What is Good Writing? And a Profile on a Peruvian Actress
Hello my friends! Welcome back. I hope you’ve all had a wonderful fall full of lovely and challenging changes. Winter is here now—time to buckle down! Or escape somewhere warm as I’ll be doing.
I’ve spent this fall back at school at UMass Amherst! It’s been over a year since I’ve left Ohio State. This time, instead of studying Electrical Engineering, I plan to graduate with an English degree with a concentration in creative writing. My inspiration, strangely enough, came from an essay written by Mark Twain on his famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras County story, one of his earliest publications that sent his reputation veering toward the literary icon he is today, and, in his words, promptly killed the newspaper it was published by.
The essay starts with a professor informing Twain that his story was thousands of years old: there is an identical story about a frog stuffed with rocks so that it couldn’t jump set in Athens and written in Greek and Twain had no idea it existed! Every story really has already been told. Later in the essay he remarks on the fact that the French translation of his story didn’t do very well. So, he re-translates it back into English for us, retaining the cadence and grammatical structure of the French version, and it’s not very engaging, reads simple, and is almost boring.
I was reading this essay sometime around midnight or 1 after a shift waiting tables. I found myself burning with a strange, almost manic, inspiration. I laid in bed and wrote the first draft of my personal statement for applying back to school. I hadn’t really given my return much consideration. But the realization struck me that I was running out of time or falling behind. I want to write. I’m obsessed with so-called ‘good’ writing. What makes it good anyways? What separated Twain from his contemporaries? And how did Twain build his own understanding of what separated his own ‘good literature’ from all of the trash?
Writing well, as I’ve spent the last couple of years learning, is incredibly difficult to do. And it requires, at the very least, a very keen eye for ‘quality:’ an ability to discern, distinguish, like, dislike, and understand—both intuitively and through careful dissection—why good writing is good. Twain had a scary confidence in this regard. I do not.
I needed to read more, write more, and discuss more, if I wanted to approach that kind of confidence. What better place to do that than in University?
I took four classes this semester: Spanish 2, Shakespeare, Intro to Literary Studies with a focus on Climate Change and Post-Colonial Thought, and Creative Writing Non-Fiction. It was in my creative writing class that I’ve started to form a community of people who care about good writing and sharing their stories to the world through it. Our professor, John Hennessey, is the head of the creative writing department, has three published poetry collections, and among other accolades, was the judge for the National Book Award in Poetry in 2020. He’s legit, man. He’s also hilarious, light-hearted, kind, encouraging, and pressed us to look at form, the shape of writing, and how that leads to its success.
Creative Non-Fiction is basically what I’ve been doing with this blog—expository writing is another name. It includes personal essays, character profiles, documentary essays, food and travel writing, and anything of that sort.
I had the pleasure and honor of reading a ton of writing by my classmates: one student wrote an essay describing the experience of a 10 day silent meditation retreat; there was a profile of a kind-of friend who became a very close friend through the process of writing a thirty page profile of her, who is described by many as ‘human cocaine;’ I also read a long essay about taking care of a special needs child over the course of the summer and learning how to love him and his family; and even a travel blog of living out of car, but rather than aimlessly climbing in West Virginia they were exploring contemporary art in The South; one documentary essay was a series of solo interviews linked together in a kind of choral voice describing a spiritual awakening experience that people in the Joe Dispenza community share; essays about medical conditions, family profiles, death, childhood, and it goes on!
I find that writing of this kind is truly a gift: for the writer as it pushes them to look closely at a piece of their own life and take the vulnerable leap of sharing it, and for the reader who is granted a window into someone else’s life. What a wonderful way to connect with people!
I chose to work on a travel blog of the two weeks that I spent in Perú last year in October. It started out as that, and I did do some travel and food writing, but the jewel that came out of that process for me was the character profile of a woman I had met and fallen in love with.
