by Hoang, Jamie
“We’re pre-programmed to always want more. I want to experience everything—I want to do everything before I die, don’t you?”
“You want to know the real reason Jeff and I are here?” She nodded. “I’m going blind.” Sabrina was being so open with me about her fears that it felt insincere to not tell the truth at this point.
“Bullshit.”
I laughed, “I keep hoping. But it’s true.”
“Well that explains your dizziness yesterday. Should you even be doing a hike like this?”
“It’s not super bad yet. It’s different than what I was expecting. I thought things would start to get blurry, like a camera going out of focus. But I’m starting to see dark rings around my eyes, kind of like looking through a set of binoculars, except right now my periphery is still pretty wide.”
“How long before you’re completely blind?” she asked.
“Six to eight weeks, they said…that was five weeks ago.”
“Oh, bollocks. Well, that’s really shitty, isn’t it?”
“Totally shitty,” I said, mimicking her accent. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.” Holy cow I’m an asshole, I thought. She laughed.
After a short silence Sabrina concluded, “I would be really angry if I were you.”
“Believe me, I am.”
“I’m trying to imagine what I would do if I were in your situation.”
“And?”
“And I think I would be doing the exact same thing as you. Traveling around the world with the person that I love.” I opened my mouth to deny the accusation of love, but she waved me off. “I don’t know what the deal is with you two, but I know you love each other.”
It didn’t matter that she had no basis for making that statement; I loved her for saying it. I wanted to know why she thought it. Had he made some kind of gesture that I missed? Was it his body language? All I needed was a glass of wine in a private tent and I would’ve told her everything: my history with Jeff, how we had reconnected, his heartbreak, Paris…all of it. I wanted so badly to share my side of the story, to analyze and discuss the situation, and to have someone else confirm that my feelings were not misplaced.
Instead, I mumbled, “Bad timing I guess.”
“Just remember, the man can’t always be expected to make all the effort.” I wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but Jeff emerged from our tent just then and walked over to make his own coffee. “Morning,” he grumbled.
“Morning,” Sabrina and I said in unison, before she continued on with the conversation. For a second I was worried she was going to ask him about our so-called “bad timing,” but she didn’t.
“Sebastian and I have been traveling for nearly six months now, and no matter where we are, whenever I see sprawling landscapes I always feel like I need to meditate. Like Mother Earth needs me to really take a look at her—to see something on the horizon, or in the trees. Maybe flowing in the river beneath me. It’s like she’s pointing me towards answers except I don’t know the questions.”
“That’s very philosophical for six a.m. I’m going back to bed. Wake me up for breakfast,” Jeff yawned as he lumbered off back to our tent.
“You got it, champ,” Sabrina laughed.
“Have you tried meditation?” I asked.
“No,” she said, as though offended I would even think that. She had pulled that entire monologue out of her ass. I was impressed. I felt like I had met my soulmate. Too bad she was a girl.
“I know you were just trying to get Jeff to go away, but I actually think there is a direct correlation between one’s happiness and the amount of time they spend in nature every day.”
“Oh, I’m sure there is. I mean, why else would a third of all paintings in people’s homes be landscapes?”
“Is that true?” I was skeptical.
“Yea, I did a summer internship at the National Gallery in college,” she replied.
“Don’t you think most people, especially in large galleries and museums, walk by paintings too quickly?” I asked. “And because of that they see something static, but really great paintings are always moving. If you pay attention to the brush strokes and look at the details, the movement is always there. Every painting has a secret—layers that were brushed over, sometimes completely, to hide something the artist wanted to share at some point but then redacted.” I had stopped talking to Sabrina and was really only talking to myself. In the twenty years I’d been painting, I never once stepped back to look at my process, notably my lack of an outline and my love of mistakes. Behind the couple dancing in Midnight in Paris was a swing set—my childhood swing set. I put it there to help me paint the expressions of joy on their faces. When I snapped to, I noticed Sabrina had her elbows propped up on the table and was listening to me. Embarrassed, I apologized for rambling.
“I can’t tell if you’re genuine or just another artistic hack,” she finally said.
“Definitely the latter,” I smiled.
“Good, because otherwise your condition might be a real tragedy. I’ve never heard such meaningful bullshit,” she said with glistening eyes.
“Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling me I was supposed to be an actress after all,” I said.
Throughout our whole conversation, Sabrina never once offered up advice on what I should do or harped on the fact that she didn’t think I deserved to go blind. She was honest about the fact that she was worried she might be acting overly sympathetic because of a subconscious guilt stemming from relief. She was glad to not be in my shoes. Her candor and dark humor made me trust her and I was grateful for the fast and easy friendship.
The ancient city of Machu Picchu was built inside a valley guarded by mountain ranges. We entered at the top of the southeast mountain range and stepped out onto a small platform. Once my eyes peaked above the crest, a wide space opened up and I walked to the edge of the cliff to discover an enchanted city. I looked back at the path from which I came: behind me were the thousands of steps I’d trekked up. I turned to face the thousands more I’d have to walk down before I reached the city. Four days of hiking led us to the Holy Grail of ancient ruins and stepping through the Sun Gate, which was little more than a rectangular stone hut containing six carved-out windows and an entryway, meant I had arrived.
