¶ … Pilgrimage to Miami I remember looking around excitedly, yanking my bags back and forth as I patiently waited in line for a cab. It was summertime in Miami, and I had managed to finally get away from New Mexico for the first time in quite a while. This would be a vacation for me, a Labor Day weekend getaway in which I could catch up with my friends and hopefully enjoy some fun in the sun. But for me, the trip had a more profound, graver significance. It was a test, to see if I even could enjoy myself and my life again. Even then at the airport, I was not sure if I could make it.

The crux of the matter was that two summers before I had made this trip, I had incurred some sort of strange illness. As is typical, no health care professional could shed any degree of insight on it, and I had exhausted my resources going to specialists and general practitioners attempting to find the answers. I had all but missed that first summer languishing in bed, and had difficulty making it through the second summer (although I had noted progress). The trip to Miami was a measuring stick to see if I had fully recovered enough to actually enjoy myself again. It might not have seemed like the typical quest to gauge one's health and ability to physically hold up to the sort of stamina required to hang out again....

But it certainly was, and many times during that weekend I remarked to myself how fortunate I was to even be in this vacation town on a holiday weekend, acting like any other 20 something year old when the Labor Day before (and the Labor Day before that one) I was not able to do so.
Thus, my pilgrimage consisted of tanning on the beach, hanging out at night clubs at night, and trying to save money on food in the meantime. I was delighted when after the three days none of my old symptoms came back, and I was able to assert as much stamina as the others. But still, I managed to take baby steps, and was able to navigate through the weekend one encounter after another, gradually growing in confidence and strength until, at the very end, I was able to finally forget about the significance of the journey and actually lose myself in the moment (or a couple of them).

One of the biggest tests for me that weekend was simply eating. For a couple of years I had figured out that I was actually better off eating the things that I prepared -- and that my mother did -- than things that by when I am going out. There was a superior quality that the latter rarely could match when compared to the former, and a greater degree of consistency in eating at home as well. One of the things I could not do before was…