THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN

The two weeks I spent in Bogota felt sort of like a dream sequence in movie.

There was an overarching sense of “I know it... I know it... it's on the tip of my tongue but I can't quite remember the word;” a certain sense of deja vu. I had, indeed, seen a lot of it. My grandmother's apartment, where I was staying, was a couple of blocks away from the first apartment we owned, and my aunt's house is right next to the house were I lived most of my life in Bogota. So there were many familiar sights. But they were surrounded by a myriad of changes which, added to the fact that I had left bogota at 13 when one barely starts to learn how to get around the city, made me feel totally lost in a city full of familiar instances that seemed to be sprinkled around as if they had spilled by mistake.

It is quite strange to simultaneously know and not know something, or someone for that matter. I know my family. My very large, supportive and loving family. But most of the contact I have had with them for the past 9 years has been limited. I know all sorts of things about their lives, but I had not had a real conversation with most of them for years. This is mostly because I hear about them through my mother, who I would call almost everyday from college, and who, in turn, would call her own mother almost everyday. So there was a literal game of telephone going.

But to some extent my family does not know me as a person, they know me as an idea, as a set of accomplishments and failures (I would guess mostly accomplishments since that is what parents tend to pass on...), as a part of their family, and as such they love me. It is strange to be able to trust someone, to know that they know more about your early life than you yourself, but that who you have become is something that eludes them to an extent, something they are still discovering. Love is very strange.

I think part of the reason why the experience was so strange was that I had to rely so much on my family for everyday things. Part of the reason why I was going to Bogota was to get laser eye surgery so that I would no longer need glasses (and as an aside, I must say there is nothing more wonderful than being able to see everything right from the moment you wake up, to see every instant clearly), so during the process I had to rely a lot on people. This was a bit hard for me as I'm used to being rather independent.

Again, this was compounded by the fact that my family is somewhat overprotective (this was also a sort of familiar feeling as my lovely parents are also somewhat overprotective, but there are usually just two people rather than a whole family), and did not want me going around the city by myself. Even to go to the gym which was a block and a half from where I was staying my grandmother asked her maid to accompany and come back later and pick me up. Which made me feel like I was young girl again and was spending the summer at my grandmother's house in Giron, a small town in Santander.

The feeling of knowing and not knowing extended to my feeling of safety. I felt safe, people feel safe in their everyday, but it is a sense of safety that has been adjusted to fit within their circumstances. There is an expression in spanish, “Dar Papaya” to look for it, an abbreviation from the longer saying, “Papaya ponida, papaya partida” if you put a papaya down it will get cut. People have gotten used to living in a limited state of freedom, where they allow themselves to do certain things and not others in order to keep themselves safe and while they do this they, indeed, feel safe. This sense of limited freedom to secure oneself is something I knew. Something that I grew up with, but after being able to walk home at 3 in the morning without feeling unsafe in Williamstown, having to be walked to the gym at 6 pm felt slightly unfamiliar, and rather than making me feel safer made me feel as if I should worry about something.

Overall after two weeks I don't feel I know Bogota any better than did. That feeling of knowing and not knowing, of independence and limitation, of opposing feelings that are felt simultaneously as one, has left me wondering what Bogota could be as a strange new city, without any memories attached, and without any loving family to protect me. At the same time, I was glad to be able to spend sometime surrounded by so many people who were happy to see me and just wanted to let me know they care. People who I too discovered as people and not just family, and was happy to meet again.

Perhaps in December when I return to Bogota I will get to experience more of it. To sandwich the unknown with the knowledge of my childhood and new knowledge of the present. who knows?