And as the context of that whole trip unfolded itself—I dropped out of school, moved to West Virginia to climb and work on a real estate business, then was in Perú a month after settling in Amherst—John encouraged me to keep telling stories from that crazy year and built out a collection of essays that might eventually be novel length and become a memoir. I’ve actually had the idea already: I created a document in January this year titled ‘manuscript.’
But I finally had something. And I had a form. And an editor. And a community willing to read my work.
I’ll be going back to Perú in two weeks to work as a cook in an eco-village for other volunteers working on the farm. I’ll be there for five weeks, and hope to use it as a kind of writing retreat—and I’ll also be writing about it!
For now, without further ado, here is that character profile (names and identifying information have been changed):
Two Weeks of Summer in Winter
Andy Ark, 2024
The author giving a peace sign to the camera
I met Noelia the first night I arrived in Lima, Perú. I landed at 10:12 pm local time after nearly twenty hours of traveling from Western Massachusetts: a two hour drive to my parents in Boston, a taxi to Logan, flight to the Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, and then to Jorge Chavez International with all of the waiting that airports entail. I’d be here for two weeks, and I was paying for it out of the $10,000 loan my mother had granted me to help with my Real Estate business after I dropped out of college eight months before this, and I was planning to work remotely the second week I was here. A month ago I moved into a new house, and I spent the three months before that living out of my car in West Virginia. I was still in travel mode and this was my last hurrah before I had to maybe find a job and start to settle. Go go go, see new things, meet new people, do dumb crazy shit, maybe even fall in love! Because when else was I going to get the chance?
My friend Miguel—who I was here visiting with two other friends from Ohio State—arranged for us to meet up with some local ladies. He had met Isabella, or Lisa, through his work in Puerto Maldonado as High School English teacher; she was an administrative worker for Fullbright, the organization funding his nine month stay. She invited two of her friends from high school to hang out with us—they were all 27 or 28—and we met up at midnight to find a bar to hang out at. One of these girls was Noelia.
I think we shook hands. She calls me Andrew to this day and I don’t know why. I always introduce myself as Andy, but maybe I didn’t then. We made eye contact, I know for sure, because I remember the absence of fear from her eyes. Those eyes, brown like ripe chestnuts, often glitter with amusement, and when she really smiles her cheekbones crease cute dimples on the edges of her face. In the mind of someone who was obsessed with Top Chef and Chopped as a child, she bears a stark resemblance to Padma Lakshmi, with similar straight black hair which that night was kept tucked behind her ears with the ends of it sometimes draped over her shoulders. She wore a light blue t-shirt tight to her torso and faded bell-bottom jeans.
I didn't talk to her much until the end of the night due to some mix of travel exhaustion, foreign overwhelm, and pride at not immediately swooning over the prettiest girl. But at the end of the night, as we walked the girls back to their cars, Noelia slid across the sidewalk next to me with her arm inches from touching mine and I was immediately made aware of my heart beating faster and had to pretend I felt calm and confident. It was nearing Summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Lima had its typical humid heat, gray sky, and slight salty breeze from the Ocean. The streets we walked were largely empty—it was around two in the morning—and without the typical honking of cars or bright business lights the sidewalks became small and intimate.
I was smoking a cigarette, taking comfort in the familiar way it tucked into my fingers and made the air taste like something darker than it was. I wondered if she thought it was disgusting and that I smelt bad or if she thought I looked cool. If I slouched, we were about the same height, so I stood up straight and looked slightly down at her as she looked up at me.
“Hello Andrew! How was your night?”
“Hola! Good, it was good! Bueno. I talked with Lisa about food.”
“Que bueno! What did you learn?”
“Si, Si, I’ve learned a lot. Let’s see, there’s Tacu Tacu, I had that today, y ceviche I’m excited to try I’ve heard that’s big here. There’s Chaufa, the Chinese stir fry, mucho comida italiano. I saw a Pizza place we walked by I’d like to visit. I didn’t like the tequeños very much–”
“No?”
“Very dry, not very tasty, yeah.”
Peruvian tequeños are wonton wrappers stuffed with cheese, deep fried, and served with guacamole—a classic bar snack mixing Chinese and native cuisine.
