Kemabli (or You Are Welcome)

It’s 1am at the Sea Tac airport. It’s deserted and dark. Security takes all of 20 seconds. I ride the shuttle, through concrete tunnels, alone. I clutch an Indonesian dictionary and practice. Kembali or you are welcome. The escalator ride up deposits me into a sea of voices I can’t decipher. Utterly unfamiliar to my untrained ear, it sounds like chaos. It's amusing to watch how my mind instantly switches to the other language it knows: Spanish. It works in overdrive, sprinning through the verbal chorus of sounds, trying to find something, anything, it can recognize. It rattles off Hispanic words it knows, naming things it knows, trying to re-assert its value, as I flip through summer in Spain, weeks in Mexico, a month in Costa Rica. It’s then that I realize how much I’ve learned of one language over the years. It’s then it sinks in that I’ll truly be starting over. It’s 1 am and I’m alone in the airport, surrounded by voices that hold passports from far off places I have yet to go: China, or Thailand, or Taiwan, or Korean. It doesn’t seem all that far now. It seems like something I’m going to do—just a few years ago, unthinkable, but now it’s “eventually”. Standing here, in the airport at 1am waiting for a plane to take me to Indonesia for a month just feels right. I smile and they all smile back.

I send a few last minute texts and emails. His phone rings then. A stoic elderly man, with whisps of black hair, framing bi-foculed almond eyes. He looks at the phone with indifference. Then lets the song play: I laugh that I can actually recognize poplet Miley Cirus voice. “The Climb”.

The refrain: my sendoff.

There's always going to be another mountain
I'm always going to want to make it move
Always going to be an uphill battle,
Sometimes you going to have to lose,
Ain't about how fast I get there,
Ain't about what's waiting on the other side
It's the climb