Nighttime in the Market

My favorite time of day is just after sunset. I finish scooping up the last few beans onto my tortillas, and slowly drink the end of my coffee. I read a last few pages in my book. Then I stand up, pay the women bustling around the steaming pots, smile and thank them, and promise to return tomorrow. Then I wander through the empty market stalls towards the road. There's still a corridor through the market, but it isn't important at night. There are a few stalls still open, mostly food, but most just stand as wooden frames. Outlining the corridors, but possible to walk through unhindered. Stacked benches mark the daytime comedors. Emerging onto the road, ducking between two frames, a single light and a patch of warmth at the corner marking a tortilla cart. And lining both sides of the road the empty frames. They stand as both a memory and a promise.

When I arrived Saturday there were not as many. Saturday night I sat in the park, drawing curious glances from the locals as the only pale blue-eyed face in town, and watched as pairs of young men arrived with loads of wooden poles and deftly erected the frameworks for each market stall. They surprised me - with a forked stick and a few pieces of rope, stalls emerged rapidly from each pile. Blending into one another at night, but separated each day by tarps and with their own stack of wares and a shouting vendor.

I like the market better at night.

I like it when it's nearly empty and I can pick my way right through the stalls, just short enough not to hit my head on the cross pieces. When I can glance at the stacked benches and tables and remember the crowds at lunchtime and the smell of beans and tamales and the heat from the tortilla plate. The noise and the motion and the laughter. The promise that it will happen again tomorrow. When it's quiet enough to actually make out the words in the music playing from the giant speakers on the stairs to the church. When no one promises a "good price for you" and instead ask curiously why I choose to travel alone.

The memories of one visit and the promise of the next.

The empty stalls remind me of setting the table for a party. Of spilling jelly beans on the table for a birthday, and eating the last few while cleaning later, tired and content. Knowing that something exciting is coming, but not being quite sure what, exactly, it is. Of my moments in Scotland when I walked around the islands right after the ferry left, leaving me alone on the dock. Of being in McCall in June when the beaches and coffee shops are still empty. Of the science building at Middlebury in the middle of the night when I walked alone past half-filled chalkboards.

I have always liked this feeling, the quietness and reality after a crowd passes. Of seeing something that most people don't move slowly enough to notice.

In just a few more days, I will catch a plane out of Guatemala. At over a year of travel, I have started to question what exactly it is that I view as my goal. The uncertainty isn't helped by what I viewed as an abrupt change in my plans when I bought a ticket to Chile instead of Bolivia (yes, I do realize they border each other, have mountains, and both speak Spanish). Wandering through the market this evening, I realized that right now I too feel like both a memory and a promise. The pause between busy days. The accumulation of stories, yet the uncertainty of what the next one will bring.

Several times in the last few weeks I have paused and noticed that I feel different. Something has changed. The realization that the girl who no longer stumbles when a little girl asks her why she isn't married at 24, but instead jokingly replies that she can't even commit to her next plane ticket, isn't the same girl who gleefully jumped up and down when she learned she was going to travel for the next year and a half last March. She certainly isn't the girl who fearfully tried to read the Paris metro map for the first time. But she is still scared of making phone calls to people she doesn't know.

The world paused for me for a year. That's what I thought originally. That I could travel and wander and wonder and then come back a year later to pick up the same pieces again. But even if the world paused, I didn't.

Instead, I've accumulated stories and skills and smiles. I've built and rebuilt my framework. Enough times to wonder how it will mesh with the pieces I left behind. It's full of memories, and holds the promise of another new adventure.