On: Leaving

May 16, 2025

It’s a perfect spring evening in Mexico City. Lavender jacarandas glow in the setting sun. The mountains breeze through the city’s streets.

We’re walking to dinner - just my roommates and I - on Glorieta de Cibeles, a famous roundabout a few blocks away. The monumental fountain’s turned on, buskers and restaurants and people of all ages bustle about.

This dinner feels like a celebration. Not that we’re celebrating anything in particular, as much as that we’re making the time to do it. Caught up, as we’ve been, in our own lives; Grace and Alice and me, with all those things that matter for a moment. They’re leaving soon and then we’re all gone for the summer - but for right now we’re here. Savoring the normalcy of our routines and the moments we find away from them.

We grab a table along the tree-lined sidewalk, order drinks, and then the most pizza I’ve eaten in years. Their eyes shine in the hazy light; our laughs ring out amidst the busy roundabout. A man serenades us with perhaps the worst Coldplay rendition I’ve heard. We talk and talk, as golden hour slips into dusk, across from the fountain, the jacarandas, and these truly awful buskers who somehow make everything seem funnier.

Of course, I forget what was said. But I remember, still, how it made me feel. It was like everything was right in the world. Like all those baby steps I took to build my life here - from my work to my friends - had come together in a moment so solid that this little life felt as if it had been here, waiting for me, all along.

That night marks six months of me living in Mexico City. I don’t mention it - don’t even register it, really - though, somehow, this casual dinner feels like the right way to celebrate. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere in two years, and it’s moments like this I missed most while away. On these nights that feel like friendship at its finest, that stretch into drinks with our neighbors and then friends who live nearby, how can life not feel infinite and sweet and, above all, important, just as it is?

Especially if, I know, deep down, that it’s not meant to last.

I’ve been lucky here, in friends and invites and even photography, but I can’t deny that it’s all built, somewhat, on sand. That so many people - myself included - leave for the summer; live in this constant state of transience that I all too easily recognize as my own.

That I exist within this culture of displacement, even if it all seems so solid on these perfect spring nights. A culture that feels kind of like studying abroad, in that way. That sooner or later, everyone who’s either halfway-in or halfway-out has a flight that they’ll catch; myself included, having received a congratulations email, with a scholarship attachment, for a film school summer program, some two thousand miles away. A program I wouldn’t have known existed, had I not come here, or applied for with a confidence that this place, and all my friends here, inspired me to find.

I write all this to say that it was the last time we had a dinner like this.

Which maybe is what being young in these cities is all about; that spirit of discovery and realizing things, big and small, that change how you see yourself and the world. That even if I’m not that young anymore, coming someplace like here at a time like now can change me, still. That it’s worth it, to feel like I can carve a new path, in a new way, after months spent wondering if and when and how that new path can happen for me, still. That even if the costs of this haunt me - the inevitable distance, with my family, the unanswered texts, with my friends, my severance that’s finally running out - it’s worth it to feel like I can try again, after all.