Reasons to Quote

"Lust is easy, love is hard, like is most important."

-Rob Reiner

When you spend three plus weeks with someone navigating through plates of deep fried concrete discs under the guise that they are patacones, cracked out drug hordes, Panamanian sailors, pork soup with a fine veneer of grease floating on the top for breakfast, weak beer, too-strong rum, crusty old Germans with swastika and Che tattoos, the stopped-up toilet that the entire Mondo Taito hostel shared (and its Monday Martini Night vomiting), the dive shop that insisted we go out in the rainy boat and salt-spraying ocean that immediately killed the new camera bought to replace the one stolen, the flight cancels, the barge leaves early, the bus far too late, stinking of urine, freezing cold at four AM with the radio blasting, "Me gusta! Me gusta! Me gusta!"...you remember stupid things like quotes and forget important things like giving your traveling partner some slack for not wanting to talk after being awake for forty hours.

Things like love can't get you through that, the rib that was nearly cracked, the Codeine tablets popped every six hours after the clinic sets you free, talking your way into getting a Yellow Fever card to get you out of the country instead of receiving the second Yellow Fever shot in ten days (that's a live vaccine, meaning they GIVE it to you a second time, what do Colombian officials care if you'll surely die from such a thing? A different Colombian official took your card upon entry and never gave it back, so they consider you WITHOUT A CARD.). Love is nothing. Love isn't easy, sure, but to really enjoy, really like someone, that's something special. To spend all that time with someone, the hards, the have nots, the bruises and broken everything, the mud and blood-spattered clothing, no money, no clue, no way out, and to come home and immediately rent Deep Cover and get hot and sour soup and spend the day in your bed falling in and out of consciousness, that is something special.

I think.