At Night in Granada

GRANADA, Nicaragua – Monday I sat sweaty and exhausted in the back of a rickety old school bus two and a half months after boarding a Greyhound in Mobile, the sun setting behind me, its rays pouring in through open windows making the entire bus an explosive shade of orange. I closed my eyes, my memories played out the same way those mountains and all the ones before them scrolled past, bumping my way into the Granada city limits, a hundred faces, moments and emotions all behind me as quickly as I encountered them.

Then my feet were on the ground in Granada. That trip ended, another one began.

So this is my third night here, I’ve written one short article (about Honduras, naturally) and in the morning I’m headed to Managua to cover a student protest over budget cuts that will affect education funding. My first two days have been tranquilo, just wandering the city, running errands, getting adjusted. I really like the house I’m staying in here with Blake, which you can see pictures of and other spots I stopped at in Nicaragua over the weekend on my way down from Tegucigalpa here.

How do I properly reflect on the journey here? First of all, it doesn’t feel like one single trip. It’s been two and a half months, seems more like a year and yet feels like it only took a week to blow by. Every new town had new faces, I was hearing new stories and telling my story all over again. I’m not entirely the same person I was when I left, nor am I entirely the same person I was in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. I’m not trying to quantify this growth in terms of political boundaries, a rose by any other name and all that. Maybe Simon & Garfunkel put it best when they said

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song
I’m twenty-three now but I won’t be for long
Time hurries on
And the leaves that are green turn to brown

Tonight I’m just caught between beginnings and endings and Spanish tiles. Sometimes it feels like the world only gets less certain the more I familiarize myself with it. The inevitable doesn’t come out from under its shroud at my convenience. Enjoying life is all about detachment from that reality and exercising precision with every other cognition.