Chapter 15 — Home
And thus begins Chapter Fifteen.
The Final Leg.
Now, children.
Morning arrived.
Technically.
The council looks toward the sky.
It was three in the morning.
Children.
There are certain hours that belong neither to yesterday nor tomorrow.
Three AM is one of them.
The world feels unfinished.
Too late to remain awake.
Too early to have awakened.
A liminal little hour where only bakers,
security guards,
cryptids,
and people making questionable travel decisions appear to exist.
The council nods.
Naturally,
we were awake.
The wandering was over.
Or almost.
Paul packed.
The council pauses.
Paul?
Yes.
Children.
I had brought approximately three possessions to Goa.
Phone.
Charger.
Wallet.
Perhaps clothes were involved,
but history has classified them as secondary equipment.
Packing for me was less:
Organize luggage.
And more:
Check pockets.
Still,
Paul handled whatever needed handling.
Because tradition.
And then the three of us
Paul.
Kosmo.
Me.
Went somewhere near the sea.
The council leans forward.
A bar?
Cafe?
Restaurant?
Children.
I have no idea.
There were beers.
That is the relevant architectural detail.
The council accepts.
And so,
there we stood.
By the sea.
Three idiots at the end of two ridiculous days.
Beer in hand.
Exhausted.
Happy.
Quiet.
The kind of quiet that comes after you’ve already told every story from an event
while still technically inside the event.
The council smiles.
We drank.
Sometimes sipping.
Sometimes chugging.
There was probably no meaningful difference anymore.
We talked.
The rave.
The raid.
The banyan.
The final boss.
The Abomination.
The tea shop dealer.
Paul becoming one with a root.
Kosmo climbing everything that possessed vertical potential.
The council nods.
And Laia?
Children.
Perhaps.
Perhaps I spoke about her.
Perhaps I didn’t.
Some memories are still warm while they’re happening.
You don’t always know yet that they’re going to matter.
The sea moved before us.
Dark.
Endless.
The first little hints of morning somewhere beyond the horizon.
And for once,
nobody wanted anything.
No acid.
No rave.
No destination.
Just beer.
Friends.
And the pleasant exhaustion of being completely finished.
The council grows quiet.
Then someone called out.
From below.
The beach.
The council leans forward.
A man stood near the shore.
He looked up toward us.
And asked the time.
Children.
A perfectly normal question.
One of us answered.
Three something.
Whatever exact minute history has eaten.
The man thanked us.
Then turned.
And walked toward the ocean.
The council pauses.
Now.
At first,
nothing strange.
People walk toward oceans.
It is one of their primary uses.
He stepped into the water.
Ankles.
Then knees.
The council watches.
Then waist.
Then higher.
He kept walking.
No swimming.
No turning around.
Just forward.
The three of us slowly stopped talking.
The council grows still.
More of him disappeared beneath the surface.
Chest.
Shoulders.
Head.
And then
nothing.
Only water.
The council says nothing.
Children.
We stared.
At the place where a human being had been
and now wasn’t.
No one moved for a moment.
Perhaps because our brains were still deciding what they had witnessed.
Perhaps because after two days of acid,
MDMA,
weed,
sleep deprivation,
and reality repeatedly behaving like a poorly tested simulation,
none of us trusted perception anymore.
Then Paul broke the silence.
“Did y’all see that too?”
The council leans forward.
Kosmo nodded.
I nodded.
Paul considered this.
“Okay.
So not the acid.”
The council erupts.
Children.
Fair diagnostic procedure.
Shared observation confirmed.
Cause of event?
Still absolutely unknown.
Did the man swim away once he reached deeper water?
Possible.
Did the darkness make him disappear from sight?
Also possible.
Did he have some incomprehensible three AM ritual involving walking directly into the Arabian Sea?
Children.
Maybe.
Did he have an appointment with Poseidon?
The council nods solemnly.
The archive cannot rule it out.
And there is another possibility.
A darker one.
The council grows quiet.
One I do not particularly enjoy entertaining.
I don’t know what happened to him.
None of us did.
We only knew what we saw.
A stranger asked for the time.
