By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Gone

By the time you read this, I’ll be gone.

Well, not gone gone.
Just Passport in hand, gone.

I’ll be somewhere between Barcelona and Mallorca, sitting at a little café with a glass of vino tinto and something delicious in front of me, or lying on a beach staring at the Mediterranean, doing absolutely nothing productive and feeling very fucking good about it.

My phone will hopefully be somewhere at the bottom of my purse, with 12 missed calls, 57 unread emails, and 125 group chat notifications, God I hate the group chats! Does anyone know how can we ban this type of aggression?

But anyway - I have this feeling that something is going to come from this trip although I’m not wanting to put that kind of pressure on Spain, or on myself!

But I do mean like something inside of me, Like some overdue needed clarity and some spiritual insight.

I can feel it coming, even though I don’t completely know what it is yet...
That’s why it’s not a surprise that yet again Facebook and its memories feature showed me September 2014 because exactly twelve years ago, I got on my first international flight as an adult.
Paris. Belgium. Amsterdam.
One week.

At the time, I don’t think I understood how significant that trip would become, but I understood I desperately needed to take it!

I was fresh out of my divorce, the boys were with their dad that week and I was also involved in a toxic relationship with a married man, which is a story for another day- but my need for drama and self-destruction was unchecked and I was broken.

That’s why I remember knowing one thing very clearly...
I needed to get the fuck out of here!
I needed distance from Miami, distance from my life, distance from whatever version of myself I had been living inside.

Originally, I was prepared to go alone but my friend Mari ended up coming with me, and thank God she did because that trip became one of those memories that somehow gets sweeter as the years go by.

We landed exhausted and I was Jet-lagged!

Day one we walking all over Paris, sightseeing, and figuring everything out as we went.
Our first stop was to picnic at Champ de Mars underneath the Eiffel Tower, we eat these little ham and brie sandwiches on the obvious French baguette and I wearing my cute red Beret and I remember feeling completely happy! Then we ending the first night after dinner and an unnecessary amount of drinks back at the Eiffel Tower watching it light up and twinkle close to midnight for the last show.

I had not slept in 24 hours, but I remember how free I felt!
There was no school pickup.
No angry ex-husband, no toxic relationship drama.
No household or dishes waiting for me.
No one asking where I was going or when I was coming home.

And for a few days, I wasn’t really anybody’s anything.
I was just me, completely undefined and untethered.

I didn’t really understand the importance of that then...
I read something recently that said one of the reasons travel can be so transformative is that it temporarily removes the roles we carry around at home.

And when you go somewhere where nobody knows you, those labels loosen a little.

Nobody in Paris knew I was divorced, or in the middle of an affair.
Nobody knew I had children waiting for me back home.
Nobody knew my job or my mistakes or my responsibilities or what I was supposedly doing with my life...

I was just some random woman walking down a street in another country in a red beret.
And you know what?  There is something incredibly freeing about that.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons travel gives so many of us clarity.

It’s not necessarily because Paris, Barcelona or Mallorca has some magical answer waiting for me. But maybe it’s because when you step outside your regular life, all the other noise gets quieter. And underneath the noise, you can actually hear yourself.
What do I want?
What feels good?
What feels alive?
What am I doing because I actually want to do it, and what am I doing because I’ve been doing it for so long that I forgot there was another option? (That’s a big one!)

But I didn’t have language for any of that in 2014...
I just knew I felt different.
 

Then, I fell in love with France!

Some years later, when I did my ancestry DNA, I confirmed that we’re actually part French. My mom had told me this but I never really believed it because it was some family stories that got passed down and it was unconfirmed. So to later confirm it was so cool because of course my immediate thought was "Well, that explains everything I felt in Paris."
The bread. The wine. The attitude.

But I also started thinking about something deeper.

You hear people say that the body remembers. That somehow our DNA carries pieces of our ancestry and lineage, little echoes from people and places we never consciously knew.

I have no idea how much of that is science, how much is spirituality, and how much is me romanticizing the hell out of Paris but it’s Probably some combination of all three.

I do know that France felt familiar to me before I had any reason for it to feel familiar.

And lately, life keeps doing this to me.. This is why Spain feels so magical, I am also part Spaniard, no surprise there. My parents are Cuban, lol! That why I feel this trip will give me that same familiar feeling, like I’ve been there before.

Life (and Facebook!) keeps handing me these little pieces from years ago and making me look at them again.

Things that seemed random at the time suddenly feel connected.

Or maybe I’m the one connecting them now because I’m finally at an age where I have enough life behind me to see the patterns.

Either way, I find it completely fascinating, and I want more!

My friend Mari eventually got married, and her husband proposed to her at the Eiffel Tower. She’s been back to Paris several times since, and every time she goes, she sends me a picture and immediately - I’m back there with her.

Two women sitting underneath the Eiffel Tower, jet-lagged, eating Parisian sandwiches and having absolutely no idea where life was going to take us.

That’s the part that gets me now.

We had no idea!
No clue who we were going to become, we were just there.

Then there was Amsterdam.

Oh my God, I loved Amsterdam!
And yes, I got high in Amsterdam, I was participating in the local culture LOL

But Amsterdam really was incredible. The canals, the bikes, the energy of the city.
It felt so free! This bizarre order in the chaos vibe.

And looking back now, maybe what I was actually falling in love with on that trip wasn’t just Europe. Maybe I was falling in love with the version of myself I was meeting there. Sometimes we fall in love with a city because of the architecture or the food or the history, and sometimes we fall in love with who we are when we’re there...

