Yesterday, I was on the phone for an hour with an artist in Santiago. She told me she didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to visit the Atacama desert when I come to Chile because the altitude could cause problems for my health.

I thought deserts could only be low, like hot, dry basins. Frying pans over hell. But I was reading about it afterwards and the Atacama’s sloping down the left-hand side of the Andes. It’s so high, tour guides bring oxygen tanks. And I’m closing the tabs on the astronomy tours I was looking at after reading about how people with my condition, POTS, are especially prone to altitude sickness because we basically experience something like it here on the ground.

And yet last night I slept ten hours and dreamt I went to the desert anyway. On the plane ride over, my arms began to tingle, but I felt better when the other passengers on the flight said they could feel it too. We landed and I knew things weren’t right but I thought, well, I’ve come all this way. And anyway, I wanted a clear view of the stars in that place where NASA tests their equipment because the ground is so much like Mars.

The group waited until nightfall and a bus took us deep into the red. When we walked forward, we floated. I dreamt the altitude was so high that gravity was low, and I remember bouncing down a path other tourists had made before me. Desire lines in space. Giddy in my sleep. And when I finally remembered to look up, the stars weren’t scattered like they usually are, in all their different sizes and uneven brightness. In my dream, the stars were making a uniform grid of lights across the sky, as if the planet was caught in a great silver net.

After 5 years of Long Covid decimating my body and income and independence; after 2 years learning Chilean Spanish over video calls so I could feel like I was travelling even when I could barely leave the house; and after 1 year on the right combination of medicine that meant I could start a cardiology rehab programme that’s had me in the gym basically every single day since, I just found out I got Arts Council Funding. Later this year, I’m going to be travelling through Chile on my own for an entire month to do the research I need to finish my next book. I’ve never been before and I wonder if it will feel like Mars or home.

I’ve gotten very used to things going wrong in my life and then staying wrong, so this news has been a rupture. I’m floating when I was only expecting to walk, and at the same time, panicking that I am in the air. I could book the flights and get Covid again. Lose my baseline. I could get an orthostatic headache on the 14 hour flight. I could get a migraine alone. Chronic fatigue might make tar of my thoughts, and I might be in the middle of interviewing an important stranger who doesn’t know anything about my health only to lose all the Chilean Spanish I’ve learnt. So much has to go right — and I wake up with a nosebleed, bad skin, a fucking cold sore, and then sleep eleven hours the following night. Anxiety making films of my dreams.

So I’m zoning out on the couch when YouTube serves me episode one of something called Tip to Tip. Fine, whatever. It’s two American content creators, Ludwig and Michael Reeves, at the start of a challenge to drive motorbikes from the south coast of China to the Mongolian border, except they’re not allowed phones, maps, or translation apps. Motorbikes aren’t permitted in major cities across China, so it’s going to be a very rural trip. They’ve done a few weeks of Mandarin lessons in preparation, and that’s it, they’re off.

I wasn’t expecting to care, but I slammed through all 16 days of their trip in a weekend. The margin for error with Chinese as a tonal language is a joke waiting to happen. The boys keep asking strangers for hotels but the word for hotel is close to 9 o’clock, pig shop and dictionary. They’re sitting in a restaurant and when the waitress takes their order, one of them says, ‘can I play with rice?’ I cry laughing but can’t get the words out to explain to my boyfriend how this is perfect dramatic irony — that the audience has subtitles but the boys have no idea what they’re saying in the moment, and won’t until they get their phones back and see the translations.

When I sit down at this serious art criticism job to write a text about a YouTube series, I wonder if I’m mentioning the dramatic irony to persuade you it’s something worth writing about — but my boyfriend reminds me an exhibition has never made me cry laughing. It was the culture I needed this week because the Chinese people they meet along the way keep laughing too. My traumatised animal brain thinks going to Chile is an exam and if I get something wrong, the anxiety police will arrest me. But then, my brain thinks two years of Chilean Spanish lessons aren’t enough, and that no amount ever will be; and I wonder why it’s so hard to have what I want, even when it’s being offered to me.

Halfway through the China trip, the boys go through a rural village, see people eating food at the side of the road and stop to order lunch. They have no idea it’s a funeral. The funeral-goers don’t want to make them feel insensitive for an honest mistake, so a family member called Li takes them on a tour of the village, all the way up to a viewpoint overlooking a factory that makes bricks, they share fruit and then he cooks them lunch at his house. Li invites them to sing Take Me Home, Country Roads together. The episode goes viral in China.

You don’t see people getting annoyed at these small failures. People laugh with them for trying, or go out of their way to call relatives in other countries so they can communicate. I reckon I get embarrassed speaking in Spanish because, yeah, I don’t want to make mistakes, but also I’m presenting a different person to the one I am in English, so it’s not just an information gap but an identity gap as well. But like, who cares? It’s so easy to default to serious when you’re alone but the boys made me not want to care. I watched strangers give them one hundred ciggies and kids take them to a meadow, and things that go wrong in earlier episodes are solved 10 days later like somebody has written impossible story arcs into a documentary, and it’s endearing, and it was exposure therapy —

but it was also like a terrible dare. That dream version of me who went to the desert regardless, she’s watching two boys make it up as they go along, with all that health and money, and she’s thinking: Chile could be like writing a book, where you have an idea of how it’s going to go but the actual words take you somewhere else entirely. She’s telling me I will always have this chronic illness but I won’t always be in Chile. She’s telling me they have oxygen tanks available, and if I go, I could see the geoglyph of the Atacama Giant. Observatories. Salt flats, and sand dunes becoming piles of used clothes. I could walk through the Valley of the Moon.

When I wake up, I text my friend asking to be put in touch with her therapist. With the funding paying me a wage, I can finally afford it. I need to calm down. I need to make some decisions. I need to deal with these things when I’m awake.

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