Down below, the ancient city was crawling with people: other hikers who’d beat us there, and those bused in from Cuzco to explore without first traversing the hilly land on foot. Like the hierarchy of any society, the city was built in tiers, and at the bottom of its six or so ranks was the mighty Urubama River. A reddish-brown color similar to that of clay, the muddy water looked filthy, but it was responsible for the lush green hillsides and was the main source of hydration for the free-roaming alpaca. From our vantage point on the platform, we had an aerial view of the ruins, and it made for the perfect photo-op. I watched as others next to me took perspective trick photos of themselves stepping on, taking a bite of, or pushing the ruins. My own cliché photo was of me holding my hand out as if I were painting the landscape. Unoriginal, I know, but it was me.
I had walked over forty-one kilometers carrying only my personal belongings while struggling to breathe at times and feeling my heart beat mercilessly. How had the Incas found the strength and willpower to move enough earth and rock to build an entire city?
“This is incredible,” I said, more to myself to than to anyone else.
“Here, give me your camera,” Sabrina said to Jeff. “I’ll get a picture of you two.”
Jeff handed her his camera and we stood side by side for a photo. Sabrina had us shift a couple of feet this way and that. Then, a couple of times we had to wait for people to clear the shot. She took a photo, looked disappointed, and shouted her positioning demands all over again. After the fourth set-up, we caught on to her little scheme: initially her commands were for repositioning but eventually they were just to get us to stand closer together. Jeff and I rolled our eyes at her and she laughed. Ten minutes
later we had our shot, or rather, twenty-seven of them.
Using Sebastian’s camera, Jeff reciprocated and took a few photos of them while I looked at the ones of us on Jeff’s camera. Even after four days of not showering, he looked as handsome as ever. I hit the back button and found that Sabrina had taken quite a few candid pictures of us. There was one of Jeff looking down at me with a smile while I was lost in thought looking off into the distance. We looked like a couple. We looked happy. I shut it off.
It took us about twenty minutes to reach the bottom, where Cayo gave us some basic information about the different areas in Machu Picchu. Then he sent us out to explore on our own. We took a group photo and exchanged information before parting ways in case we didn’t run into each other back in Cuzco. As she hugged me, Sabrina whispered in my ear, “Go easy on him. Broken hearts don’t always mend properly.” I started to say something back, to tell her I wasn’t the one he needed, but she had already backed away.
“We’ll Facebook and Skype and then forget all about each other in six months,” Sabrina waved. I laughed, knowing that it was probably true and hoping that it wasn’t.
Machu Picchu sat on the crest of a mountain in the Andes, but instead of it being the highest peak, it was the lowest. All around us were lush green mountaintops, misty but pure air, and the remnants of a lost civilization. Even with maps, GPS tracking devices, and state-of-the-art technology, I was certain I’d never be able to find my way out of the valley had I stumbled on it on my own.
Jeff and I wandered about until we came across the Intihuatana Stone, which was thought by archeologists and historians to be the Inca equivalent to a clock. Its design, like all early indicators of time, used the shadows cast by the sun to delineate the hours in a day. The English referred to the stone as “The Hitching Post of the Sun” because of the Incan belief in the stone’s ability to hold the sun in place during its annual rotation in the sky.
“Hey,” I said to Jeff. “I’m going to do a little wandering with the iPod, I’ll meet you back here in 20 minutes?”
“Sure,” he said. “Don’t you mean twenty degrees in shadow movement?”
I laughed, “Right.”
I popped in my earbuds and turned on my iPod, which randomly selected the song, “Stronger” by Kanye West. Jamming along to the hip-hop song felt good, but I only got a couple of verses in when I heard local music somewhere on the grounds. The sound was wistful and full of soul and when I finally found the source, I was surprised to find two English musicians. Using the Quena, an Andean flute, and the Xampona, a wind instrument made of up a row of cane tubes in varying sizes bound together, they could be heard throughout the city. I closed my eyes and listened. Musical notes emanating from wind instruments always lingered in the air long after they’d escaped musicians’ lungs, and in Machu Picchu that was even truer because the large mountains that protected the city reverberated the sounds. They flowed outward only to come back in. The rhythm was tantalizing.
Lost in thoughts of spirits, earth, and whether or not there was a real connection between the two, I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going. When I reached the eastern edge of the city, I stumbled upon an image that pulled me back into the present: it was a large rock in the shape of two mountains that people were literally hugging, or trying to anyway. The sacred rock was an energy point, a place where one could get in touch with Pachamama (Mother Earth) and recharge one’s energy. At any other time in my life I might have skipped joining in, but with nothing to lose, I found myself leaning against it for an exchange of ions.
The surface was smooth like glass at the bottom of the sea, and warm like a blanket fresh out of the dryer. One of our family traditions on holidays was to change into sweats, put on thick socks, turn off the central air, open all the windows to let in the fresh, chilling air, and sit in front of the burning logs of our fireplace playing games or watching movies. After my parents died, I carried on that tradition alone with an indoor electric fireplace and home videos instead of board games.
