Seven years before I moved to Iquitos, a friend mentioned it in passing.

“There’s Machu Picchu, Arequipa, Iquitos,” he said, listing places to visit in Peru.

“Iquitos? What’s that?”

I’d never heard of it before, and something about the word snagged my attention.

“It’s a city in the jungle,” he said. “I don’t know much about it.”

Four years later, I visited Iquitos for the first time. It was… hard to be in.

It’s feverishly hot. It’s dusty, loud, and overstimulating. There’s something almost threatening about the extremeness of it all. A year later, though, I got a job with an NGO and moved there.

I have since moved back to Lima, but Iquitos has not lost its hold on me. I go back whenever I can.

There’s something…central about that place. Something infinite. Something capital-R Real.

✨

Isn’t it funny how that happens?

Something—a word, an image, a name—makes us feel that shiver of recognition. And then later, maybe years later, that thing enters our stories, and changes us.

It’s like we recognize a memory from our future.

Like Liz Gilbert wrote in Eat Pray Love: maybe it’s the oak tree calling back to the acorn it once was: “Grow, grow.”

Or maybe it’s not mystical at all.

Maybe we just build our futures based on what appeals to us in the present. Maybe that pull, that frisson of familiarity, is only traceable in retrospect.

I don’t know. But I can’t help but believe it’s the former.

💜 ✒️ 📖

Have you ever felt called somewhere, or recognized a “future memory”?

What was it like?

This is the kind of reflective writing we do in Memoir in Miniature, an hour-long dive into something that grips you from your past.

Click here for more info. I’d love to write with you.