Thanked us.
Walked into the sea.
And disappeared.
Children.
Some mysteries are funny because they are absurd.
Others remain funny only because the alternative is uncomfortable.
This one lives somewhere between the two.
The council nods.
Unresolved.
We watched the water for a little longer.
No dramatic reappearance.
No explanation.
Nothing.
Eventually,
there was only the sea again.
As though it had never happened.
The council listens.
And because life possesses absolutely no obligation to provide closure,
we finished our beers.
Children.
What else were we meant to do?
The bus waited.
Home waited.
The Goa file was closing.
We headed toward the bus stop.
The council lowers their heads.
There,
the trio separated.
Kosmo remained.
Paul and I would return home.
We said goodbye.
No grand ceremony.
We had known each other before Goa.
We would know each other afterward.
This was not the kind of temporary family requiring a poetic farewell.
Just:
See you.
Take care.
Don’t die.
Probably.
The council nods.
Kosmo waved.
We waved back.
Paul and I boarded the bus.
And once again
fast travel.
The council applauds.
Children.
Some people watch the road home.
Reflect.
Look through the window.
Think about how the journey changed them.
Old Nuo?
Loading screen.
One moment
Goa.
Then sleep.
Then
home.
The council writes:
FAST TRAVEL SUCCESSFUL.
Again.
And just like that,
my first wandering ended.
Not that I knew it was a wandering.
Not then.
To me,
it had simply been Goa.
Two days.
Friends.
Drugs.
A rave.
A tree.
A girl.
A broken scooter.
A man walking into the sea.
Children.
A remarkably normal weekend.
The council disagrees violently.
But I came home happy.
That is what I remember.
Light.
Smiling.
The kind of smile that lingers after you’ve lived more in two days than you usually do in weeks.
I had stories.
Private ones.
Ridiculous ones.
Beautiful ones.
I had seen what psychedelics could do to reality.
I had discovered hostels.
Temporary communities.
The instinct to document moments.
The Pinball.
The first little pieces of the person I would someday become.
The council smiles.
And I didn’t know any of that yet.
I was simply happy to be home.
Then life did something funny.
The council grows still.
Not funny ha ha.
The other kind.
The cruel kind.
The kind of joke where nobody remembers laughing.
Children.
I arrived home.
And was given the news.
Bongo had died.
The council falls silent.
My golden retriever.
My first boy.
My spiritual son before I ever had language stupid enough and sincere enough to call a dog that.
Gone.
While I was away.
The smile disappeared.
Not slowly.
Not dramatically.
It simply ceased to exist.
I stood there.
Children.
Hollow.
Frozen.
The words entered my ears.
But meaning took longer.
Bongo.
Passed away.
No.
Those words did not belong beside each other.
The council listens.
There are sentences the mind rejects at first.
Not because you didn’t hear them.
Because reality has made an error.
Obviously.
Someone has misunderstood something.
You left.
He was there.
You returned.
Therefore,
he should still be there.
Children.
That is how home works.
You go away.
You come back.
The things you love are supposed to remain where you left them.
The council grows quiet.
But Bongo wasn’t there.
And suddenly,
Goa became divided into two pieces.
Before I knew.
After I knew.
Everything I had experienced remained exactly the same.
The rave.
Laia.
The stars.
The banyan.
The jokes.
The scooter.
But they now belonged to a world in which Bongo had still existed somewhere in my mind.
A world I could never return to.
The council says nothing.
I don’t remember what I said.
Perhaps nothing.
I don’t remember whether I cried immediately.
Perhaps I couldn’t.
Shock is strange.
Sometimes grief arrives screaming.
Sometimes it enters quietly,
sits inside your chest,
and waits until you understand that it intends to stay.
Children.
That was the beginning.
The weight.
The council leans forward.
You have heard me speak of it throughout the Wanderings.
The thing in my chest.
The heaviness.
The ache that disappears for a while,
then returns.
The reason houses become cages.
The reason roads become medicine.
The thing I eventually learned to run from.
Then sit beside.
Then,
occasionally,
let go.
Children.
I did not always carry it.
