Crossing
Two flights.
Six plus hours.
The particular exhaustion
of leaving everything.
Taxi window.
Dust road.
Mountains I have never seen
turning pink in the distance.
¿Primera vez en Loreto?
First time?
Sí.
Yes.
Estoy cansada.
I am tired.
The driver nods.
Sí, se ve.
Yes. It shows.
Key in the lock.
Door swinging open.
A room that belongs
to no one yet.
Bag on the floor.
Zipped shut.
The quiet discipline
of leaving it unpacked.
Salt air.
Open window.
The sea
I came to meet.
Sixty years old.
Alone.
The radical act
of arriving for myself.
No one waiting.
No one expecting.
No one asking
what took so long.
Shoulders dropping.
The body knowing
before the mind
admits.
Threshold.
Umbral.
The space between
who I was
and who I am becoming.
Light fading.
Sea darkening.
The first night
of thirty beginning.
Mañana será otro día.
Tomorrow will be another day.
But tonight
just this
arriving.
He llegado.
I have arrived.
For now
that is enough.
Title: Weathered Open
Artist Statement
I almost walked past it.
It lay half-set in the sand, unannounced, the colour of something that had spent years under sun and water. What drew me back was the opening. Small. Quiet. A hollow worn clean through the stone as if time itself had needed passage.
I picked it up and felt its weight.
Solid everywhere except for that one opening. The hole held no weakness in it. If anything, it revealed its endurance. Pressure had shaped it instead. It had shaped it. Wind, salt, movement, persistence. Forces working slowly enough that transformation appeared gentle even when the forces were fierce.
Standing there, I thought about what it means to be marked without being broken.
How life wears through us in places. How absence forms where certainty once lived. How openings appear beyond damage, as evidence of having stayed long enough for change to move through.
I placed it back where I found it.
Some objects feel less like discoveries and more like acknowledgements. A quiet recognition of what survives shaping. Of what remains strong even with light moving through it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com