I return to Antigua to recharge, remember, rediscover, and to discover. When you leave, a part of you, a real presence remains.

A tree seen from distant angles of perspective is my metaphor for my life past and present in Antigua, Guatemala. When I first moved to Antigua, Guatemala in 2008, my view from my first house included a tree so massive that at night it loomed like a dark, stoic giant above the city. It was smack dead in the center of my view from Colonial Manchen and seemed to rise higher than the distant mountains and volcanoes.

Yesterday, I left Antigua again after a two-month stop off back “home” so to speak. My living situation was at the other end of town, but through the second story terrace of Casa de Loch, I could see the same tree, still looming absurdly large, but this time from the other side.

In the mornings I would always pause during my getting ready routine to look at this tree. I would think about my mornings when I saw the tree from the other side of town and recall those days, mostly good memories, some difficult, but each a piece to a much larger puzzle I am still trying to fully understand.

This summer a lot of my friends in New York and North Dakota asked me why I was going back to Antigua. I didn’t really know how to answer that since it felt like the they were asking me why I was going to visit my family over Christmas. “Why are you going back to Guatemala?” has too many answers to pin down a specific reason. For me it’s a question that answers itself. Antigua has that power. The only way I know how to leave is with a promise of coming back soon.

I think a lot about what gives Antigua this power. I would try to come up with my own prose of explanation for the magnetism of Antigua, but Michael Tallon, intrepid editor of Central America’s best English speaking magazine, La Cuadra, has already explained it better than I can. In his letter from the editors in the May/June 2013 he wrote the following about Antigua’s magnetic magic:

Everybody, it seems, has a dream — and a scheme by which they’ll achieve it. Folks here are starting schools, designing new products to bring clean water or safe living environments to poor folk. I have friends in every direction who are opening businesses, expanding operations, following inspired new plans. Our friends in this town are all about damning-the-torpedoes and pushing full-steam-ahead into risky propositions. And that is undeniably cool.

Well said Mr. Tallon. Antigua is the fairy tale city that attracts dreamers in droves. To all the expats like me here, it represents the culmination of one dream, and often, the staging ground for the next.

I return to Antigua to recharge, remember, rediscover, and to discover. The contact list in my frijolito phone, which has miraculously survived 5 years and 3 robberies, reads like a list of the departed. 9 out of 10 numbers belong to people who no longer reside in Antigua. But that is just part of Antigua’s ongoing dance. When you leave, a part of you, a real presence remains. It fades a bit, as do your friends, since many retreat back to their home countries or onto the next adventure. And that’s one reason to return often to Antigua’s flux, this moveable feast, where people play musical chairs, come and go, but usually return. You may not always find yourself in the same chair, but odds are good there will still be one waiting for you.

“We’ll always have Antigua,” our lives seem to say.

Yesterday, at Guatemala’s international airport, while nursing my despedida’s hangover, I felt what amongst my friends we call the post-Antigua blues. We cannot arrive somewhere without first leaving, and Antigua is always the hardest place for me to leave behind. Soon, I’ll be immersed in the next adventure, and the feeling of loss will retreat and become a detached nostalgia. But for now it is with me and I welcome it. Antigua in my mind, deserves at least that, a quiet, pulling sadness that twists your stomach and solidifies your resolve to return. Entonces, hasta luego Antigua, nos vemos pronto.