“Mmmhmm, I see. Don’t worry, we have much better food!”
“I heard there’s a lot of Sushi and Japanese food here—I love sushi!”
“Ahhh I don’t like sushi very much, no.”
“No?! What! Well that’s okay I guess. Why not?”
“I like Criolla, local, home cooking Peruvian food, much more. Escabeche, ají de gallina, lomo saltado–”
“Ah I’ve heard of lomo saltado! Miguel was telling me about it…”
“Yes you must try it!”
“So How was your night? What did you talk about?”
“I talked with Vic, and uhhhhh, hmmmm, aah–”
“Louis?”
“Yes!” She smiled and pointed her finger up in the air, “Louis, I forgot his name. They are very nice.”
“What did you talk about?”
“We talked about God actually.”
“About God? I hope it went well!” I said.
“Yes, it did. We each gave our own view on it. It was very nice.”
“Oh! Well what is your view? What’s God to you?”
“Hmmm…do you want English or Spanish?”
“English please, I’d like to uhm, understand it.”
She smiled before turning away from me and tilting her head slightly downward, eyes narrowing. Whether it was deciding how to say what she thought slightly differently than she just had, or translating the Spanish into English, I don’t know.
“Well, God to me is uhmm, well, everything outside of me, I think. What I do not have control over. Because, well, I have to ask Him for help sometimes. But it’s always me that acts, you know? I come back to God when times are hard, and I have had really really hard times, yes, really,” she nods her head looking at me with serious eyes, “I was confused and scared and I didn’t know what to do, what to do with my life, you know? How to handle the challenges when they feel too much. And that’s when I go and ask Him for help. I pray. And it’s helped me it really has. I pray for help, for guidance, and then I am able to work hard in the right direction, towards what I want. How to live my own life.”
She paused as we came to a crosswalk and looked briefly at the road to check for cars before gazing off into the distance again,
“I think sometimes we need to start again, you know. I mean we need to feel free in order to feel that we are living, that we have, uhm, maybe, control, over our lives. I mean control in the way that, that, is not society that is controlling your life. I mean your decisions have more power over your life. Sometimes that is all we need. That is how I see God. Yes.”
She nodded, closing her sentence, and looked at me, her mouth half smiling, eyes entreating as if waiting for or maybe expecting some kind of a judgment. I didn’t really have anything to say—I mean it all made sense to me then. I stared back and smiled,
“That’s cool.”
For a moment she looked surprised before turning her head back down, not to think this time, but to hide the small delight that I saw peeking out the side of her face from the curvature of her mouth.
“Well what about you?” She turned back to me, “What is your God?”
I thought for a moment.
“Well, when I think of God it’s more like…God is everything I guess. Every moment, every thought, every sensation, everything all around us is God. And so, when we act, we’re acting through God, I guess. God is me, too. So when I ask for help, or guidance, it’s really asking some higher form or some deeper part of myself that already knows the answer. The part of me that’s closest to everything, closest to God.”
I paused for a moment, watching her as she waited for me to continue, trying not to let my desire to impress or agree with her muddle my ideas,
“When I live my life close to God it’s very simple. When I get lost, or at least when I feel lost or stressed or that I need help, I feel like I’m losing my connection to everything. So I try to always listen for that voice, that word for peace, God, and act in alignment with whatever helps me feel most like myself. Yeah, I think God to me is me but also everything and everyone else. Does that make any sense?”
“Yes! Of course.”
After that she helped with my Spanish, saying simple things two or three times until I understood, patiently waiting for my responses, correcting grammar, and teaching me new words. At the end of the night I asked if one of the girls would accompany me to dinner in a week when I would be in Lima by myself. Noelia graciously offered me her presence—her hand shot up into the air when I asked—and we agreed to make plans once I was back in town and knew my schedule.
View from a farming terrace in Choquequirao
The following week served as a kind of spiritual cleanse for me. The four of us went on a trek in the Andes mountains to see Choquequirao, a city believed to be constructed in the fifteenth century and abandoned a little over a hundred years later. We hiked over twenty thousand feet of elevation change in four days. The grueling uphill battle was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life.
