An inevitable rookie mistake,

to try to translate everything because you think that it will help you to understand. But ultimately, you find that not only does each language falta words that are crucial to the other (like cochino—someone who falls asleep in their clothes or skips a bath and is dirty, roughly, and cholo—a person who does not like things that are good, and madrugada—the hours that are really late at night/really early in the morning), but that the manner of phrasing things makes it impossible to express something in one language that exists in the other without either changing the words you use or the meaning that you are trying to convey. So that just as my camera always captures either too much or too little of what my eyes see and my heart wants to share with everyone, in the end it is just as impossible to capture in a photo the many layers of perspective that inform what you are seeing as it is to try to understand this experience en cual que no es español.

One of the hardest things to which to adapt in this language is trying to say that you like something—the subject and object are switched so rather than saying I like it, ‘me gusta’ is more like ‘it makes me like it.’ Plus I learned, after telling half of the members of the orchestra that they me gustan, that when you want to say I like a person, saying ‘me gusta’ means that you have a crush on them, and instead, you say ‘me caes bien,’ literally, you fall well with me.

That is a perfect way of expressing what happens here—falling is a passive action, and without even trying, la gente just falls with me in a way that makes me feel as though we have been friends for our entire lives.

Besides caerte bien right away, the other way to develop confianza is share experiences, and I have been so lucky as to have the most spectacular adventures with the ones who had immediately fallen into closeness with me anyway, inherently singular experiences augmented by ridiculous moments of adversity that generate the presently nervous jokes that will later be the hilarious and tender reminiscence of the time passed together.

From the 7 AM flat tire (whose popping noise I initially identified as a gunshot) that left me and my 30-year-old amiga percusionista (after a dream-quality night of beach, surfear, agachaditos (from the verb ‘agachar’-to squat, as these ridiculously cheap kiosks exist to fulfill only the most basic caloric needs), the famous empanadas de Playas accompanied by thick creamy yogurt blended with fresh fruit in the classic Ecuadorian way (I can’t tell you how I will miss that), and homeotherapeutic medicinal teas bought from a peddler off the street,) stranded on the highway between Guayaquil and the Guayas coast with a mere $10 between the two of us, not sure whether the refusal to slow down of cars whizzing by at 100 kmph was more or less dangerous than the possibility that they would stop…to being locked outside la casa de mi mejor amigo in the cool Ecuadorian mountain province at one in the madrugada (si ves) with our group of nine friends including the 6-year-old daughter of two of them, persevering with hammer and an awl, some intense teamwork, plenty of patience, and a good rato (at 1 AM!, think of the bebé!) until finally he persuaded the resolute lock to fall open into his hands, these kinds of things that don’t go perfectly mean more, in the end, than the idyllic beach and bungalow-stay or the breathtaking and unrivaled waterfall landscape of Baños en la sierra.

It’s things like that that make your corazons touch, that make it so a smile says everything you need to say, that make your friends forgive you when you spray them with mororcho spit out of your nose for laughing, and so in the end, though despedir is just as impossible and meaningless as you thought it would be, you part in laughter and not tears, and really, on the deepest level, you do not part at all.

Ya pues pilas loco, ya regreso. No puede ser el fin.