we make the road by walking

It’s been almost a year since I left the US for Guatemala--almost a year of not really having a home or having lots of homes for just enough time to feel that sense of the familiar before moving again; a year of some pretty constant flux. It was all really powerful, and I think I’ve made some of my closest friendships this year. 

I left Mexico in April for a summer job in rural Alaska, where I worked with indigenous youth in small boardwalk villages on the YK Delta. My teammate Jimmy and I struggled for 8ish weeks with the project of “delivering” a program we didn’t create in a community we didn’t understand or belong to, two white kids from the lower 48 dropped in Napaskiak. 

Shout out to all the incredible 10 year olds doing who knows what (they run that town) but most likely riding bikes and making up beach games. I miss you all. 6 months later I’m in Mexico again and it’s feeling both new and full circle with a lot in the circle. 

One week into this CDMX life and I’m moving past timidity for the most part, knowing what I know now about where I might go and how it might feel to get myself there. Typical of first days in a new place, I did a lot of walking last week, in wrong directions and in right directions to places that were closed or didn’t actually exist. I feel like I’ve forgotten most of the Spanish words I keep learning but I doubt it’s as true as it seems to Me, queen of self doubt and over scrutiny.

I’ve only cried in public once, in a big field on the massive UNAM campus after a day of walking and walking and changing directions and talking to pretty much no one. Lots of “I should have”s that, by now, are familiar first-day travel content. I managed, then went to two back to back movies, one of which included free tacos, and felt better. (It was called Todos Los Tacos--I learned a lot, thanks Vice of Mexico. https://munchies.vice.com/es/show/todoslostacos)

The other was called Llévate Mis Amores, a pretty solid documentary about a group of women who collectively provide bagged meals via extremely skilled moving-train handoff to folks immigrating to the US via train from Guate. These women do this work EVERY DAY since 1995 (I think--there were no subtitles). This spoke so hard to the Food Not Bombs of my soul.

The metro has only broken once in my presence and not while I was in it. A friend and I were about to board an already sardine-status train car when the stench of electrical burning and the spread of its thick smoke halted things. The crowd was massive and grew as we stood around waiting for the announcement that, when it came, was unintelligible even to the native speakers around me. Eventually, with everyone off board, it left and another 4 sardine trains passed before we could shove ourselves on (with the not-so-gentle but very well intentioned help of a man with rasta bracelets). 

I was then sung to (or mumbled--words unintelligible) by a man with a teardrop face tattoo and half closed eyes (the open halves were staring me in the face) as I stood completely unable to move because for real, sardines. The rasta bracelet guy eventually made some space for me a few bodies away. 

I’ve had some incredible tacos and have thrown caution to the wind with street food with only one very minor gut debacle that was worth it because cuitlacoche is DELICIOUS. ( https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustilago_maydis ) I think I can say without hyperbolizing that south of the US is where I find myself the most culinarily happy. Just gotta make my own kraut and kombucha and I’ll have what I need.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with passersby, prompted by my obvious non-belonging and sustained by their surprise at my level of Spanish (though I promise them me falta bastante), then by the fact that I am somehow a magnet for the philosophizing of others; these convos inevitably end up in the “what is life” or “where does the body end and the machine begin” territory, beyond even the level of Spanish they think I have. I don’t know how I do that, especially since my convo buddies are pretty much always men and I thus don’t get a chance to talk much. (http://arementalkingtoomuch.com/)

I spent Saturday and Sunday an hour outside of the city--the mini road trip felt so good.

We stayed at a giant magical house that anyone who’s seen Ex Machina would have been a little spooked by--it was basically straight from the movie, sans secret robot chamber. All windows, roof covered by shrubbage, so much light and expanse.

We hiked and meditated and sat in the shallow part of a v cold lake and couldn’t shut up about how cool life can be as we made dinner over fire by candle light. 

I am wound up, that is for sure, and this helped snip some threads, prompt some unwinding, at least show me where I’m holding on or winding tighter. There are some things I do too much (think, mostly, and jump on the opportunity to make changes based on the thoughts) and others not enough (top of the list is probably think kind things to, for, about myself) and this closes me down. It makes moving easier than sitting still. It makes talking to strangers about the nature of the universe more comfortable than showing someone familiar that I love them. It means every goal feels really impossible, and that at the same time it ought to be achievable without my ever feeling failure along the way.