Afraid that my emotions might get the best of me, I backed away from the rock and went to find a secluded area. With the faint sound of music still lingering in the air, I sat down and opened my pack. Inside was a rolled up piece of canvas, my portable canvas stretcher, and a small box with paints and brushes. Using a large rock to prop up the canvas, I began to paint.
Without any paper to fold into cranes, I played with the grains of color pigment, rubbing them between my fingers. Again, I asked myself, what difference would it make to me if the sea were red, the trees brown, or the dirt green? So I painted the piece to be a reflection of a world where color didn’t matter.
I started with black, letting the brush move about the canvas freely until it was covered completely. The darkness was a backdrop for solitude. I wanted it to be there, burned into the canvas so that every layer of paint I added was automatically a little saturated. Only then did I slowly start to cover the canvas in color using the bags of pigment from India. A large mountain stood on the right side of the canvas with a zigzagging trail that ended somewhere off the frame. But I changed the colors. I made the sun blue, the leaves and grass brown, their trunks and stems green, and the earth violet. At the bottom, a lone pair of white sandals made of tire, like the ones our porters wore, sat facing the steps, ready to ascend. In the center of the canvas, black clouds hung low against a damp yellow sky. This was the first time I’d ever painted a landscape, so I was surprised that something so common could make me feel so lonely. Landscapes, void of people or animals, had always felt stagnant to me, and I wondered if people were drawn to them because they were a reflection of the loneliness inside themselves? No, the forlorn feeling was personal. Most people loved landscapes because, in nature, there was a place to look outward and discover something inward.
As I began to place a fire hydrant in the painting, I realized I didn’t have a reference point for fire hydrants along the Inca Trail. In Cuzco, I saw a silver one outside of the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in the Plaza de Armas, but along the Inca Trail, there were none. The city was built long before the conception of aboveground water plugs, but I found myself stunned nonetheless to have landed in one of the few cities of the world without them. And I liked the city more because of it. Incorporating a steel-cut object anywhere among the ruins would have been like taking Monet’s famous Water Lilies painting and adding a rose bush off to the side. I left the fire hydrant out.
I wanted to show that color didn’t matter, that it was simply a perception we created, but the opposite happened. Color became the central theme of the piece, posing the question of why we feel a certain way with certain colors and how the tone of the piece changes with our personal connections to blue, green, yellow, or any other color. My mom was laid to rest in a yellow floral dress, so for me, yellow signified transition and Heaven. In the painting, the yellow sky doubled as metaphor for going blind. As the finishing touch, I blurred the edges to reflect the progression of Retinitis Pigmentosa. If the painting was going to be a world that I hoped to cultivate, then it was only right to show it as I really saw it.
Jeff approached me as I waited for it to dry. “When you said twenty minutes, I didn’t realize you meant twenty Incan minutes.”
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry, I just got caught up in the moment, and I stopped…”
“To paint,” Jeff finished.
I nodded sheepishly, “How long did you wait?”
“About an hour. Then I started wandering,” he said, checking out the canvas. “Think it’s going to dry by five?”
I remembered the last bus out of here was at five. “I hope so. I didn’t exactly think it through when I started. Maybe the high altitude will speed up the process.” Standing up, I walked to the edge of the mountainside and looked down at the briskly flowing Urubama River below. Jeff followed. “If you asked me in high school where I thought I’d be at the age of 27, I never would have guessed I’d be here with you.”
“Me
neither,” Jeff said.
“Didn’t you miss me after high school?” I asked, referring to college. He knew what I meant.
“Sure,” he said. “Did you miss me?”
I had cut ties with everyone from high school, not because I didn’t like them but because I didn’t want them to judge me. I wanted to be free to make mistakes: smoke weed, drink myself into oblivion, sleep with someone I didn’t love, and rid myself of any preconceived notions of who I was. “Yeah, but I think we needed to grow apart in order for us to grow up,” I said. “It’s hard to change who you are, or to reinvent yourself. I honestly don’t think I would’ve stuck with painting if I had stayed.”
“I think I still would’ve been a teacher. The difference is, I’d also probably be content,” Jeff said.
“You’d probably be married to someone from class who also never left home. You never would have known heartbreak.”
He nodded. “I could probably do without that experience.”
“Do you think all of this being ruins means it was a mistake?” I said, gesturing around us. “That they never should’ve built it?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Everything that’s broken was beautiful at one time. And our mistakes make us better people,” I said.
“I’m still not following.”
To be honest I wasn’t entirely sure I knew what I was getting at. “I guess I’m hoping that the loss of something we love doesn’t have to mean that it was all for nothing.” Most people yearned to love just once in their lifetime and he was lucky to have experienced it already. Just as I was lucky to have had any success at all in the art world. Artists were a dime a dozen, and very few of us were lucky enough to see our work displayed for a large audience—or any audience, for that matter. I had to remind myself of that.
“I won’t pretend that I understand art the way you do,” Jeff said, “but I’ve watched you connect and disconnect from it over the past few weeks and I’m certain you’ll figure it out.”
