The Andes

 

My best friend dropped the news one day last December, she in London, I in Argentina, confined in a bumpy bus driving along gravel mountain roads towards the Chilean border. I had been travelling  in Argentina for a week, starting off in the faded grandeur of Buenos Aires and slowly busing my way westward. I had been looking forward to Los Andes – the thin air and summer snow, they would cleanse me somehow after a difficult year.

“I’m getting married,” She said.

We had relentlessly analysed boyfriends and crushes billions of times over the years, but somehow it never felt “grown up”. Even now, though we were in our mid twenties, it still felt like two teenage girls having a laugh. Her words were a wake up call – we really were grown up now. I burst into tears.

“I’m so happy for you,” I texted back, the patchy 3G signal ferrying my concoction of happiness and disbelief over jagged peaks and faraway oceans.

Outside, the air was crisp even in the heat of the Argentine summer. The bus was climbing higher. The earth was a rich, saturated brown, not an inkling of green in sight as we ascended to over 3500m above sea level. Somewhere further up was the road crossing the Andes and leading the traveller to Chile – a new beginning.

Perhaps when you are truly close to someone, you experience their life changing decisions with every cell in your body. My tears conveyed what words couldn’t  – the shock of impending change, the happiness of knowing her happiness, and the uncertainty of growing up. I thought of life taking all of us in different, unpredictable directions, and the sheer impossibility of this moment – a connection transcending geographical boundaries, me in Argentina feeling her emotions in London.  It was overwhelming and beautiful all at the same time.

And there I was, rocking to the winding rhythm of the dilapidated minibus, 90s Chinese pop songs blasting in my ear, tears on my cheek drying under the unforgiving Andean sun, finally content.

Here’s to the Andes – a place forever associated with a memory.

P.S. The original draft of the last paragraph dates from Dec 2015, frantically typed, and saved in the notes folder until I rediscovered it and relieved those emotions all over again. Such is the power of words.

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