#105: Departure & Return
Reflecting on the beginning, coming home again, and the movies that held me as we flew.
When I was a little boy, in the years I lived in Florida, I had a cousin named Jandro. He still exists and so do I, but we don’t know each other in the same way. As children, we were best friends. He is slightly older than me and I looked up to him in the way children often look up to their child elders. My sister and I loved each other and still do, and were very close, but there is something different about having a sibling or cousin who is your same gender.
I knew early on that I was different than the other boys around me, and I was desperate to hold on to any facets of boyhood I could, before inevitably being swept away on the undertow of puberty and washed ashore on the tide of adulthood. My name is Alexander, and my cousin is Alejandro. We call him Jandro, we call me: Alex.
It was interesting to observe him. Is this what I would be like if I grew up around my Spanish-speaking Cuban family members? Would I have a personality similar to his? Would I use the same words and have the same interests?
As Cheryl Strayed says: We’ll never know of that other life, the one we could’ve led, but we must salute it, a ghost ship passing in the night, never wondering too long what could’ve been, and instead focusing on all that is. I’m paraphrasing.
When my family moved to Georgia, I felt a kind of loss. It’s strange because now I think of Georgia as the place that has always and will always be my origin. Florida, those years from birth through the beginning of schooling, they’ve fallen away, soft petals on a flower that has long since died. Yet Georgia still blooms in me.
There was a carpet my mother had bought from Tuesday morning. It was in my childhood bathroom and the little faux zebra lines made something of a face. I would stare at the face and cry whenever Jandro left. I didn’t like being without my cousins, and their visits to Georgia were in my opinion always too short.
I would always begin a period of mourning, as I watched their car from the windows of my upstairs vantage point, watching it turn the corner out of my drive and recede from my vision, becoming a smaller and smaller spec, sending them someplace new.
This is what I thought of when I woke up this morning. In that same house, the place that I was glad to come home to. It’s strange what we carry with us. After all this time, it’s been decades, still, I carry that memory of watching Jandro go, how sad it was to feel the space and distance growing between me and my Cuban family, a distance that has continued to grow ever since.
For the past ten weeks, I’ve been living with my best friend in Mexico City. My passport allows me to stay up to 90 days in the country before having to return. Originally I was set to come up just shy of day 90, but I decided to come home on day 70 instead. It was a hard decision, one I’m still grappling with, but I reached a point where I continually was getting sick, with stomach bugs, vomiting, the flu, and colds, and I realized that there’s a certain point where a place is telling you to lovingly leave.
Despite my battles with sickness and pollution, I have nothing else but extremely fond memories of Mexico City. Largely because it was a time of peace and love and closeness for me and my best friend. It feels so strange even now to be away from her, to know that she is not resting just 10 or 15 feet away in the other room, but instead thousands of miles away.
I miss her fiercely, and it was lovely to see the ways in which a relationship that already felt so complete and beautiful and fantastic could find new depths, new closeness, and an ever-growing garden of need seeds of love and connection planted.
The night before I left, I stared at the waters of the SoHo house pool, always that same turquoise and I wondered, when, if ever, I would return to this place. I don’t know, I like to imagine that nothing is ever truly goodbye, but I could die tomorrow (knock on wood that I don’t, Lord I’d like to go on living) but I mean to say is that life is so strange and short in so many ways and things can unexpectantly change in an instant. All the more reason to hold your loved ones close while you can, hug them as often as possible, and tell them how much they mean to you.
You never know when it might be you looking from that window, watching a little car sink farther and farther away, becoming a little spec, and then disappearing altogether.
The flight home was delayed, I walked around the airport for hours wondering what and where I should go. I hadn’t slept very much the night before, a couple of hours, maybe three, so I felt a bit delirious as I walked gaps around the K terminal.
I’m like my dad when it comes to travel, always arriving extremely early out of fear that I might miss something, that the day I travel would be the day that they decide, you know what, let’s leave three hours early for fun. You never know, his voice in my head tells me.
The airport was more beautiful than I remembered. I flitted in and out of stores, holding trinkets for a moment and then assuring myself I should instead save my money.
