The day I left Mexico it was raining. The morning was a blue the color of the second layer of sea, the layer underneath the clear turquoise where the water becomes soft and quiet and absorbing and the blue comes in deep, subtly varying layers.

There was a luminous, gleaming blue woven into thunderclouds; there were long, whale-blue, pale-bellied clouds and streaky watercolor blues against the fading midnight backdrop of night. I remembered thinking throughout the preceding week of how much I would miss these skies.

The tears started falling before the taxi had even pulled out of our street and into the city, and when we started moving I felt the streams on my cheeks in that distant way we feel them when the crying is involuntary. The radio went over the election results, the Spanish voices jumping and sparking and speculating about Gabino Cue and the PRI, the taxista swerved and stopped in all the familiar places, and people walked along in sandals and hair gel to work, past the street vendors, the steam of tamales, the pungent sweet smell of fresh oranges, Latin America in the morning.

The thousands of small houses on the hills gleamed wet at 7 a.m. and I could smell the grass and the dirt behind them, the small gardens of wayward grass and corn and bare wet earth. We streamlined onto the main road to the airport and swooped around the big box stores exiled to the outskirts of town, past the green fields grown almost painfully bright in the rainy season, past the stray cows chomping at overgrown weeds, the Beneva mezcal billboards, down the last smooth alley to the airport, and inside.

And when the plane lifted, the tears were fluid and I no longer paid attention to them, thinking about the valley we were lifting up from and slowly flying out of, that yellow-green valley which, more than any place in the world where I have lived or worked or studied, has become part of my soul and changed me. We rose by Monte Alban, the stoic Zapotec ruins on their mountain top, and mountains rippled out on either side of the valley, quiet and smoky blue in the morning and the rain, and we were already gone, already en route to DF and the Dominican Republic and then three years in the U.S and my heart was already aching for viaje, voyages, journeys, the unpredictability and prickling sheer moment-to-moment aliveness of travel, the cup of coffee in the morning in an unfamiliar place with nothing taken for granted, not the overgrown alocasias, not the humid grip of the air, not the smells, not the possibilities of the day, everything mattering and fully felt and meaningful, and my heart was already reaching out back into that valley with a longing and a gratefulness and only when we descended slowly into DF through the clouds and cruised down the runway at Benito Juarez International Airport did the tears stop, and I was gone already, already beginning a different journey.