The Unstuck Times

Anxiously terrified and dreaming of disastrously adventuresome times, I stepped into my confines for the next eleven hours. We’ll call it “a boat”. A boat that belongs in a lakeside shed with a small family of five tending to its needs of summer time tubing charades; a boat that does NOT belong in the Caribbean Sea carrying travelers from Panama to Capurganá, Colombia. Call me “high maintenance” but every soul on that ship had the same blank stare that, in any language, read “I picked a bad time to bargain!”
I was bound to the trestles of this boat, it’s “Captain’s” and the other seven passengers who had painstakingly chosen the same fate for themselves that morning. One of our Captains was enjoying some shut eye while the other clung tightly to a glorified stick, our intended means of steerage to guide us safely to la Frontera de Colombia, and the Colombian border.
I aim to paint a picture of a sobering a moment; a moment, where you recognize strangers as trusted confidants; a moment providing truly beautiful aesthetics yet a strictly distracting reality; a moment, unstuck from a previous life had; a moment isolated from its counter-moments, with a faint motto and a smug shoulder-shrug, whispering incessantly, “You’re alone.”
Like any good travel tale, it’s the people that orchestrate the memories worth having.
The Colombian chef and his timid cousin returning from Cuba sat back left. They were young, had smiles that lingered and temperaments, kind.
Directly behind me, a couple, most intriguing, hailing from Argentina to set off on a journey, shared. His constant companions, the man’s guitar and his leading lady, are fixtures in his contentedness. And the lady spoke with cadence and sang with intonation that was intentionally comforting.
To my left and right, “Brothers from another mother”, a self-acclaimed poet and an eternal day-dreamer from El Salvador, were on a mission to get to Venezuela to realize their reveries.
And last but not least, seated at the front, sat a tall, Hispanic man. He carried only a small plastic bag filled with tortillas and an empty, old-school Coke bottle. Silent, with his eyes constantly fixed on the distant horizon, the man sat, motionless.
“Can you swim?!” broken, Spanish cries echo frantically in my mind. With waves too big and a boat too small, we were united in a moment too real. Drenched in salt water and cognizance, we were stripped to our most principle identity: Human.
I don’t feel alone anymore.