Month: August 2016

Swell Waves: A Song for Grandpa

Three days after I arrived in Guatemala in June, I woke up at my dark hostel dorm room in Antigua and rushed out to catch the 9:00 am Yoga class across town. I hadn’t walked two blocks through the cobbled-stoned streets of Guatemala’s old capital when I flopped down on the sidewalk, crying uncontrollably. I had been expecting the news my phone had delivered on that fresh morning ever since I started this journey over one year ago. I knew this moment would one day come and whisk me away from whichever corner of the world I happened to roam. Yet the news came like a flash flood and there I was, curled up like a scared rabbit, frozen on the damp, cold stones of Antigua’s streets, as if the entire world had caught on fire and I was the first to know. “Your grandpa is in a coma,” my father said on the phone. It didn’t look good. My grandfather had been unwell for some time and he hadn’t called me in over two …