Now, I attempt to embark on a task that at times has felt like that trek. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve met Noelia, and I still think of her during hot yoga while in wheel. Wheel is near the end of the Baptiste Power sequence, occurring maybe 45 or 50 minutes through a 75 minute class, and the teachers call it the peak of the intensity. I’ll run you through it: lie on your back, with the bottoms of your feet on the ground, close to your bum, toes pointing forward; place your palms on the ground beside your head with the fingers pointing towards your toes; now push up off the ground, keeping your elbows and your knees tucked into center, and raise your pelvis as high up to the ceiling as you can, letting your neck relax and your head look behind you as your body rises up above it. We do five reps of this, each for five to ten deep breaths, before a short rest, a five minute core sequence, and then deep stretching. Because this is the most intense section, and we get rest after, the instructors will often encourage us to push ourselves. One teacher likes to say: “Do it for something greater than yourself!”
At this Noelia appears in my mind and suddenly I am doing it for her. I press up higher, caring nothing for the pain but my ability to breathe through it. I know that I must work, push myself through more pain and discomfort than I ever have before if I want to be with her, to love her, to understand her. It is a power welling from some deep part of me that I didn’t even know I possessed. Nothing else—not my mother, myself, world peace, nothing—has the emotional charge and significance that this woman seems to be able to churn up from deep inside of me to find a strength and commitment and energy that continues to astound me. Why? How? I still don’t understand. The raw creative impulses, a newfound confidence and ease, waking up at five in the morning for a whole week to study Spanish and practice piano, and new dreams of raising little Peruvian children and cooking dinner every night for my wife and I.
But this is boring you. Let me try to describe her, to present to you how I saw her then, as lucidly as I can.
Aji de Gallina, a traditional Peruvian chicken stew
After the trek I was left by my lonesome in Lima and made dinner plans with Noelia over WhatsApp. But before the two of us had dinner at a high end Peruvian Gastronomic experience, she wanted me to meet her at her parents restaurant and try good-ol home cooked Criollo food.
The Cafe is in the Magdalena Del Mar district of Lima where she grew up. I was dropped off a few blocks away. Walking over, I saw a procession of schoolchildren in Catholic-looking uniforms: burgundy long-sleeved sweaters and black pants or pleated skirts. The neighborhood had only one or two story buildings filled by corner stores, houses, and apartments. The cafe itself was on a corner, with both of its outer sides a kind of patio with glass walls, twinkly lights, tall snake plants in between the tables, and a chalk sign in front (many of the restaurants here had these) with a list of that days Menu—a set lunch menu with two or three choices of appetizer, entre, and dessert. I walked in searching for Noelia and found the center room with the pastry display shelf. Behind it stood a tattooed cashier and an older man with graying hair and kind eyes. He said something to me in Spanish and waved his hand. I squatted in midair, trying to pantomime sitting down to guess the meaning of a verb (sentarse), and he kept waving at me so I went and found somewhere to wait: a table in the outside patio facing the door.
I ordered a coffee, but before I had a chance to take a sip Noelia came barreling through the entrance out of breath and radiating with energy that I couldn’t help but smile at. As I turned to tell my waiter that it was her who I had been waiting for, he smiled a smile at my smile, like it made him glad to see the effect of her joy on someone who was new to its beauty.
“Andrew! Hello!”
“Hello! Hola Noelia! Que tal?”
“Sorry I’m late! I was working on something, writing, and I didn’t see the time, how late it was, but I came running over here when I realized. I’m so glad you made it!!”
She sat down in front of me and put her elbows on the table, leaning forward excitedly, “You make it here okay? How did you get here? Was it far?”
“I took a taxi, it wasn’t bad, not at all. But yeah thank you so much for the invite! This is so cool. You said it’s your restaurant? I wasn’t sure if you were working here, or, well, do you work here? What do you mean this is your restaurant?”
