Breakfast in the Clouds. First Place in the International Week UNAM 2022 Creative Writing Contest

I t was here and now. The precise instant that ran through my imagination every time the idea of studying abroad came into my head. I knew now that the image I had in mind was unexpectedly plausible. It was like an omen, although I never knew what exact moment it took me to. The image came to me one day unbidden. While making travel arrangements, it was simply drawn as a photograph of the future. Always the same view: at the ends, a relatively homogeneous frame that belonged to a curved wall, not seen from the front, but obliquely, as if from a parallel seat. As if it were a photo, the interior, and everything behind the wall, seemed to be under the gloom produced as an effect of the contrast between the intense exterior illumination, visible in the center, and the dark interior environment.

In the center of the image, there was the protected gloomy frame. One of those aerial landscapes I loved so much yet saw so little, decidedly covered by an oval-shaped glass, what we usually call a window. An unparalleled perspective, cautiously traced by nature and a bit decorated by societies that coexisted with it. Above, a blue sky, but still tinged dark, mysterious, a product of dawn; that rebirth of the sun that surely would have been appreciated if one were to look in the opposite direction. The sky was sown with imposing cotton, which was just beginning to awaken its white splendor. In a few hours, the water, vapor cumulus would show off their full color in the zenith’s sunlight.

Below, a not too green horizon, brown, caressed by some sunbeams whose function was to announce an incipient day. A dual-surface; the left side, somewhat rough, forged by perpetual streams, and the right side dotted with smooth and spectacular cinereous cones; an extremely young relief, according to the words of my geology professor at UNAM. Lack of green did not make the less beautiful. I laughed. Amidst all my thoughts, I realized that, even up there, the geographer’s enthusiasm was invincible and unceasing. I kept remembering what I had once learned in college that would later come back to me in a thousand ways, including four French-language university courses that I’d take nine thousand kilometers from my hometown.

Then my mind lit up. If this moment was unique and had awaited me for so long, I would remember every relevant detail. I finally dared to step out of the scene, previously imagined and now completed, to live the missing part. Ultimately, a photo produced by my imagination was as dimensionally limited as one that would have emerged from the lens of any camera. We had to observe the surroundings in search of a panoramic view with more details that, without presumption nor warning, could be interesting and add to our previous knowledge of the environment as much as what we had already seen.

That’s what I did when I decided to study abroad. I realized that I could look around and that the view I had at that moment was, to say the least, spectacular, rich, and deep. In my country, without a doubt, I had learned an infinite number of things, but I could still turn around and perhaps discover a source full of revelations in the least expected. I needed to look at different places, other cultures, and other ways of approaching the world and building it, which would allow me to expand the horizon of what I could understand and do until then.

I decided to end this little moment of pause that had me absorbed while contemplating that landscape. I turned around and immediately remembered that in front of me, on a kind of folding table, with a grey, smooth, plastic surface, there was a perfect French breakfast. Its arrangement was symmetrical, arranged in three horizontal circles, with the largest at the center. On the right, a paper cup with coffee; in the center a croissant, and, on the left, a plastic cup with orange juice. They were a perfect alignment of planets, a color scale that started with dark brown, continued with an ochre shade of orange, and culminated with light orange.

Coffee was the pleasant essence of cold mornings. The one from that morning was, like any other day, a magical elixir that transformed reality. It woke me up and inspired me to live. It gave me the much-needed push to face the day. Drinking coffee is an art. From its first scent, it announces its arrival, which in itself produces a feeling of satisfaction, of knowing that a cup of revitalizing bitter drink is about to arrive. When it finally comes, it goes through the process of slowly but steadily approaching the palate; it starts with a hot coffee, full of excitement and expectation that means it still has to handle things delicately, waiting for the tongue to progressively learn to tolerate the temperature that until a few moments ago was unknown to it. This happens eventually and only then can I move forward at a faster pace, though still slow enough to enjoy. And there comes a point in which I’ve gone very deep into this coffee, I know it and I enjoy it more than ever. I know that sooner or later a cup has to come to an end, but by then I’m ready to move on. Drinking it is a whole process of which the enthusiasm I feel for what follows is part.

