Creature Comforts

I think everyone must have something within them that is never satisfied, something that longs for something else.  A touch of wanderlust.  This must be what keeps us from true contentment, a state where striving for something out of reach is rendered wholly unnecessary.  If we were comfortable, there would be no need to dream.

I dream.  To much sometimes, which is why I probably flunked my last Calc quiz.  But life is short, you know?

I dream vaguely of a nomadic existence and I've this idea that somehow I will be happiest this way, although I have never lived thus before.  Exotic lands, with their warm climes and coloful flora; forbidding celtic shores, whose very sands witnessed the coming of the Norsemen; austere European cities: London, Vienna, Budapest...

Yet central to these dreams (right now) is somewhere very warm and very sunny.  The people are dark-skinned, mostly, and the sky and sea strive to outshine the other.  There are mountains, at the edge of consciousness, and colorful open-air marketplaces selling non-GMO fruits and various handmade artisania.  

Argentina, maybe.  Or Peru.  Or even darling Mexico.  

I dream of a land of Spanish speakers, now that I am plowing full-steam through my later teenaged years.  It isn't truly a place, although I tell people that it is Peru I dream of.  And that's no lie, for Peru must be a place like that.  But I have never been to Peru; I have never been anywhere in South America.  I don't know what it is that gives man the desire to force a name and a face to a feeling.  

But Peru is ideal, even if I risk disappointing myself for trying to dress it up as something it may not be.  Indeed, that is a great disservice to the both of us, Peru and I.  

I have spoken of Peru many times with Profe Sanchez, my Ap Spanish teacher.  We talk of Machu Picchu with voices hushed with reverence and longing.  Always longing.  San Diego is sunny too, and there are mountains aplenty in California.  But they say that the Andes are unrivaled.  They say that there is no grass greener than that which grows thickly on the old Incan terraces at Machu Picchu.

I wonder what about my life right now makes me want warmth.  Not so long ago I wished for a place that snowed in the Wintertime, where beer flowed more abundantly than water, where cold, crushingly powerful rivers roared through.  A place I named Germany.  I will go to Germany next Summer, and I wonder how similar she is to My Germany.  Will the air taste as the air in My Germany tastes, I wonder?  

And someday I will go to Peru, to eat papaya and maize and bananas until I don't have to keep feeding My Peru.  Because then I won't have to feed the dream; reality will have taken its place.