“Ah, yes!” she laughed, “This is the house I grew up in, my parents run it. They turned the first floor into a restaurant. They always dreamed of owning a restaurant, and so they finally did it. I can give you a tour! Show you where all the rooms used to be! My room used to be down here too. It was a lot of work! It took a couple of years, and a lot of testing. I helped my mom try out her recipes, I ate so much food!”
She laughed again and this time I laughed with her, “That sounds like fun!”
“Yes it was, but I ate a lot!” She rubbed her belly, “I don’t eat that much normally, and it’s rich you know? Not healthy, really. Comfort food. It took a lot of tries for her to feel that everything was perfect. I liked it all.”
I nodded knowingly, “recipe testing takes a lot of trial and error.”
“They love it though, they love the work and serving people, and I love it too! And! Today I made sure my mom was working—she doesn’t usually work today—so that you can try her cooking, have the real Peruvian home cooking! You’re going to love it.”
“Wow, that's amazing, muchas gracias gracias gracias!!”
Warmth like I’d never felt before flooded my body and crept upwards towards my mouth—I couldn’t stop smiling, thanking her, and looking at her eyes.
She stood up suddenly, “Come on, let me give you the tour!”
And so she did, pointing out what rooms used to be what. I followed her, more interested in how her voice jumped up in excitement when she talked, the way she seemed to bounce from room to room, floating more than walking, and the intense care and patience she had when she stood lost in thought looking for an English word. Then she introduced me to her father, the man I had squatted in front of while trying to deduce sentarse. He didn’t speak any English, but with Noelia’s encouragement I talked to him for ten minutes in broken and stunted Spanish. We talked about what I liked to cook and eat, and I learned that he enjoys American Classic Rock. Everytime I couldn’t find a word or didn’t understand something, I’d turn towards Noelia with a confused and pleading expression, but she’d just—except on a couple of occasions when I was seriously and hopelessly lost—smile and nod at me, her eyes telling me I was doing great and to keep going, and not worry so much about being embarrassed or looking stupid.
“Your Spanish has really improved in the past week!” She told me as we walked back to our table.
“Thank you! Yeah, Miguel’s been helping me a lot, and I try and practice whenever I can, and I mean I just hear it everywhere—I really try and listen to it—but it's a little exhausting sometimes. I love speaking it and learning it. It's so cool when I get it!”
“You’re doing great, keep it up!”
“Gracias, gracias.”
We sat back down, and after chatting a bit she got up to go tell her mom what to make for us.
At the time my favorite question to ask people was “what is your dream?”
Noelia is an actress, a dream and career she’s been working towards because she liked the way the characters made her feel when she was younger and wanted to do the same for others. She attended a Catholic University in Lima, and made her debut as an actress at 18. She’s currently best known for her role in a soap opera set in Lima with 3 seasons and over 300 episodes. At the time of writing this (October 2024) she has 940k followers on Instagram and 2.1 million on TikTok. Although, I didn’t learn any of this until I looked her up later. During lunch, she pulled up Instagram to show me some of “her work,” a few zoomed in clips of her face during dramatic moments in her show.
“It’s all in the eyes, you see? You can do so much with the eyes. That’s the hardest part.”
Before lunch she had been working on what she called her “thesis,” comparing acting in live theater, serialized shows, and movies. You can use your eyes and facial expressions more in a format where the camera is able to zoom in, but in theater you have to be more expressive with your body; with movies the character is more of a set person, where as in TV, when you act as someone over the course of years, your relationship with the character changes over time.
Then the first course came, Papitas a la Huancaína, sliced rounds of boiled potatoes smothered in a smooth yellow sauce made with aji amarillo—a local spicy pepper, bright yellow with a unique fruity flavor—evaporated milk, saltines, and queso fresco, served with the traditional olives and a hard-boiled egg. You’ll find variations of it all over Perú, and served as a menu appetizer everywhere in Lima. Noelia pulled her phone camera out to record a live reaction of what I thought of it, giggling at my embarrassment in front of the camera and asking me if I liked the food.
“Muy rico!” I offered blandly, and again she laughed.
