La Noche Boca Arriba: A Reflection on Germany

Time and time again, a short story that I read in my 7th grade Spanish class reemerges in my mind. “La Noche Boca Arriba” by Julio Cortazar. I will now summarize it blasphemously in English (although I remember we read this in Spanish in class).

The protagonist is a man who gets into a motorcycle accident, finds himself injured and wakes up in a hospital bed. His consciousness floats in and out between his dreams and reality. His dream is shockingly vivid and he is running away from los Motecas (which is a fun play on words, since the Spanish word for motorcycle is moto). Eventually, he finds himself tied down onto a rock and being carried up to a platform to be offered as a human sacrifice. In the final moments, he realizes that the true “reality” is in fact in the Moteca world, just when he is about to die as the executioner comes at him with a knife.

Although this story is pretty gory and dark, I think the superposition feeling described in this story is close to how I feel after spending my summer in Germany, and then returning to the US.

In Germany, I felt a freedom that I had never experienced before in the US. Although I have lived alone for many years before in the US, starting in undergrad and throughout my years in grad school, this was different. I experienced a groundedness, a practicality that imbued the small European city and the people there. A slowness in the air, a linger in the step, a chance to breathe deeply. As a girl raised to always gun for the next thing, it was a new feeling. I began to feel like an empty figure in a kid’s coloring book, with the colors slowly being filled in. A little pink here, a dash of green there.

I became more aware about the aspects that made me unique as a person. Instead of being the “studious Asian” girl, I found myself assuming different aspects of my identity that I had not embodied in quite some time. The American. The ballerina. The pianist. I guess just me. Olivia.

When I think about my summer there, I don’t know which life is real anymore. Like in the story of “La Noche Boca Arriba,” I wonder which life is the dream. Or if there truly is a “real” life. Maybe this is something we can choose.

I guess this blog post is another form of my accessing another part of me that has laid dormant for some time. The writer.

It is the best tool I have to distill strong emotions and reflection. To encapsulate feelings before they slip away like water through my fingers. The human mind is designed to forget pain. But I think there is a dark beauty in remembering the spectrum of emotions, because that is the human experience.

And so this a snapshot of the roiling thoughts in my mind and the whispers in my heart. A girl’s search for meaning in this strange world. An ode to the beauties of humanity and all the pieces of myself (discovered and undiscovered) that are all worth finding.