Being in France had been like slowly drinking coffee. Five months of a great experience that I had enjoyed in its different stages from beginning to end, starting from before my arrival, when a pleasant scent reached my nose for the first time when the excitement of having a new project full of expectations was there. I had lived through a whole series of moments that were like the tiny units of ground coffee powder that had given life to this beverage. The ground beans are, in the end, the distance between the hot water and the coffee; they give it its essence, they are its reason to be, and they endow it with flavor and its motivating power, but in the water, all its properties cease to be those of individuality and are mixed to produce collectivity, a whole made from the parts. Thus I carried this cloud of ground coffee beans with me, of experiences whose extract had dissolved in the water and was now dissolving in myself to drive me on.

In the middle, the croissant as it was called in that country from where this term added to the Spanish dictionary as cruasán. I knew I would be unable to forget the croissant, I was just adopting it into my own cuisine, in the same way that my mother tongue’s Dictionary did with the Gallicism: accepted it and integrated it into a large repertoire of words that formed an identity. And so French had also entered my life.

It gave me great satisfaction to be able to communicate naturally in another language. The blurring of the boundaries of interculturality by breaking a language barrier was unusual to me, but absolutely comforting. I remembered that the croissant had accompanied several of the most interesting conversations with my friends, during breakfasts, at the university that received me in France. Unwittingly, the exquisite French bread, part of the French language and culture came with me on the return trip.

Now it was time for a fruity sip: try something different from our two previous meals. It was a refreshing drink, a taste that changed abruptly and made me salivate vigorously. The papillae had to be prepared. It received sweet and citrus notes, which if they had existed on their own might not have tasted the same and so they came together to generate a wonderful symphony without which breakfast would not taste the same. That’s what the thousands of kilometers traveled were all about. To try something new, to change from dark coffee to orange, to face the sweet and the sour. Not to forget that there, at my destination, all kinds of things awaited me, familiar and unfamiliar. A culture, or rather, a diversity of cultures that, in a globalized world, can be both different and similar. And this, far from becoming an obstacle or a fear, became an additional motivation because, when my taste was ready to appreciate this fruity juice, it meant that I had opened the doors to otherness with all its own. My mind was now more open than before.

I learned to recognize a distant society and its educational system that I liked very much for its ability to generate critical thinking and a little less for its coldness and rigidity. The geography of an entire country and that of an entire continent is related to it. And, of course, an enormous academic repertoire of authors from different fields and professors that were trained under different paradigms, under other forms of learning. I had seen everything good and everything that from my perspective was foreign and each thing added up to a small but excellent contribution for me. This morning’s juice was part of what I needed to crown the previous six semesters of my studies in geography and to add a plus value to all the personal baggage built during my life.

If there was one thing that excited me, it was that within all this interculturality, we had a generational vision in common in which the search for a better world persisted, and it reflected, for example, in the interest to confront a climate crisis that is so much a part of our prospective professional field. I, of course, was amazed to attend a university where the same problem was being discussed from such a different perspective. However, learning did not only take place in the classroom. The fact that I had to leave that environment and exist in my own alternate space, to immerse myself completely in the otherness, made this experience one of the most enriching field practices of my entire training.

​​​​​​​In addition to the beautiful and complex window scene, I had my morning airplane breakfast and still the unexplored field of the rest of the cabin where I would surely find a wide way to go. What was next was to accept that I had finished breakfast and could now go on with a full stomach. I returned to the present world. Again I had become abstracted and we were already landing. This was me, back from an unprecedented episode in my life. I looked to my right. On the opposite side from where I had witnessed that view, the other windows were in a row. Through them, we could appreciate the sun that had already finished rising on the horizon. A new day had just begun.

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