In 2009, newly married and with heads full of hope and ideas, we left our lives in the United States to start over in Chile. It was the ideal time to leave - the recession had proved out our distrust of the work-a-day life and as young, middle-class Americans we had been lucky enough to think we could make it anywhere. He was ready to run and I was ready to follow. We spent five years laboring on a project, a piece of dusty coastal land that through brute force and stubbornness alone, became our home. When We Went South is a story of pushing boundaries, of wicked homesickness, of quiet and loss, and ultimately of letting go. It has been one of the biggest gifts of my life to live this story and it’s an even greater gift to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it.

Milestones

April 11, 2014

The tiny sedan dashed past early morning revelers, my moans drowning out their drunken chatter. Between contractions, I scanned the streets I had grown used to, the sights that once felt so foreign but were now a new version of home: the grocery store where we’d spent our last pesos on roasted chicken and beer, the bus stop on the corner where I’d stood for hours over the past five years contemplating my loneliness, the cafe where we’d found out about my pregnancy. Victories and losses, moments strung together and flashing through my mind. I grasped the handle overhead with a shaking hand and clung to my laboring belly with the other.

Our entire existence here had been marked by change, mile-stone upon mile-stone stacked up to create a new life for the two of us. But we had always been separate in our experience, so very different in the ways Chile had changed us. Nearly our entire relationship took place here. And now, we had created a new life between us, one that would tie us to that place and each other forever.

In the weeks before her arrival, I wondered: Would she bring a new perspective? Could I finally feel at ease in my life in Chile, or would the finish line forever feel like it was being pushed further and further away the moment I attempted to cross it? My unspoken questions were always there, bubbling up into a nervousness he was tired of dealing with. And I was tired too.

Years later, when I’d look at her sometimes, a picture of Laguna Verde would paint itself in my mind—our little white house and the never-ending pines. The flames in the sky over Valparaiso on the day we brought her home.

Commutes

May, 2008

I scanned the crowded subway car, Paul Simon strumming in my ears. Everyone around me seemed perfectly content with their busy urban lives. They must be crazy, I thought. There had to be more to life than this back and forth, the commute to the office, the ten paid days of vacation, the pushing of paper, the paying of bills. Not that I was paying my bills, exactly. I still had my parents to thank for that. The music in my headphones and fuzzy daydreams were my only escape from reality, a reality that had basically lost its luster as quickly as it had started.

I had followed along with the rest of the recent grads from my prestigious liberal arts college and gotten a nine to five job in New York City. But the job market was abysmal to say the least. Many of my friends from school had decided to get graduate degrees instead of entering the job market at the worst time in recent history. After graduation everyone around me seemed so sure of where they were headed while I, overwhelmed by endless options of places to move and careers to pursue, chose to accept the first job I was offered, which in my case was an entry level assistant role at a Public Relations company. There, my job consisted of traipsing around the city all day delivering lip gloss and nail polish to building attendants at the big magazine publishing houses. The women I worked with were ambitious, cutthroat even, and smarter than I gave them credit for. They wanted to claw their way up the ladder in designer heels and I thought I would fit right in. But as much as I had been bred to focus on the way things looked, something in me had started to shift. I couldn’t bring myself to care about the beauty products I was pitching, or imagine spending most of my waking hours talking about the latest nail polish color. I rode the subway all day watching the diverse humanity that filled the city, all the people rushing off to somewhere, and let my mind wander to other places.

As a kid I had always dreamed about living in New York—the idealized version of it I’d been sold, where I could afford a quirky apartment with the salary from a job in something fun and ambiguous, like “fashion” or “magazines.” I imagined myself in stylish clothing with a cappuccino in my hand. But in all my childhood imagining, I hadn’t exactly factored in a paycheck that would afford me said luxuries. And even though my parents were still thankfully subsidizing my apartment, they had tightened their purse strings around unnecessary purchases, like constant wardrobe updates and expensive drinks. So instead of glitzy evenings out, most nights I spent alone, eating a dinner of cheap crunchy peanut butter on toast in front of a movie in bed. Everything about my current existence made me feel like I was wearing someone else’s life. And unlike everyone else I knew, I was beginning to realize I didn’t want the thing I had signed up for.

