For Travi
my friend who went missing in the mountains.
When you join Peace Corps, they put you in a room with a group of strangers and tell you that this is your cohort now. It’s intense and artificial and intimate too fast. You do icebreakers. You clock everyone immediately.
That’s where I met Travis. I call him Travi now.
I couldn’t stand him.
He was older than me. Private. Confident in a way I read as arrogance. He brought an extremely expensive road bike to Guatemala, which felt ridiculous at the time because we were only allowed two checked bags for two years of service. He talked about the bike a lot. I thought it was lame. Now I understand it differently. He knew who he was.
He was also really good at Spanish. Not a native speaker, just a whole lot better than me. He wanted to help. I didn’t know how to receive help like that yet, especially from older men I didn’t trust. So instead, I felt small and defensive. I remember calling my parents and telling them I had found a new nemesis.
He loved hiking, but in a way that felt secretive, like it was something you earned access to. I still don’t agree with that. He was also obsessed with pupusas, which are not comida típica guatemalteca, but he would disappear to find them anyway. He would occasionally drop a piece of personal lore and then immediately panic that he’d said too much. I would never fully know who he was.
Once, he showed up with a broken hand and refused to tell anyone how it happened. It became a kind of loving game among the people closest to him. We’d piece together his backstory from fragments—odd jobs, places he’d lived, timelines that almost lined up. None of it felt invasive. It felt like proximity. Like this was simply how you knew him.
He was my nemesis.
Then we got assigned our sites. Five volunteers within two hours of each other. Proximity does what proximity does.
We started spending weekends together. Hiking. Talking. Slowly. I realized he was actually very sweet. That I’d misunderstood his help. That his privacy wasn’t superiority—it was protection. I learned things about him sideways. I still didn’t know much, but we became close.
In Guatemala, there are these mega-stores called PACAs—secondhand clothes shipped down from the U.S. when places like Goodwill have too much. He went obsessively. He would find things that were somehow perfect for each of us: a dumb pun shirt, a Christmas sweater when we missed home. He gave gifts quietly. I stole his sweaters.
He was mean on hikes, by the way. If you were lagging, he did not hide his disdain. This was not a perfect friendship.
The day I decided he was one of my best friends was my birthday. I was sick with a parasite. Miserable. Questioning what I was doing with my life. I don’t think I told him I was having a bad day. I usually shell up instead.
He asked his cool host family to drive him an hour to my site anyway. This man showed up at my door with a tall boy Gallo and said we were going to a local soccer game his friends played in. It ended up being one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.
After Guatemala, we kept texting. A lot, I think. I moved to D.C. He was doing something cool and unclear, as usual. He told me he had a sweatshirt for me, one from Guatemala, or Iceland, or a thrift store. He was going to stay with me. We were going to see another Peace Corps friend.
Then my mom called about a family emergency. She came to stay with me. I asked him if he could stay with our friend instead or get a hotel. I never saw him.
He went hiking alone in Ecuador. He went missing. He has not been found.
It took me a long time to write this. Partly because he was so private. Partly because I didn’t know his family, and partly because there’s no shared mourning space. No resolution.
As you get older, people disappear from your life in all kinds of ways. Slowly. Quietly. Permanently. Each time is its own small grief. This loss is different only because it’s literal. Because he didn’t just fade; he vanished.
Sometimes it feels like he was an imaginary friend. Someone who existed for a chapter. Someone who showed up exactly when I needed him and then disappeared.
I didn’t realize how much comfort I took in knowing he was out there, how much I counted on the idea that if I ever wanted to do something a little insane in Latin America, he’d be there—until he wasn’t.
This isn’t a story about regret. I didn’t do anything wrong. I wouldn’t change how I handled that moment with my mom. But it is a story about honesty. About loving people as they are. About letting them remain unfinished.
What a guy. What a strange, imperfect, unlikely friendship. Cheers to you, Travi. I hope you are chilling in a mysterious off-grid cafe—eating a pupusa—right about now.
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