Tropical Ecology 2011

There is, and it seems there always will be, something
about the way life happens in places like these that will
forever appeal to the more illogical divisions of my heart.
Yet, more and more every day that I have been here, that
sense of the illogical is becoming a larger part of my
serious contemplations.
Every iota of smell, color, sound and thought--if they
could speak, they would rapidly learn to how to scream and
tell me "you belong here!" And at some moments, it's
almost like they already can. They whisper subliminal
messages to my senses to get me to stay.
I can still remember my first taste of the platanos here!
It was like a rookie angel tripped in heaven and
consequently fell into my mouth, and his surprise only
exponentially increased the bubbles of heaven-dust that fell
from his robes onto my waiting tongue. Yes. Yes, they were
that good.
In fact, every day I have been here I have fallen in love
with something new. And now, on our last day, all I can
think about are the little things that I took for granted
here and won't see again back in NY. I love watching the
businessmen in crisp white shirts paired with neatly pressed
slacks as they rode to work straddling speeding motos. I
love seeing the uniformed schoolchildren walking towards the
brightly-colored homes that shade them from the sun but give
lizards the opportunity to bask in it. I love the
devil-may-care attitude of the sprawling fauna that
furiously and deliberately encompass these homes in spindly
arms of neon-tinted comfort. I love the borrachos (so
infamously known for their jauntily perched fedoras and
wrinkled button-downs) that take frequent breaks from
warming their seats at the bar to spy on a bunch of
unsuspecting gringos. I love the colors that remember to
vehemently shove the city-induced grays from the events of
my mind. I love how the thunderstorms here force the world
to wake up from what is, more often than not, a food coma.
Most of all, I love how you never had to walk far to find
a spot where something beautiful could begin—whether it
was at a bug-filled hostel that revealed surprises when the
clouds cleared, in the middle of a pitch-black jungle
where, despite the fact that you couldn't see your hand in
front of your face, you could still see the bravery in
someone's heart, or on a slippery log in the middle of the
beach where you get bitten alive, but also where ghost crabs
danced underfoot and waves kissed your toes and you realize
you've stumbled into a waking dream.
We lived, we learned, and now we leave. But we'll be
back.
I remember now the first thought that graced my mind upon
its initial intake of the world here. It was, "I'm
home."

--Amanda Ramcharran