While I stood, jammed face-to-face against the other commuters on my way uptown one night, the thought of moving to Argentina to teach English popped into my head. The idea hadn’t sprung out of nowhere: I had been trying to return to a Spanish-speaking country since my study abroad days, but teaching in South America hadn’t crossed my mind before that very moment. It was the first time in years that I felt thrust forward by something meaningful and the thought of it lit a fire that burned in my belly. I quit my job the next week and moved back to my parents’ house in Pennsylvania. They were going through a messy, protracted divorce, but I had nowhere else to go. I wouldn’t miss New York.  

Home

July, 2008

I was twenty-two, fresh off my first real fuckup, and back in my parents’ house, the limbo-land between the past and the exciting future I had been assured lay before me. To fund my trip to Argentina, I had started waitressing at the Roadhouse, a cheesy franchise restaurant full of Texas-cowboy paraphernalia. My arrival back to Pennsylvania was too late in the summer to get any of the better service jobs, so I was stuck cowboy dancing, dreaming of November when I was planning to get the hell out of town. The only appealing part of the job, other than the easy paycheck, was that I never had to stay past 9 PM. Most nights I headed straight to the local dive bar to mingle with the other food industry folk. I enjoyed getting drunk and wanted companionship, so I faked my way through our mostly-superficial conversations, happy to drink my weight in Yuengling lager with the rest of the crew.

After my shift one night, I sat inside my car in the corner of the restaurant parking lot to get ready—I practically lived in my car that summer and it housed anything I could possibly need at a moment’s notice: random bits of clothing, my favorite brand of light cigarettes, a two-piece swimsuit, a half-empty cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. I don’t remember ever eating much since caffeineinated drinks and nicotine sustained me. I opened the mirror on the sun shield, hastily applied dark eyeliner around my wide blue eyes, smudged it just so. It was a look that got me attention, though mostly with the kind of men who had no intention of taking me out to dinner. I smacked my lips together with sticky pink gloss and shimmied my grease-stained jeans off in the driver’s seat, replacing them with cutoffs.

The sun had just gone down but the humidity from the day still hung heavy in the air as I drove over to the dingy bar, which sat awkwardly between a residential neighborhood and a public golf course. I’d been frequenting this spot for years, long before I could use my real ID at the entrance. Standing in the door, I lit a cigarette in a way I had co-opted from movie stars, cupping the flame glamorously, and walked inside. As was customary, I scoped out the men surrounding the bar, until my gaze landed on him. I knew nearly everyone in this town, so a new face was obvious—he may as well have been bathed in a spotlight. His worn-out green baseball hat was turned down and blonde curls peeked out below the sides.

I chugged a quick beer, busying my hands by lighting another cigarette, and waited for my friends to arrive. As luck would have it, an old friend of mine started chatting to the stranger and casually waved me over. I could see the new guy wasn’t interested in the conversation by the way he smoked, furiously sucking down Camel Lights. I approached. I couldn’t see his face, but I noticed the black-inked graphic tattoo that decorated his tanned forearm. He looked tall. “I’m Bree,” I threw out, my beer buzz shoring up my confidence. “Trey,” he replied. He still seemed bored.

I could make out the shadow of his cheekbones from under his cap. Blonde stubble dotted his chin and I wondered how it would feel on my cheeks—scratchy, I imagined.

“Bree is looking to move to South America, bro, so I figure you two have something in common,” my old friend said pointedly. I guess he had remembered a drunken conversation we’d had the week prior about my pending trip abroad.

I lit another cigarette and sat myself next to the mysterious man, doing my best impression of a self-assured woman who had better places to be than this seedy dive bar. Our matchmaker quietly peeled away, leaving us alone to assess each other.

I told him about the public relations job I had hated in Manhattan, my impending departure, and my plan to teach English to fund my travel in Argentina. I left out my parents’ ongoing divorce, my dad’s prescription drug problem, and my mom’s withering away. I wanted to seem adventurous and fun. He didn’t ask for my number when my girlfriends came to whisk me away so, afterwards, I didn’t think twice about our encounter.

My dating history was anything but prolific, and my expectations were leisurely. I had been in and out of infatuation with the same boy for the better part of a decade, and once I realized my feelings for him were unrequited, had decided to stick to flings: the man I met at Pianos on the Lower East Side my last night in New York; an old friend from college who’d come to visit for a weekend; a chef who worked in a restaurant in town. These were experiences I could accumulate, like trophies, to prove how carefree I could be.

