An Analysis

I wanted to provide a little bit of insight for why the story below feels to pertainent to me right now.

Essentially, I am the stream and the sands are everything new that I experience. I left my home in Carolina del Norte and arrived in Chile wanting to keep a firm grip on my identity while at the same time gaining new insight and knowledge about the Spanish language and Chilean culture. Of course, the possibility of "losing one´s individuality" (identity) when traveling and changing in someway is thrilling but also nerve wracking, considering that you never know how you´ll turn out afterwards.
It did not want to lose its individuality. And once having lost it, how was one to know that it could bever be regained?
The stream (not yet a river, obviously still young) wants to cross the desert in the ways that it knows. The whisper says to the stream that it cannot remain the same stream it is today under any circumstances.
Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one."

Why fight changes when we don´t know how our future will turn out anyway? Traveling, adopting new customs and relinquishing old ones seems to me to be one of the truest forms of discovering which part of me is essentially Gillian. The act of being carried away by the wind, no matter how timid or unsure I may be, will carry on the essential parts of me and leave only residue -- bits fallen off, discarded, no longer important to who I am -- in its path.


I remember being young and in the backseat of a warm minivan during a rainstorm. Perhaps I am coming back with my family from a late night dinner party, or driving home from the airport. Rain batters the windshield as the wipers pump out a persistant rhythmic shlosh. On my window highlighted by the highway streetlights the rain patters, racing down and out of site. One drop falls, picking up speed as it connects with others, zig zagging across the window leaving behind only a trace of liquid residue. In that moment I connect with that one drop and cheer it on as it skids and skirts past all others. It disappears from view and is immediatly forgotten as my eyes dart to the top of the window to cheer on another little stream. Hours of raindrop races pass. And then we pull into our driveway.