I'm in a New York State of Being/Honduras State of Mind

I remember a dream I had shortly before leaving for Honduras. I'd arrived in a desertscape version of Tegucigalpa with an empty backpack and no money. I'd instantly connected to the place, knowing I belonged there but feeling the sharp panic of having no resources. The dream seemed to have no end but was instead a sort of long personal narrative involving me searching the city for supplies. At the time I passed it off as an anxiety dream -- pre-trip preparedness paranoia. But now that I'm back in the land of Blackberrys and ballet flats, I see it for what is was: a dream about feeling spiritually broke; trying endlessly to draw on an empty emotional bank account.

I couldn't sleep the night we were departing. I was absolutely frantic imagining Tegus. It rose up in my mind, filthy, jagged, smelling of rubber and sweat and shrouded in industry smoke. I kept thinking to myself, 'This is the tradeoff. You have to suffer some to get the payoff. It has to be a little bit brutal and you have to be terrified or there won't be the afterlife of bus rides and beaches to transform you.' I guess I sort of realized in that tormented darkness that travel is about leaving a piece of yourself behind so that you can go out and fill that empty space with the richness of the world. I resolved to leave the terrified, emotionally bankrupt piece of me at home to go out and make a deposit of memory in its place.

I'm floating on top of my days now, not really in them but just slightly above them, my feet still (as my friend Kate says) in two places. I traded in my remaining Lempiras at the American Express office on Monday. Looking at the worn, crumpled pile of bills and their foreign president sitting in a stack on the clerk's desk, I felt the urge to cry. They seemed my last concrete connection to Honduras. As she sorted through each bill and placed them into an envelope I imagined my grip on little Eddie, our ten year old tour guide in Comayagua, and his angel wing eyelashes and fragile hands slowly dissolving.

I stared at the lifeless stack and thought of every bill as a snapshot: mountains of banana trees out the schoolbus window, bare feet and jungle vines, warm corn tortillas and Imperial beer on a picnic bench, the stone wink of a Mayan king, a hammock's imprint on sunburned shoulders, little hands and big cowboy hats, straw-colored dust and unpaved roads, backpacks, hundred degree afternoons shopping for jewelry, German Shepherd in the back of a pick-up, the cellophane sea, orange mud in a dripping green cloud forest, the camera's eye seeing something I missed, Mitch's dirty pant legs, Vicky's Mary Janes, and color, thriving, throbbing, living color everywhere. It's not a fair exchange: my American dollars for Lempiras, Lempiras for my experience in Honduras. Each of those worn bills is worth a million moments to me.

Honduras is rugged, gentle, hospitable, and raw. Travel there can feel isolating. Sometimes that's a feeling to be treasured and sometimes it's alienating. The country is extremely undeveloped and the environment lush but the cities are brutally urban. It's a place of enormous contrast. Still, the culture is clever and determined and we met wonderful people, Honduran and foreigners.

It's a country that got inside me, way down deep, and is now snaking its way through all my empty places and filling me with sound and scent and scenery.

We went and saw and captured our moments (22 plus hour's worth, to be exact) and Honduras captured us. I think it actually kept a piece too. That's the tradeoff, right? Leave half empty, go fill up, yes. But it's a bit like stealing if you don't leave some of you behind in return. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we'd be glad to go back and visit the Kate, Vicky and Mitch monument to Honduras anytime. Anytime.