Flight Plan

This good-bye doesn’t hide a see you later…

Este adios no maquilla un hasta luego… Joaquin Sabina, Nos Sobran los Motivos.

I am embracing the awkwardness of saying good-bye to no one and all, being overly sensitive in a world that teaches us to guard ourselves and our emotions.

I am going on a journey from which I am not sure I will return.

I am embarking on a trip from which when I return I won’t be the same one that once left.

When I was fifteen, I once wrote a book. I never published it, but I wanted to be a writer when I was fifteen.

It was a simple story. Boy meets girl on an airplane, on a trip to America, there was a boy.

Unsurprisingly enough, the book was called America.

That was when the summers were surrounded by the boiling asphalt of the streets of Buenos Aires, and the pavè I never learned to appreciate.

I was fifteen, and my present story I wrote. Of course, there were a few changes here and there in the plot. Otherwise, who would want to live the story one once wrote?

Insecurities lead me on a wild chase to accrue degrees and more degrees.

And now I am going to finish my Master’s degree, that the School has so graciously allowed me to finish after I dropped out twice.

And since I still have a day job, a family and a dog, I will be replacing poetry by algorithms, and love stories by consensus statements that are 20 or 40 pages long.

Instead of poems, I will write SOAP notes.

Travel is ultimately movement.

Like a camel in the desert, I stroll among sand and dunes, knowing the steps the caravan takes, lead by ancestors and pilgrimages taken before I was born, on a path the wind has already wiped.

Like a camel in the desert, I rejoice when an oasis, I find. And I drink till my stores are full, and then knowing the path is in the dunes formed by the sand, I leave knowing or hoping, a new oasis I will find.

All I wanted to say, is thank you for your time and patience with me.

For the claps and for the reads, to whom it may concern.

I did appreciate your stories and poetry, interacting with you when it was good and not so good.

I suspect, now and then I will continue to go down to the underworld to feed of the Spirit of the ones who know.

And one day I will return, in one form or not, and I’ll tell you about the journeys I took, how I survived my trip, how I no longer am whom I am not.

Thank you for reading and your friendship.

Pablo Pereyra 2019.