I woke up startled somewhere over Central America.
Great Scott.
I was strapped into my version of a DeLorean, hurtling toward Costa Rica and, apparently, my future.
A week earlier, I had finished nine weeks of radiation treatment. Now I was flying toward San Jose to spend a week figuring out whether I could live in another country. Doc Brown spent three movies warning Marty McFly about messing with the space-time continuum. Change one thing and you could create a paradox big enough to rip the universe apart.
I was hoping my plans would be less dramatic.
Costa Rica hit me with humidity. I had come from Phoenix, where the air was so dry it sometimes felt like Mother Nature had forgotten to install weather. I grew up in the Midwest, so I thought I understood humidity. Costa Rica took it to a whole new level. Sticky, heavy, immediate. You didn’t need Einstein, the scientist or the dog, to figure out I wasn’t in Arizona anymore.
I rented a car and made the three-hour drive south toward San Isidro, where I stayed with a friend I’d been talking with on Facebook for four months. Her house was in the mountains about five kilometers north of town. I was learning that Costa Rica measured distance differently, and not just because everything was in kilometers. Five kilometers could take forever.
Traffic crawled, and the roads twisted through the mountains. Getting anywhere felt like you should pack a lunch for it. Doc Brown said where they were going, they didn’t need roads. He’d obviously never tried scouting a place to live in the mountains of Costa Rica.
I spent the week doing things tourists don’t usually put on postcards. I went into town to meet with my immigration attorney for about an hour. He copied my passport and driver’s license, had me sign the paperwork, collected the first part of his fee, and explained what would happen next. After I returned to the States, he would take care of filing everything in San Jose for me.
While I didn’t have a flux capacitor, I did have immigration paperwork, a rental car, and a week to decide whether I was about to blow up my own timeline. Somewhere between that meeting and those mountain roads, I realized I wasn’t just visiting Costa Rica anymore. I was tinkering with my own future. Doc Brown would’ve been furious, but Costa Rica, on the other hand, seemed perfectly fine with it.
Then one morning I got out of the shower and found an iguana camping out underneath the refrigerator. This wasn’t some cute little lizard. The thing looked big enough to be a Komodo dragon.
I grabbed the broom and started chasing the damn thing around the kitchen, trying to convince it that this particular future didn’t include sharing my house. It was fast as hell. I sure wasn’t. At some point I was screaming like a little girl and jumping up on the kitchen counter trying to avoid being eaten alive. Biff could’ve called me chicken all he wanted to. I was busy trying not to be breakfast for what I could’ve sworn was a dinosaur.
There was another adventure involving the rental car. On a trip to Walmart, I accidentally ran a red light. Costa Rica welcomed me with a ticket to the tune of $524. That was one hell of an expensive grocery store run.
For all the jokes, though, something real was happening underneath them. The country was beautiful, the people were kind, and Spanish scared me a little because I couldn’t speak it fluently. I figured I’d learn as I went. I bought sandwiches, chips, soda, and enough junk food to survive several days in the mountains. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t a vacation brochure. It was ordinary life, and that was what I needed to see.
I could see myself here. By the end of the week, the question wasn’t whether I could move to Costa Rica. It was how soon I could get back.
When I boarded the plane for Phoenix, I felt relieved to be heading home, but I was also anxious to get moving. There were plans to make, dates to set, things to close out, and a life in Phoenix that suddenly had an expiration date. I was scared and excited at the same time, which is a strange feeling until you realize most big changes probably feel exactly like that.
The weird thing about visiting your future is that the present looks different than when you left it. I first arrived in Costa Rica on April 1, and I came back to stay on June 28.
Eighty-eight days later.
Marty needed 88 miles per hour to reach his future. Apparently, I only needed 88 days.
