Dreamers

--Ale, tomorrow:
(From a small counter in Paris)
"You must try this musk. It is really special. It is from Lichtenstein"

-- Peter, today:
"Greetings from Lichtenstein. Another one off my list."
"Lichtenstein was on your list?"
"Everything is on my list"
--
"What makes that musk special?"
"You know what? Have you seen this film, before sunset?"
---
Who else is in Singapore, in New Orleans, in Dubai, Ukraine, in London, In Marin and in Nicaragua and in Sydney, Tomsk, Serbia, Turkey, and missed out on Iceland.
Who is Icelandic Malaysian but lives in Mexico; Armenian, Persian, Cuban and Chilean; who is a Haitian hero from Miami or a Venezuelan-raised Austrian? A French in Argentina or a Portuguese in Panama? A Brazilian in Fiji; a Mauritian in Las Vegas; an Ethiopian in New York. A Colombian or Laotian from Silicon Valley, a Japanese from Monterrey, a Peruvian in Galicia who became a doctor in Chicago.

Dreamers. People who put "life is short" as their WiFi password, as a reminder to connect, not disconnect.

These are my best friends, the people I love, who move and inspire and define me, who give me life, who dream as one earth and who would travel eons to taste life, who do it to eat and breathe, who don't know what else. I am grateful. This is me too. My dad, I say, he's Argentine from New England, living in Latvia and working in Burkina Faso. It makes sense somehow in this world of where. My grandfather told me in a beautiful card I had taped up to our kitchen counter sill, under the knives, for years: "Everywhere you go, there you are."

It was one of the most beautiful and comforting things anyone had ever told me. I think it gave me a lot of courage to go, go figure it out.

Ale will sell that musk one day from Paris. I'll buy her dream, back of a vespa, scarf trailing, air crisp and sun-filled.

In the meantime, I am on her foldout bed in sao paulo, watching her suitcases through my jetlag; saboreando my poetic insomnia, rose and brigadeiras en boca. I saught my dreamer friends for reassurance tonight, the women that just are that without thinking, who have images of twenty years and a pool and a breeze and a colonial city, a project, a moving vehicle, a collaboration, a new world order.

And this will happen, if we are lucky to remember us. Because this we are.

The Bubble

We live these exciting, sensational lives, but we are isolated and trapped in as if by a thick digital silicon bubble, just waiting for people to come along and burst it.

But so often, people just approach us with their own bubble, and we rub digital bubbles together, maybe we can feel a change of pressure; maybe a bit crowded, even - and it never bursts at all-- we never really get to breathe the same air, or warm each other up, or hear each others' unfiltered voices. and then away they go, like a digital trail, in a database, without any physical meaning.

We can burst our own bubbles, but then we will be left open-hearted and alone to the muck of a physical environment humans no longer share, curious if the repair is worth it, again and again.