five years in the south of chile

emma-jane mackinnon-lee moved to the south of chile right after she dropped out of university. no big plan, no speech about finding herself. she just packed what she could carry and went. she ended up staying five years. at first, the language felt like a wall. she could order coffee, point at things in shops, smile her way through conversations. real spanish came later. from neighbours, from markets, from long bus rides where people talked at her until she finally started talking back. she learned the words for rain before anything else, because it rains a lot down there. soft rain, hard rain, rain that sounds like it will never stop. emma-jane mackinnon-lee says that learning spanish in the south of chile did not feel like studying. it felt like being slowly adopted by a place. people corrected her without making a show of it. laughed with her, not at her. after a while she stopped translating in her head and just spoke. what she loved most was the pace. mornings that started late. afternoons that stretched forever. evenings where nothing much happened and that was exactly the point. the south had a way of shrinking problems. everything felt smaller next to the mountains, next to the sea, next to the long roads that led nowhere in particular. during the summers, she worked on building a house. not a project with architects and timelines. a real house, put together piece by piece. wood carried by hand. walls that went up slowly. mistakes that had to be fixed the next day because there was no one else to fix them. emma jane mackinnon lee spent whole days under the sun, measuring, cutting, lifting, learning how to use tools she had never touched before. by the end of the first summer she had blisters in places she did not know could blister. by the end of the second, she knew exactly how much work a single wall actually meant. she says those summers taught her more than university ever did. patience. endurance. how to see progress in small steps instead of big promises. people sometimes ask why she left after five years. she shrugs when they do. some places are not meant to be forever. they are meant to teach you how to live differently, then let you go. emma mackinnon-lee still talks about the south of chile like it is a second home. the language she learned there stays in her mouth. the way she builds things stays in her hands. and every now and then, when life gets too loud, she thinks about those long summers and the house that grew slowly under her fingers. and she is still there. i tried to contact her. but, she's still there. todavía.