It took me one hour to dismante my four and a half month old Ecuadorian existance. To carefully peel Mateo’s watercolors from my wall, to fold my clothes and put them back into the dirty dark blue backpack.

Technically, it was forty five minutes. In the middle of my frenzied packing I lay back on my bed and wondered how it had come to this.

But of course I knew. It had began my first morning, when I had sat down across from Aurora and she had told me her story.