I started writing about Home, but then I realized - it’s Che Guevara day today. And how could I ignore that? Home can wait.

Che. The name itself feels like smoke and fever and some impossible kind of fire that refuses to be tamed. I’ve never met him, obviously, but he visits me anyway. In books, in photographs, in the smell of gunpowder, in the fever of mountains I’ll never climb. I think of that famous photograph, the one where his eyes are alive even in stillness. The eyes of someone who has seen enough injustice to combust, yet chooses to walk through it instead of running. I wonder if he ever slept comfortably, if he ever felt completely safe. Probably not. And yet he carried on. Something is terrifying about that; about the willingness to embrace danger not for yourself, but for a world that doesn’t care if you live or die.

I think about his travels, the motorbike diaries, cold nights in the Andes, the hunger, the fear, the laughter with comrades, the chaos and beauty of roads less traveled. He moved through life as if there were no borders - not just national, but moral, emotional, political. Everything was a frontier. And I wonder - can anyone today still move like that? Can we still inhabit our own lives without fences, without compromises, without the constant grinding of routine dulling the edges of our souls?

I feel that in my own ways. My revolutions are quiet. They are in letters I write and never send, in thoughts that I dare to speak or keep. They are in the small rebellions: staying awake when the world wants me to sleep, speaking the truth when silence is easier, feeling the full weight of my own despair and joy, and not turning away. And still, the spirit of Che whispers: don’t wait. Don’t settle. Don’t normalize cruelty or complacency. Find the edges of your life and step off them.

Sometimes that terrifies me. I think about risk not as dramatic revolutions with guns and barricades, but as the kind that is internal, invisible, moral. To live fully is to stake your existence on something that might destroy you. Sometimes it’s the person you love, the letter you write, the act of refusing to quiet your own voice. That’s a revolution, too. Small, yes, but necessary. The fire is always in the doing, even if no one else ever sees it.

I imagine Che smiling, a tiny smirk, knowing that revolutions are messy, sometimes doomed, sometimes lonely, but always necessary. I imagine him laughing in the rain with someone, talking quietly in a tent about nothing and everything at once, and then riding off, unstoppable, because surrender was never in his vocabulary. I envy that. I envy the purity of his choice, the total commitment, even to a world that will betray you, that will tire you, that will leave you alone.

And then I think about mortality. Che died young. He was killed. A life burned fast, hot, and incompletely. And yet he remains, uncontainable, immortal in photographs and books, in the imagination of people who yearn for justice and freedom and passion that doesn’t ask for permission. There is a lesson there, though it stings: to live fully is to risk obliteration. To love fully is to risk heartbreak. To write, to speak, to revolt, is to risk being misunderstood, erased, or silenced. But the alternative - quiet mediocrity, half-alive existence - is far worse.

I am not revolutionary in the streets. I do not march or wave flags. But I carry the fire in my own ways. Writing, thinking, refusing, feeling: these are my guns. My motorbike is my mind. I take journeys into my own fears, my own desires, my own grief. And I am not alone. We are never entirely alone when we are aware, when we dare, when we refuse to be anesthetized by convenience or fear.

Che is everywhere if you let him in. In the smell of a wet mountain, in the ink of a diary, in the rage and hope that swirl together in quiet rebellion. He is in the tension between knowing the world is cruel and still choosing to act, to live, to love, to risk. He is in every person who refuses to accept the limits imposed on them. And I feel, in writing this, a strange kinship. I have not ridden across continents on a motorbike. I have not led armies. I have not risked my life in jungles or deserts. But I have been awake when the world slept, I have loved dangerously, I have confronted despair and kept breathing. That is my small revolution.

Sometimes I wonder: do we fetishize Che? Do we romanticize a life that was fundamentally violent and dangerous? Perhaps. But I cannot help it. There is inspiration in him, yes, but also a warning. There is longing in his legacy, but also grief. He is a reminder and reckoning, both, a mirror that does not flinch from the truth.

So I write this, on Che Guevara day, instead of about Home. Home can wait. I write to remind myself that living fully is messy, uncontainable, and sometimes terrifying. That courage is not the absence of fear, but persistence despite it. That passion is not a gentle fire, but a wildfire that consumes and purifies. That love, grief, hope, despair- all of it - is necessary. That the world is often cruel, indifferent, unjust - but we are still required to move through it with fire in our eyes and hearts open.

I do not know if Che would approve of my quiet revolutions. Perhaps he would smile, shake his head, and keep moving. That’s enough. I can learn from that. I can act, I can feel, I can write, I can resist. Home can wait. And maybe, in that waiting, I am still learning how to carry the fire.

“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine” - I had that written on my hostel door!

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