So much to say. Another epiphany.

Today is my penultimate day in Lima (that's how they say it here) and it's breaking my heart. I have rarely been in a city where I would have liked to have stayed on as much as here. Why is that? Is it because I've been waking up here every morning at 7.30 to go to class, to walk along the seaside or through el Parque Kennedy to be with the same people for five days, to have lunch somewhere in my neighborhood or at home, work on my subtitling, go out again to meet up with my co-students, return home, etc etc.? Habits are strong creatures and we humans (and animals) love them... It will break my heart to leave these habits, my coffee pot, my walk ways, my teacher, my friends, the paisajes (landscapes) that I have come to know so well... Lima is a huge city and I hadn't even started to discover it all... I may cry on the bus on Sunday morning. But at the same time, Lima is too safe, too much like home, and I came here to live an adventure, to "get away", me dépayser... to lose myself in different landscapes. It is certainly time to leave.

I have been having another "epiphany".. but it is in the nature of epiphanies to be clichés; to sound so normal as to make others ask "duh, yeah, so what?".... I was walking to school yesterday morning when I thought about the fact that I don't as yet know anything about the past or future tenses in Spanish. I know only the present. And, at the same time, I am here, in South America, in a brand-new city, and I am so imbued with all his novelty that I can't miss anything that I know. I don't miss home, I don't miss Bodrum, or Istanbul, or anyplace that I know. I don't miss anything. I don't think about anything else but the place where I am. I think that this is a rare feeling; to be so imbued in the present; to think only of the present and where you are right now and yourself; only yourself. This feeling of present-ness goes through my whole body; my whole being; I am nothing but a dog, you could say, wagging its dog and being happy about existing. I wish my whole life could just go by like this.

Of course, I'm still worrying about money and itineraries and hotels and stuff. But that's all part of my present.

I don't know, could I explain it any better? It's such a simple emotion. Such a simple reality. I am, and that's it. And it's extraordinary.

I'm wagging my tail.