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No one ever said building a life would be so complicated.

There is so much packing and unpacking.

And every time I settle somewhere — the two story townhouse outside of campus, the condo with hardwood floors on 7th Street, the 1930s fourplex with a courtyard near downtown, or the bungalow with creaking floors behind a house — I unpack what I gathered throughout the years, and I’m always shocked by how much I seem to catch in my net and drag along.

They are my own private collections of trivialities.

Every time I unpack, I rearrange them just so. Some need to overlap a tiny bit, face this way or that way, but not too much.

Even though it doesn’t matter. It just adds another layer of complexity, a useless expenditure of time — time that no one, as it turns out, can spare.

I have this tiny Nativity scene of 9 figures plus a few donkeys and a sheep. They stand about two inches tall. In my adult life, I have always lived in small places, so I’m unable and unwilling to recreate the elaborate displays of my childhood, where a whole corner of the house was set up with tables covered in papel manila as a stage for Jesus and his gang. The scene included trees, mountains made out of more papel manila, lights, buildings, sprinkles of pine needles from the Christmas tree. Once, I saw a Nativity scene at someone’s house — a cousin or uncle — that included an honest waterfall with running water.

One block.

The Nativity scene of my childhood possessed a meaning, a scent of something greater than the pine needles from the Christmas tree.

In Panama, Christmas is a collection of traditions deeply woven in Catholicism. I do not recall how I reconciled Santa with El Niño Dios, both of whom are said to bring gifts to children. My child’s brain must have been satisfied with knowing that El Niño Dios was Hutch to Santa’s Starsky. Santa, being an overweight man, can’t slide down the non-existent Panamanian chimneys so that’s where El Niño Dios, with his freaky newborn-sized crown of thorns, would come in and assist.

Two blocks.

So I arrange this pathetic Nativity scene on top of a corner of my bookshelf. I do this because it holds some meaning tied to a different time.

The meaning changed, it morphed into a non-meaning of tiny figures standing for something that’s important, of what was important to me long ago.

I can still remember the scent of the house during Christmas. A scent that for years I wondered how to replicate. I thought it was just the Christmas tree, but no overpriced tree we ever bought in U.S. could match the scent. Maybe the ventilation in North Carolina apartments, with heating and such things, was somehow responsible, I thought. Years later, long after my parents stopped pretending that Christmas trees mattered at all, I reevaluated the scent of Christmas in our house in Panama. The scent of angry pine beat by the unrelenting humidity of a climate it did not belong in, combined with the smell of the house, formed after fifty years of occupancy, of old furniture and dust. The scent of the family that lived there all along. The scent of its history, of time.

Three blocks.

Beyond the platitudes of the season, my Nativity scene exists to remind me of the building blocks that once combined create a life, same as the other worthless accoutrements I have packed and unpacked so often in the process of adding on to the building of said life.

I turned the figures this way and that way, the one-eyed sheep needs to be over here by the shepherd. And the shepherd can’t be too close because after all Mary is giving birth and the shepherd would want them to have privacy. The three Reyes Magos need to be standing farther apart because they haven’t arrived yet, and this donkey can be over here acting as guard.

Yeah, it makes sense.

I hide Baby Jesus behind a picture frame that reads “Stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”  As tradition dictates, the tiny Lord and Savior will stay hidden until the 25th, when he will make his grand appearance. One year, I forgot to bring him out of hiding and the Nativity scene remained Jesus-less until the 27th or 28th, at which point I was already several days in on my ride to hell.

Even as the meaning of things change, the blocks of how we got to where we are remain.

They take up space in our boxes.

They often take up space in ways that are unquantifiable, unmeasurable.

Reminders to never stop building.

Reminders of that scent.

The tiny furniture of the soul.

The one you can’t get rid of.

It all belongs to you.

Vacations are sometimes disappointing and tiring. And although things are not all we hoped they would be, there are these flashes of happiness weaving into the long minutes of what can be an otherwise dull existence. I think I travel because of those fleeting moments of sheer unexpected happiness, so incomparable with the small mundane joys of everyday. Yet those moments are all so small: a good coffee, a hug, a conversation, and the sound of the sea — pockets of happiness. And little by little, those small pockets are filled with enough moments to hopefully make enough of a dent in our lives that we can look back and say “ah, yes, I had a good life.”

A few Saturdays ago, I slept on the deck of the Lugano following a race out to Catalina Island. I had a couch with my name below deck but the skipper, who pretty much becomes my dad when we are a certain number of nautical miles out to sea, had brought me a cozy sleeping bag and a pillow. Given the choice between sleeping in a musty below-deck and the open air above deck, I chose the deck. We were anchored in Cat Harbor, and the water lapped gently against the boat. As far as could be made out, there was this inescapable darkness broken only by the dim lights from the boats around us.

It was such a serene evening, and likewise bittersweet in that every other evening cannot match it, and that slow realization is heartbreaking. For years I have carried this curse to turn beautiful moments into deep, cruel existential crises. For every beautiful evening, there is a wicked dawn leading back to an everyday with nary a ripple in its vast ocean. So on deck I eventually fell asleep, subconsciously trying to will myself to stay still or I would end up breaking that peaceful night with my unceremonious splash into the water. Sporadically, I woke up — my tired brain thinking someone was around, walking around on deck, hovering near me. Within seconds though, my head would clear enough to look around, and with an unexplainable twinge, re-live the solitude that seemed as unbreakable as the black night.

I remember a somewhat uncomfortable night, slightly cold, but worthy of a line or two in these notebooks for writing down life, much as Clara did in Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espiritus.

I like to document the little things of my trips: the man on the BART reading a Chinese newspaper; the two women sitting across from me holding hands; the two teenage girls sharing headphones, one ear bud each and swaying their heads to the same music; John and his dog, Thelma, zipping us around Cat Harbor in a dinghy, the cab driver who asked me to explain Social Media as I tried to paint my nails in the back. I envision photographs in small moments, like visual souvenirs. And though sometimes they escape me, I hope to carry those visual souvenirs in my subconscious.

Yes, I travel to escape, and live a different life for a while: to find pockets of happiness. I collect them in photographs, in writings and in my heart, so they might lift me up in darker moments and make me smile.

A través de los años, y con vergüenza reconozco, el español se convierte más y más en mi lengua secundaria. Ni hablemos de tildes, las cuales hace tiempo eliminé de mis preocupaciones al escribir. Pienso y sueño en inglés, no por querer sino por la larga temporada que llevo viviendo en este país.

Decidí escribir este pasaje en español por que deseo practicar el lenguaje que recibí al nacer, en la esperanza de que algún día, regrese a ser mi herramienta de comunicación principal.

A medida que envejezco, mis sueños ingleses proveen el único escape donde se desahogan mis anhelos, donde el mundo que he construido se desarrolla con continuidad y estabilidad. De niños soñamos con el futuro perfecto, el trabajo de nuestros sueños, los amigos mas leales y el amor mas desenfrenado.

Yo me hice la promesa que nunca trabajaría un trabajo de oficina de 9 a 5, y hasta cierto punto he mantenido esta promesa. La vida, de la manera más cruel, me ha dado un trabajo de oficina de 8:30 a 5:30. Mi punto no es de maldecir horarios, ni edificios de luz fluorescente donde las plantas se mueren por falta de luz natural y aire fresco. Esos detalles no son importantes cuando sientes pasión por tu trabajo y las causas de tus proyectos — cuando eres feliz.

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