Costa Rica

The summer before senior year I spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica with a group of friends, and it ended up being one of those trips that quietly rewires the way you see things.

Into the green

I don't think I was ready for how alive everything is down there. We hiked up to Irazú, this massive volcano with a crater that looks like the surface of another planet, and on other days we were deep in rainforest so thick and loud and green that it honestly felt like the whole place was breathing around us. I saw lizards just hanging out on walls like they owned them, heard birds I had no names for, and picked up the kind of sunburn you can only really laugh about, because there's nothing else to be done at that point.

Hands in the dirt

A big chunk of the trip wasn't sightseeing at all, it was actual work, and that turned out to be the part that stuck with me most. We spent days planting and getting our hands properly dirty, the slow unglamorous kind of effort that never makes for a flashy photo but somehow feels like it matters more than anything else you do all week. There's something clarifying about doing real physical work in a place that beautiful, surrounded by a group of people who slowly stop being just classmates and start being the kind of friends you'd cross an ocean with all over again.

The nights

And then there were the evenings, all of us tired and sunburned and gathered together under a sky absolutely packed with stars, talking about nothing and everything at once. I came home with bug bites, a peeling nose, and this quiet sense that the world is a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot kinder, than it tends to look from inside one classroom.