She nibbled at my plate, eating a slice or two, and watched me clean up the rest of it.
“You’re very present, it’s super impressive,” I commented, noticing her eyes: unwavering, open, non-judgemental, always observing.
“Yes, I have to be! I like to look at people and notice things about them, in case I need to play a character in the future that they can help teach me about. For example, if someone is nervous maybe, and not very expressive, hunched over, doesn’t make wide gestures, that might say something about their childhood—they didn’t grow up able to express themselves. So I’m always looking at people, observing them, so I can learn.”
I understood. “With writing too, you need to look, to see, if you want to write about it or describe it later. Yeah…”
I sat up straight and took another look at her: today she wore a long-sleeved black v-neck tucked into her bell-bottoms—they could’ve been the same pair she wore a week ago—with a hole the size of a book taken out of the right knee, no jewelry, and some makeup adding blush to her cheeks and accentuating the smooth lines of her face.
Then the main course arrived: Aji de Gallina, a sauce similar to Huancaína, stewed with shredded chicken and broth, and served with white rice, crumbled pecans, olives, and a hard boiled egg. It smelled sweet and bright. And Lomo Saltado, a stir fry made with strips of steak, peppers, red onions, and fresh tomato cooked in oyster sauce, vinegar (red or white wine), and soy sauce. It smelled dark, like meaty molasses with hints of vinegar wafting around. It’s served with Tacu Tacu, a rice and bean patty mash fried crispy.
“This is my favorite!” Noelia tells me, as she picks at the strips of meat from the Saltado, “But I don’t get to eat it often, it’s not uhhh, healthy. Very fatty, you know? But it’s so good! My mom cooked it a lot growing up.”
My favorite was the Aji de Gallina, and it’d be the first Peruvian dish I cooked when I got home, using leftover turkey from thanksgiving. I mopped up the last of the sauce on my plate with the fork as we talked. She recorded my smelling and tasting these two as well, delighted at me enjoying her childhood meals cooked by her mother. Her dad came over at one point and asked us what music we wanted to listen to. I awkwardly asked for salsa music, and they laughed at me but played it. Again I was filled with a feeling of warmth and love.
A couple of older women came into the cafe and greeted Noelia. She got up, hugged them, and chatted for ten minutes while I sat there looking around.
“They’re fans of my work!” She told me after they left, “I have fans that will come here sometimes to meet me, and I talk to them all the time about my life and theirs. It’s very nice. They’re very sweet.”
For dessert I had a Maracuya cheesecake, with a local fruit whose seeds are almost like chia seeds in the way that they get gummy under moisture, and which tastes like a pineapple and orange mix. Then she said she had to go and write so we departed with a hug. I decided not to take a taxi back, but instead walk the hour and a half walk home along the coast.
The beachfront was empty, rocky, covered in seaweed, and didn't look very swimmable. I found a spot on a short stone wall to sit and look out over the ocean, smoothing over with my fingers a small pebble I picked up with the intention to meditate over later. I hated the work I did that morning. I was building a Real Estate startup with a partner then, and that morning I learned about mass email marketing as a tool to find people interested in selling their houses so we can up-sell it to cash investors. What shit. I thought in wonder at the love and joy that Noelia had in her life. I wasn’t doing what I loved. But back then I thought I had to do it. I needed money, and I didn’t even know what I loved anyways. I loved food, and reading, sure. But my dream? That thing I could center my life around, learn about, practice, do as a career? It was so simple for her. She loved to act so she acted. I didn’t believe back then that it could be that simple for me.
That night I lay in bed and texted her as she worked. I sent her gifs and made bad jokes that she somehow laughed at. It was warm and cozy under my thin covers despite the plain hostel cot, nine strangers sleeping around me, and city noises seeping in from the window.
Aperitif next to a Napkin embroidered with Astrid & Gaston and an image of the front of the restaurant
The next day I had some work to do: I needed a nice shirt and a shave. I made a friend at the hostel: a totally chance encounter with someone I went to High School with in Boston was staying there at the same time as I was. He relayed some advice he received while in Argentina about the loneliness he felt while traveling solo: “You have to learn how to be friends with yourself.”