Paris and Amsterdam introduced me to a woman I hadn’t spent very much time with yet.
The woman who could leave.
The woman who could travel.
The woman who could walk around a foreign country and figure it out.
The woman who could get lost and somehow find her way back.
The woman who didn’t need her entire life mapped out before she was allowed to enjoy it.

Of course I came home and my problems were still waiting for me.
Unfortunately, Paris did not confiscate my emotional baggage at customs.

I still had a divorce to process.
I still had choices I needed to make.
I still had a relationship I would eventually have to understand for what it was in order to heal and move on.

Nothing magically disappeared because I ate a fucking croissant in France.
But something had shifted...I had seen myself somewhere else.

And once you’ve seen yourself somewhere else, it becomes much harder to convince yourself that the life you are currently living is the only life available to you.

Maybe that’s what I’m feeling now. Because here I am again.

September.
Another international flight.
Another moment where I don’t completely know what comes next.

Except this time, I am not the woman I was in 2014.

Bitch, Not even close!
I’m on the horizon of fifty now, which feels completely wild to say.

I was just having this conversation over Martinis with a friend who already turned 51, and we were talking about how you suddenly become much more aware of time. The clock is ticking, not in some depressing or morbid way, but-Just, in a very real way, and you start looking at your life differently.
What do I still want to accomplish?
Where do I still want to go?
What do I still want to experience?
And maybe more importantly, what am I officially done doing??

Because I feel like I’ve lived a lot of life already.
I’ve raised children.
I’ve been married and divorced.
I’ve built a business.
I’ve gone back into corporate America.
I’ve been broke.
I’ve had my heart broken.
I’ve been in love.
And I’ve lost people I loved.

I’ve started over more times than I ever expected to in this lifetime, and now I find myself in a season where I am more financially comfortable than I have ever been. I’m not rich, Let’s not get carried away. But I am comfortable, and I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again:

Having money makes a big fucking difference!

People love to repeat that money doesn’t buy happiness, But fuck that!

Because money buys options!
Money buys time.
And Money buys a plane ticket, with little hesitation to upgrade the seat!
Money gives you enough breathing room to make a decision because it feels right instead of because you have absolutely no other choice.

There’s an old joke: Would you rather cry broke or cry rich?

Bitch, I would rather cry rich.
Every damn time!

But I tell you what Money doesn’t protect you from.
Heartbreak.

It doesn’t protect you from grief, and It doesn’t answer the big questions for you.

But financial stability gives you space. And space? That’s powerful. Because when you’re not constantly operating from survival, you get to ask a completely different question.

Not "What do I have to do?", but "What do I actually want?"
And maybe that’s part of where I am right now.

I wrote in my last blog that I don’t completely know where the future is going.

I don’t know exactly what Karmic Currency becomes.
I don’t know where Sandy lands professionally.
I don’t know what stays, what changes, what opportunity appears or which door suddenly flings opens.

And surprisingly, I’m okay with that!

An earlier version of me would have needed the answer already.
A plan.
A backup plan.
And a backup to plan for the backup plan!
And probably a spreadsheet, and a tarot spread, and lots of wine!

But now, I think I’m more interested in seeing what happens and how it all unfolds, because whatever decisions I make from here on out, I want them to feel good! And yes, I’ve used the word hedonistic to describe that.

Not hedonistic in the burn-my-life-down-and-move-to-Ibiza sense.

Although, Maybe. I reserve the right to reconsider that, lol!

But I mean hedonistic in the sense that I have lived enough hardship in this life to stop voluntarily participating in things that make me miserable! I want my choices to feel good in my heart. In my soul.

And, as Cardi B said “Feeling all whoo! Butterflies in my stomach and vagina” lol

There. I said it, I’m almost fifty. I don’t have time to pretend anymore.
I want the rest of my life to feel like mine and maybe that’s also why this trip feels important to me because for a few days, I get to put all the identities down again.

The banker.
The entrepreneur.
The mother.
The girlfriend.
The woman who has spent most of her life being responsible for something or somebody.

I get to leave all of them in Miami for a little minute.
Not because I don’t love those parts of myself. I do.

They’re all me but I’m curious about the woman underneath all of them.
Who is she sitting at a café in Barcelona when nobody needs anything from her?
What does she think about lying on a beach in Mallorca when there is nowhere she needs to be?
What does she want when there is no one around to influence the answer?

I don’t know.

And I don’t want to manufacture or predict some profound answer before I’ve actually lived it. I don’t need Barcelona to reveal the meaning of my life over tapas y tinto. I don’t need Mallorca to hand me a five-year plan while I’m lying on the beach, I just want to go..

Experience it and Pay attention.

Because there is one thing I know about myself...I usually feel something coming before I understand what it is.

I call it intuition.
Clairsentience.
Clairvoyance.

You can call it Pattern recognition or call it whatever makes you comfortable.

But I know that feeling, and I feel it now.

There is something on the other side of this particular chapter.
Something interesting.
Something exciting.
Something I haven’t seen yet.

Twelve years ago, I got on a plane because I desperately needed to get away from my life, but this time feels different. This time I’m not running away from anything.

This time, I’m running towards something and I’m creating enough distance to see what it is I’m moving toward.

So - by the time you read this, I’ll be gone.
Somewhere in Spain.

Hopefully eating something amazing and definitely drinking wine! Definitely I will be staring out over the water at some point, because that’s where I do some of my best thinking.

I have absolutely no idea what I’ll come home knowing that I don’t know right now, But I think that might be the whole point. 

September 2014.
September 2026.

Same woman.
Completely different life.

And somewhere between those two trips is the woman I’ve been becoming all along.