Journals from the Jungle X: One-Way Ticket

Does aloneness invite potential, or regret?

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The following are journal excerpts—a series of stories from my recent travels.

March 9th 2024 continued

Airport: These environments are such a reentry shock. I feel hollowed out. Regarding reentry, I now have to turn myself from the jungle and surf, to the screen. Turn myself from feeling to doing.

I scroll through my photos from the trip and choose favorites.

5:15pm: About to depart. I would otherwise be just arriving to the beach for sunset. I feel … wrecked. In the sense that I hate the feeling of cramming my brain back into a calendar and computer. I know I’ll reacclimate, and I hate that too. I think I really need to take off, for even longer. I need to just go. I see all the signs of my loving it—living for it—the physicality, the nature, the nakedness, the minimalism. I can enjoy culture, but I don’t choose it over being an outlier jungle defector, etc.

It would be possible to see my whole life in NYC as part of my “competency problem.” Now, how to pivot (hate that word), parlay, redirect the momentum, if that even matters. Meaning: What do I have to do to see this book all the way through, and to sell in the next? That is what matters.

We take off at sunset, which I watch through the plane window. As the wheels leave land, I feel pierced. We lift into the pink clouds and I think, “It feels like I have to kill something in order to return.”

My heart feels like it’s breaking. A chest-caving ache. I already miss Costa Rica.

This is change. Prying apart, unhinging, exposing, and reforming … change.

~

May 15th, 2024

Here I am on the eve of the eve of GOING BACK. Already, somehow. What is time?