I told him about having to prepare for my big date that night, showing him pictures of Noelia, and saying “this is the kinda girl I’d move to Perú for and marry man, she’s fucking awesome.” He took me to a market a thirty minute walk from where we stayed to find some clothes, and I got a shave and haircut at one of the many barber shops lining the street. There was a kind of fanfare to it. Five or six shops next to each other on a single block with the classic striped pole outside, each filled with only male barbers and packed with customers. My barber worked efficiently and cleanly, shaving my face with blue gel and a straight razor fresh from a pack. He gave my shaggy hair a trim too, but it didn’t look as nice so I wore it up in a bun as before. But the beard had clean and smooth lines. I found an old light-blue long-sleeved Polo sweater for 5 soles in an empty trailer filled with used clothes.
Noelia and I had dinner reservations at Astrid y Gaston for a twelve course tasting menu (see appendix) that night, a gastronomic experience designed by famed chef Gaston Acurio and his wife, Astrid. The very first paragraph on the website reads:
Esta es una historia de amor. Astrid y Gastón se conocieron en París cuando estudiaban cocina. No solo se enamoraron, sino que abrazaron juntos el mismo sueño: tener su propio restaurante.
This is a love story. Astrid and Gaston met in Paris when they were studying cooking. Not only did they fall in love, but they embraced the same dream together: to have their own restaurant.
That five and a half hour dinner was probably the most romantic experience of my entire life. The restaurant is huge, taking up an old mansion in Miraflores. I arrived and walked up the house’s perron to the first host's booth and chatted with him about Real Estate—funnily enough his main occupation was working for his father’s company in Lima—as I waited for Noelia to arrive. When she did, I watched her walk up towards me, her shining red dress swirling her up the stairs. We continued together up a switchbacked flight of stairs that brought us to the wide entryway and a second host stand behind a long wooden table. We were then led through a second floor balcony to our table. Below the balcony was a large open room with a bar in the middle and tables scattered around it. Hovering above the bar was a “giving tree,” a kind of Peruvian Christmas tree, with hanging paper leaves, colorful streamers, paper lanterns, bright woven cloth patterns, and twinkling lights scattered among its foliage.
Our table was in a rectangular side room near to the kitchen, with five or six other round tables in the space separated by enough distance to give a feeling of quiet privacy. We sat not across from each other, but kind of edgewise, and as the waiter came to explain each dish in English and Spanish, he stood across from us. He recognized Noelia The Actress immediately, asking for confirmation, but politely did not belabor the point. I ordered a glass of wine for myself while Noelia refused any alcohol—she was driving and couldn’t risk being pulled over. The waiter made fun of her a little bit, “oh you won’t get arrested from one little drink, even a sip?” but she persisted.
We chatted comfortably, easily, and familiarly. I told shitty jokes that she giggled at. The food was insane, of course. Tiny, impeccably presented dishes each with a clear focus yet at the same time a complexity and depth of flavor that transcended the simple and the straightforward. One of my favorites was the leche de tigre made with artichoke—a smooth, buttery, and salty broth that made the harsh Pacific Ocean feel like the enveloping arms of a lover.
Noelia’s least favorite was the duck. It wasn’t because of the flavor or appearance that put her off (the spicy butter sauce tinged with fragrant basil was extraordinary) but the texture of the meat and the emotions she felt while eating it. There was an intense aversion to the meat and to the idea of eating an animal. Earlier in the night I had mentioned all of the dogs in Cusco, and how they seemed happy to wander around ownerless. She told me that to her they looked very cold. A few months after this I asked her if she was still eating meat—if the experience with the duck had remained with her—and she told me that the only meat she’d eat now was chicken.
