Searching for Colon

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl Woman – Age 30

My trip to Ciudad Colon Costa Rica was my first trip abroad.  I was in residence at an artists’ colony for two weeks.  The trip met all the criteria of a first trip: foreign and scary bugs, the airport pimp, the angel cabbie that saves you from the airport pimp and then disappears like a mirage, the stomach bug, the suspicious customs officer, the elevated terrorism threat, and the fire under your feet to fill every one of your passport pages–twice.

And all that I wrote about the trip is on a crashed hard drive that is going to cost me $1100 to “possibly” retrieve.  The above picture is a very bad scan of the hard copies I luckily printed before I discovered I was hard drive crash prone.

But memories, well whatever we have in our minds and hearts, are all we ever really possess.

“Searching for Colon” was one of the poems on that hard drive.  In many ways, even when I retrieve it, I doubt I’ll ever stop searching for Colon–that experience of newness, the limbo that forces us to balance, move forward.