Nina St. Pierre

I have this set of love letters. Their envelopes are worn soft. The papery rectangles are hand-painted by an artist, a man whose small-town swagger captured me at 15, and again at 20 in a dark, smelly bar I snuck into.

In 1996, my mother bought me a pair of baby-blue shell toe Adidas. The price tag: sixty dollars. For the rest of high school, they were my go-tos.

As a flat-chested '90s tween, I spent most of my time in a one-piece. On weekends, I rocked trendy snap-crotch bodysuits while running my neighborhood dance troupe's rehearsal to "Baby Got Back."

My first language was one of transcendence. I was raised by a single, nomadic mother on a relentless spiritual journey, and my childhood was laced with chatter of ascended masters and astral traveling.

"Go all the way down this road,” the driver said as he pulled my giant backpack from the combi, a hybrid van-taxi, before chugging off and leaving me at the gated entrance to Vilcabamba, Ecuador’s southernmost village.

I waited in line for an hour to see his heart, eating sausage in a semolina bun with roasted hot and sweet peppers, watching children chase each other around headstones in the church graveyard as live Polka music blared.