She tried helping me with my Spanish more. I could've learned how to speak from her for the rest of my life and died a happy man. She encouraged, lightly prodded, listened patiently, explained grammar, and attempted to get me to start simple and speak about my college experience, but as I tried I devolved into English explaining all of my pains with dropping out of college and my parents not being happy and my hating Engineering and being unsure what to do with my life, but rather than maybe nudging me back on track, or even ignoring me or looking bored, she continued to listen patiently and empathetically with a present and loving awareness. This is what I fell in love with. Her presence. I’d never experienced anything like it before in my life.
At the end of the meal the waiter had her record a video for his children, of her saying hi and some sweet words for them. She told me it was confusing to make these videos, that there’s some uncertainty with how to be, what to say. I told her that maybe it was because she didn’t know what character to play?
“Si Si! That’s it, yes!”
I wrote an entire poem (see appendix) about how I felt in this moment when her eyes widened, her smile brightened, and she seemed to grow two inches taller from a joyous clarity that I had helped to impart. It was so wonderful that I had to look away: I didn’t feel like I deserved happiness like that and felt guilty of being in its presence.
***
That night was the last I saw of her. She drove me home, and I remember staring at her as she went around an unlighted chaotic roundabout, looking around for other cars and checking the sides. I was thinking how insanely lucky I was to have spent time with her, and that it was over now. I laid outside the hostel on a bench, staring up at half a moon, imagining what a perfect metaphor it would make when I wrote about this later.
I was still feeling warm and grateful then—I had fallen in love and everything had turned beautiful—but on the flight back home the loss finally hit me. The two seats next to me were empty, so in the privacy of my little aisle I watched In the Heights and used its love stories filled with change and beauty as an excuse to cry, over and over again, at whatever scenes had enough love to hold space for my grief.
Why did I ever leave?
I could have learned Spanish, quit my Real Estate business to become a chef, hung out with her happy family, learned how to love her, and built a new and wondrous life for myself free of all expectations of who I was before.
What if I had stayed?
Appendix
To Look at the Sun
It is cliche, I realize,
To say that when I look at the sun it burns my eyes
But really,
It's just too warm: so much so it burns like a brand.
Here’s another one:
All in moderation, too much of a good thing hurts.
‘Too much water can kill you!’
When I looked at the sun, it burned, it hurt. But I saw.
For a moment,
the world and its every piece as full of aliveness
had been reborn.
How can a single glance change everything?
Just like that!
So full of warmth that the whole world burns sharp with it?
Now it’s all like that.
Every face, hand, leaf, bug, toy, pencil, and blade of grass
Is full of it.
The moon is a dim fog inviting owls, frogs, and witches in the night!
Or it glows like a candle,
a lightpost calling a clear white light on a stormy night.
Or a waning half moon
hanging alone and incomplete in a lamp post lit sky
like an uncertain frown.
Or an upside down smile.
What am I supposed to do when even the drudgery of spreadsheets
is a morning stroll
in a fall forest littered with fallen thoughts and budding ideas.
It is all like that!
And all I want to do is look.
Mirar El Sol
Esta Cliche, yo se.
Miralo al sol y el sol quema mis ojos.
De verdad,
Está muy cálido, quema como una marca.
Y el proxima:
Todo con moderación, los buenos demasiados hacen daño.
‘¡Agua demasiada mueren!’
Yo veo el sol, quema, si, el hace daño. Pero miró,
Una momenta,
Todos mundos y pedazos fueron vitalidad completada.
Renacieron!
Como una mirada cambia todo?
Sin paradas!
Está demasiado lleno, así todo el mundo quema.
Pero, todo como eso.
Cada hoja, mano, bicho, vaso, y vos
Estan llenos!
La luna esta niebla obscura con ranas, búhos, y brujas a la noche!
O un vela brilla,
Un faro llama una luz clara en una noche tormentosa.
O la luna mengua,
Colgando sola y incompleta en un noche con una luz de farola.
Como un fruncir el ceño incierto.
O una sonrisa al revés.
Qué hacer cuando mi trabajo penoso aburrido
Es un camino
En un bosque de otoño, los pensamientos están cayendo y las ideas brotan.
Es todo asi!
Y quiero ver a todos.