The next week I was sitting in front of the television at a girlfriend’s house when an unknown number rang on my beat-up gray flip phone. Distracted by our conversation about the evening’s plans, I let it go to voicemail. After deciding on a game plan for the night, our attention turned to my phone which was now dinging with a message. My girlfriends huddled around me as I pressed the speaker button on the playback prompt, and there he was—Trey, asking if we could meet again. Deciding not to play it cool, I called right back—but the line just rang.

“You’ve reached the voicemail box of Hilltop Farm.” It was two voices, speaking slowly in unison. One of them sounded like the Marlboro man.

Did he live with his parents?

He eventually called back, and we planned to meet the next Friday night at the same bar. Despite the lackluster introduction, the mysterious man intrigued me.

The days passed slowly as I waited for the end of the week; it wasn’t often I had plans worth looking forward to. Plus, the sexy stranger provided me with new material to fill my daydreams while I waited tables.

Finally, Friday arrived. Since it was a special occasion, I decided to wear my lucky green dress, which was short and flowy and had paid for itself in compliments. As I arrived at the bar, I lit a cigarette, threw my big brown leather bag across my shoulder like a shield, and walked in. My eyes quickly investigated the reaches of the dark room and U-shaped counter in search of him. I tried to seem casual, aloof even, though he was easy to spot, sitting quietly with a book in the corner, tall beer in hand, his hat turned down. Apparently looking mysterious was this guy’s M.O. The signs of an adrenaline rush came over me, I felt my stomach drop and my heart rate quicken as I realized how handsome he actually was. Hoping to look like a woman who knew how to order a man’s drink, I asked the surly bartender for a Black & Tan and sauntered toward him. I suddenly felt like a kid playing dress up. 

“Hey there,” he said. His aqua eyes, peeking up from his paperback, locked on mine. I was toast. I sat down next to him and circled the rim of my beer glass with my finger. Something about this meeting felt different than our first. We started our conversation where we had left off, but soon dispensed with small talk. I felt drawn to him, as if he had a gravitational pull I couldn’t escape. I knew that I was leaving soon to move to Argentina, but I wondered if I might actually want to stick around a little longer now that I had met him.

He told me he had spent a semester in Chile during his master's degree program the year prior: “My degree’s in foreign policy,” he elaborated. “Though I don’t see myself using it. Now I have over two hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, and there’s no way I’ll ever pay that back.” 

I drained the remainder of my now-warm beer. My parents had paid for my college education in full and I had no concept of how much money two hundred thousand dollars actually was.

“I’ve been wanting to go to South America for years. I’ve finally run out of reasons not to,” I said, not wanting to dwell on his obviously less-than-ideal financial situation. “Chile sounds beautiful—did you travel much?”

“Yeah—we traveled with the program, and then I traveled some on my own. There’s so much to see there though, it’s impossible to cover an entire country in just one visit.”

“Did you see Argentina?” I asked, crossing my legs toward him.

“I did. They have the best food. It’s like they’re all Italians who speak Spanish, they're so animated, full of intensity and culture.” He seemed so confident as he spoke. “You’ll love it if you like that kind of thing.”

What I wanted was for him to think I was the kind of person who liked that kind of thing.

“Were you in Buenos Aires? That’s where I’m trying to go.”

“Yup. That’s about it, though—I didn’t see much else of Argentina. Though I could tell you everything about Chile. Santiago at least. I spent a long month there. I was in a bad place but that’s my fault. That was where I was. Not where I was, if you know what I mean,” he said.

I wanted to know what he meant.

We spent that night in that darkened corner in a conversational ping-pong that felt like magic, a steady back and forth between the two of us. I listened with rapt attention as he described, in meticulous detail, the political history of Chile, the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the dictatorship of Pinochet. He complained that the master’s in foreign policy had done him no good—he was now saddled with a mountain of student loan debt and no desire to become a lifelong academic or a cog in the machine. He had moved to California, then back home, then back again. He had jumped out of airplanes and lived alongside the indigenous people of Peru. He had gone to school, and dropped out, and gone back again. He had been to all the places I had, and then some. He was, by far, the most interesting man I had ever met. He also displayed a sadness I simultaneously loved and wanted to fix. When he told me that he wanted to write a book some day, I pictured myself as the muse of his narrative.