I listened to voice notes from friends, childhood besties who I’m meeting up with in Europe this summer, and old colleagues who I’m about to set sail with at the start of 2025. It was a pleasant afternoon.
On the plane, I was served a little bowl of cheese and fruit, which I ate gladly. I watched two films: Aladdin and Migration. I feel complicated about Aladdin, but I tried to suspend my intersectional criticism brain and just let myself enjoy this sweet story about a young man who dreamed of more for his life, and a young woman who dreamed of having authorship over her own story.
So much of it was enchanting, I’ve forgotten with time. When the credits rolled, I found myself wanting to almost cry. I remembered myself as a child loving that film so desperately, begging my mother to rewind the VHS tape and play it again. I never wanted to leave Aladdin, I never wanted to leave Jasmin, or Genie, or Carpet, or sweet, mischievous Abu.
When I looked at the tracker, I saw we still had another hour. I was unsure of how to fill the time, so I scrolled through the movies. I felt at peace with this nostalgic magic I was feeling and I didn’t want to pollute the emotion with anything that might bring me back to the cynicism and realism of adulthood. I was up in the air after all, I decided to let myself float with idealism and pie in the sky (literally) thinking for a bit longer.
I watched a film called Migration. It was a sweet film that I imagine would resonate with anyone who has overprotective parents. The film centers on a family of Mallards, who live in peace on a beautiful little pond, only, unline their geese, goose, duck, and fellow waterfowl family — never migrate.
Their father is very concerned (with good reason, as we come to discover) about the many dangers that exist in the world, and wouldn’t everyone just rather stay at home where it’s safe and peaceful and we know what to expect?
But his children and his partner, they dream of seeing the world, they want adventure. They want to migrate, to taste the glowing waters of Jamaica, to meet birds of all kinds. They want to set out on their grand adventure.
What follows is a truly heartwarming story of family travel, opening one’s mind, and facing danger with bravery and cunning, as well as some topics that one might not expect a children’s movie to address like the dangers of factory farming and how predatory and cruel the animal industry can be, especially to birds.
There is also a charming third act of the film dedicated to freeing a confined Jamaican friend who joins them en route to the paradise waters of his homeland.
I found myself feeling warm and joyful in that way that only animated films can make you feel and as the final scenes played, the heroes returning home, only to be greeted with their new adventure, I looked out the window and saw that I too was touching down from the sky in the land I call home.
After a lengthy line at customs, there was my father, waiting for me, as he had a thousand times before, welcoming me home, eager to hear of my travels and bring me with haste to the open embrace of my sweet mother, who made me feel, as they always do, welcome and wanted.
I slept peacefully that night, and I woke to the sounds of Georgia in April, the quiet serene world of my parent’s garden, the sound of crickets and bugs singing their songs, the rustling of strong winds tearing their way through swaying trees, and the soft whoosh of many species of birds, preparing to open their mouths into morning and sing.
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Reading again through this now I see little spaces here and there that I might change, clumsy phrasings, or maybe a misspelled word or two — but I find myself filled with the very human-ness of my propensity to error. So I will leave them. The piece is perfectly imperfect, with flaws as real as my own. I’m trying to fall out of love with perfectionism and commit to anti-perfectionism, where I let myself exist, however imperfectly. Where I let myself show up and be heard, even when I’m not ready. I’m a firm believer that it is better to speak and stumble, to stammer and uncertainly continue than it is to remain silent, waiting for some perfect future readiness that might never arrive. Best, I think, to just give it a go with whatever you have to give at this moment — knowing that the loving people of the world you as a what you are, and what they are to you, a mirror, a refraction, a friend, someone with a story to tell, someone who through their own words might make things just a bit more clear when you begin (or continue) to share your own. Where are my fellow anti-perfectionists? Or perhaps we can make a more loving word for it, maybe something like: Imperfect Beauties 🥰
Beautiful! Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life, the paintings you have here, formed the foundation of myself. I first saw them on a school field trip to Washington DC. In the paintings, I saw a world a part from the suburban NJ culture I grew up in. I spent the rest of my life chasing that culture. Now I am living the third painting and Kubla Khan stands before me. Thank you for such gorgeous writing.