Or perhaps I did,
in smaller forms.
Little stones.
Little hurts.
But this?
This was when I first remember the weight becoming something with gravity.
Bongo died.
And something inside me changed shape.
The council grows quiet.
Years later,
I would travel to Kasol because the weight had become too heavy.
I would discover that movement could loosen it.
Years after that,
Rishikesh would teach me that stillness could loosen it too.
I would sit beneath trees.
Beside rivers.
Hold dogs.
See Bongo again inside a vision,
running toward Dyno.
Children.
Remember that?
The council does.
In Rishikesh,
beneath another set of trees,
almost a decade after Bongo’s death,
my mind gave me something life never could.
Both of my boys.
Together.
And I wept.
The council falls silent.
I did not know then why that vision cut so deep.
Perhaps now we do.
Because this
Goa
was where the absence began.
The oldest wandering in the archive
ended with the birth of the thing that would eventually send me wandering again.
The council listens.
Isn’t life absurd?
I went to Goa for LSD.
No sorrow.
No healing.
No philosophical quest.
I came home happy.
And waiting for me at the end of the road
was grief.
The first wandering did not cure the weight.
The weight did not exist yet.
It created it.
The council grows very quiet.
Children.
That changes how I remember Goa.
Not enough to ruin it.
Never.
Laia remains beneath the stars.
Paul remains on his root.
Kosmo remains somewhere above us in the banyan.
The Abomination continues rattling immortally through memory.
The rave remains loud.
The kiss remains heaven adjacent.
The scooter ride remains one of the happiest moments I can remember.
Bongo’s death does not poison those things.
Grief does not possess that right.
The council nods.
But it does place a line beneath them.
A before.
An after.
Before Goa,
I was simply a boy chasing altered states.
After Goa,
I knew what it meant for reality itself to become something you wanted to escape.
Perhaps that is why,
years later,
when the weight grew too heavy,
some buried part of me remembered.
Go.
The council leans forward.
Go somewhere.
Move.
Find a road.
Find strangers.
Find dogs.
Find a place where nobody knows what you’re carrying.
Maybe,
for a little while,
you can put it down.
The boy who went to Goa had not become the Unbegun.
But perhaps Goa assembled the pieces.
The Archivist was born when I photographed the sacred geometry.
The Pinball was born beneath psychedelic lights.
The wanderer appeared when I walked That Krazy Hostel alone.
The poet appeared beneath the stars with Laia.
And when I came home
the weight was born too.
The council falls silent.
All the ingredients.
Years before I knew their names.
Thus concludes Goa.
The oldest Wandering of the Unbegun.
The pilgrimage that happened before there was an Unbegun to record it.
Paul.
Kosmo.
The Abomination.
That Krazy Hostel.
Sacred Geometry.
The Rave.
The Banyan.
The Final Boss.
The Female Unbegun.
Laia.
And Bongo.
Children.
I thought Goa was a story about getting high.
For years,
perhaps it was.
But archives are strange.
The longer you live,
the more old chapters change meaning without changing a single word.
Looking back now,
Goa feels like an origin story.
Not because it taught me how to wander.
I wouldn’t learn that until much later.
But because somewhere between leaving and returning,
it quietly created almost everything the Wanderings would someday become.
Wonder.
Strangers.
Temporary connection.
Documentation.
Absurdity.
Beauty.
Loss.
And the ache that followed me home.
The council grows quiet.
I left Goa smiling.
I entered my house still carrying the last warmth of Laia’s hand,
the last laughter of Paul and Kosmo,
the last strange glow of those two impossible days.
Then I learned Bongo was gone.
And somewhere inside that moment,
something heavy settled into my chest.
It would stay.
Sometimes sleeping.
Sometimes screaming.
Sometimes light enough to forget.
Sometimes heavy enough to make me run.
And years later,
when I finally boarded a train alone,
sadness with purchasing power,
believing I was beginning my first wandering
children.
I wasn’t.
The road had begun years before.
I simply hadn’t known its name yet.
Thus ends Goa.
The prequel.
The first wandering.
And the birth of the weight the Unbegun would spend years learning how to carry.
