have a little ball of anxiety and fear before embarking on a huge adventure and change. But for me, the only thing giving me that ugly ball of weight in my stomach was thinking about life back in New York had I not decided to study abroad. I wasn’t ready to go back, and thank god I didn’t have to! Luckily, I only had excited butterflies swarming around my belly pre-departure.
Bill continued, “It’s as if everything wanted this to happen for you. It came at the perfect time, and everything is set up perfectly for you. It is as if this journey is like one big graduation party for you. Hey look everybody, I’m back, healed and ready to go!” Bill was right. The cards were dealt perfectly. I’ve worked my ass off the past eighteen months, and now I get a glorious reward. I didn’t shed a single tear during my departure. Instead I waved bye to my parents through security with a beaming smile and a wave (a completely opposite feeling of when I sobbed my way through on my way to Italy for a year). And that is all I have been doing every since, smiling. The only thing I hear from friends and family from home is how happy I look in all of my pictures. It’s true. I think it is impossible for me to be sad here. A weight lifted off of my shoulders the second I sat down on the plane. I was doing something for me, and only me. I am free. I am traveling, and learning, and going into the unexpected. And just as Pico Iyer says, I am discovering things that were hidden within me as I come across their counterparts in Argentina. I am traveling with a mind that is fully awake and ready to go. I am having a love affair with life at the moment, and nothing can disrupt that.
