Bon Voyage

Bon voyage. She actually said that... the nerve. I don't know what's wrong with "safe travels", or “Have a nice flight”, “Godspeed” even. I guess she wanted to add some kind of ornament to her words. Afterall, for English speakers, the fancy language is French, of course. But she’s not a native English speaker, neither am I. She’s Brazilian, I’m Mexican, and even though we both speak each other’s language fluently, every time we talked about important stuff we switched to English (lingua franca and whatnot). 

We both valued language, and we felt like having an argument in one language ─or an important talk─  would put the other person at some kind of disadvantage. Words have an entirely different load depending on the culture, and you are never actually aware of what you are saying when you are not in your mother language, which is why we kept anything important in English, so there was some kind of balance. 

It’s funny, after three years of dating, we must have said an infinite amount of words to each other, in a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and English. But I carry just a small number of quotes, wrapped around her voice, and the way she said them.Definitely her: Bon voyage is the one that struck me the most. I heard her voice pronouncing them, flying around my head, like a cartoon bird whenever a character got struck, I heard them throughout the flight coming back to Mexico, and I still hear them every now and then. I didn’t have the courage to ask her about why she would phrase it in French, as I said, there is the option of a “safe travels”, Boa viagem, Buen viaje… but she decided that her last words to me were going to be those, and I walked away from it as fast as I could, fighting my entire desire of staying with her and hold her, I did not even look back. But coming back to topic, if we get picky about it, me flying to Mexico, this was not the voyage, it is more like a return, the voyage was my time in Brazil, living with her right? Now I was coming back home, with my tail between my legs and the pieces of my heart clicking inside my chest, like a group of coins in someone’s pocket.

Of course she could be saying: “Good luck forgetting me” or “Good luck to both of us, in this process of healing from each other”. The only reason I keep beating theis, is because I want to think she said it with intent. And she knew me quite well, I’m sure she was aware that I would spend the whole flight reading into every single word she said as a conscious decision. After all, once I spent a whole week talking about Bartleby’s decision of saying “prefer” instead of  “rather” and how such a decision didn’t survive translation ─since in Spanish prefiero, and in Portuguese prefero were usually the first choice─ like when Borges ranted about how Kafka’s Metamorphosis was a mistranslation, not because the word didn’t mean the same than its counterpart in German, but because Verwanlung was a more common word in the daily conversations than metamorphosis is.  But I digress.

Maybe she said Bon voyage as a way of addressing the fact that I was studying French. That she noticed it. That she saw me. At first it struck me as a way for her to be pedantic, but on a second thought she was probably being thoughtful?   And I mean, a voyage implies a return, does she want me to get back? Or maybe she knew I was on my way to a world of chaos and a painful recovery process? She knew I’d be living in hell for a while and it would  feel like so until I was  able to get back to normal. Perhaps. I mean, I’m the first one to admit I never understood her.

 “Yo te quise de tantas maneras. 

Yo te quise, de veras, tal vez sin saber

que el tiempo es vendaval que arrastra todo 

vaya uno a saber qué modo 

de quererte estaba bien” 

Those lyrics always hit me: “I loved you in so many ways, I loved you, really, perhaps not knowing that time is a gale that blows everything away, and who knows what was the correct way to love you.”

 I guess that is what made it so straining, that I never knew what was the correct way to love her. Or what was the correct way of loving myself first, and then to love her. I never knew what was the proper way to talk about stuff. I am fully aware that, from what I think, how I think it, how I say it, how you hear it, what you hear, what you think of it… plenty of room for misunderstanding in any given interaction. And come to think about it, every part in any life can very well be considered a voyage. Like that poem, by  Cavafi: As you set out for Ithaca… 

That flight is in the past now. Água debaixo a ponte, it has been years since she said those words that sent me swirling into a spiral of interpretations, general anxiety, and heartbreak. I reached my homeland, and there was no Penelope waiting for me, there was no Argos to recognize me. I’ve dated other women, I have been in many planes, and in many places. I have seen the Laistrygonians, Cyclops, and the wild Poseidon that my soul set in front of me. Time has passed, and in general, I think about it a little bit less than I used to, but it still comes back, like a butterfly that flies away in spring, but still finds its way back in winter.

 Her words haunt me more than her face, because it was her voice that calmed me so many times. I used to hold her hand while she talked, and then close my eyes, because she felt like a music box. Because she liked to pick her words carefully, and it felt like an anthology. She had the voice of a garden.  Years have passed and I still haven’t mustered the courage  to send a text message to her asking: Whatever you meant with Bon voyage. What I dread the most is not silence, I don’t even fear the answer being something mean or offensive. I think what would break me is to come back to a garden, and find a wasteland. I dread her replying: I don’t actually remember.