All of this is tied up (to dutifully maintain the thread metaphor) in my recent desire to make home somewhere--to build community again, to make space and hold it for myself, to build something that I’m going to commit to sitting with even when I think I hate it, when it feels safer to quit a job and pack a bag and make my way south by chicken bus to sleep in the gardens of kind strangers. 

I miss routine, consistency, really knowing people and the places we share. I want to challenge myself to push through the isolation that so often encases me around others. It always fades in retrospect, when I look back, so I know I’m imagining it, and I figure I ought to try giving things a little more time these days.

I’ve abandoned english, in a sense, for the more seductive project of learning to express even the most basic of ideas in spanish. There is thus a void of sorts, an empty well filled prior by the nuance of a “mother” tongue.

Incidentally, or maybe thus, it doesn’t move me, this project of rote documentation. I feel bored before I even pop the pen cap, sure only of the pending loss of nuance, an evacuation of what my body held as I moved through the experience that, I tell myself, I surely ought to document, maybe tomorrow before anyone else wakes up, or the next day. 

Probably convictions of inadequacy paired with the exhaustion of having lived through it once already make sleep more appealing every time. Yet the thought of the loss of it all should I not make even the effort brings its own ache. What more can I do with words?

In there somewhere too is a stale voice, “but other experiences are more worthy of this page, this space you ought not take,” but I won’t give this argument any more time than I give its rebuttals, known just as intimately.  How can I release myself?

How can I make something new from what can only have existed once, what will not succumb to adequate reincarnation on a page?

I can do things with words but nothing sticks. I am without my means, my seams, without my method, and now without even the desire to use the language itself.

Maybe I like this, this departure from the tongue that knows me at my most profound (I am intense, I am intense, I hear it often) to one with whom I can only engage on the level of a five year old (add more self-conscious giggling than even the average tot). It is easier, the world simpler here.

I want to share everything I felt in Guatemala through direct translation from me in that moment when I felt it all on top of the volcano or in the cave or sitting sipping sickeningly sweet instant coffee with a family of people who managed, through all the barriers between us, to make me feel so deeply loved, to allow me to so deeply love them.

I want to pull a line from my chest here, where we learn our heart is, where we learn we most feel things, to yours there so you can feel it to.

That the page must come between us, that a later version of myself must translate after the feeling of the room has already faded, transformed, changed temperature and company, makes writing at all a difficult, complicated, exhausting act.

But let me try again from a new distance, with a new resolve and slightly altered approach. Because perhaps the problem lies actually in this effort itself, the attachment to the preservation of something, of a record more linear even than it felt as I lived it, this then this then this and onward. Maybe the struggle isn’t in resisting the loss of what was but in forcing the shape of a perfect paragraph on that which moved me precisely because it was unbounded, multiple, momentary and  explosive. Or because it was something so specific that it resists the lengthy prose with which I approach it from behind, or from the front but backwards.

Sometimes, too, it’s that I don’t know what it even was that moved me. 

How can I describe Ambrosio’s 30 minutes of comedic glory on the palapa-roofed platform at the midway camp after 5 hours of jungle trekking, where he had the rapt attention of every exhausted hiker who’d managed such decent time from El Mirador, without explaining who Ambrosio was first in general (my group’s 60-something year old Guatemalan guide, a scrawny man with a mustache, a swagger, a loving glimmer in his eye and a very dirty mouth) and then who he was to me (I hardly knew, or it changed every hour, but no doubt a sort of grandfather, the kind who doesn’t watch his mouth around the grandkid but makes sure she has plenty of blankets to sleep well)? I couldn’t understand most of his rapid off-color jokes but loved their rhythm, his glow as they landed, as everyone laughed.

How do I fit it in? Do I wait for someone to ask? Do you want to know about the time I went alone to some waterfalls 40+ km outside of town with no guidance but some hearsay and the confirmation of locals that “Sí, vale la pena,” (yes, it’s worth the trouble)? I strung my hammock in a treehouse and, after an afternoon swim in water bluer than my freshly dyed hair, met two Italians from Canada who shared their roasted vegetables and reminded me what it meant to have company.

Or the time I hitchhiked to some lakes with two Mexican friends whose almost musical use of slang brought both longing to move with spanish this way and the profound desire to hide, to close my eyes, to nurse my headache. 

Or all the ways I navigated the moments when men realized my spanish was decent enough to field flirtatious come-ons, or assumed it wasn’t decent enough to pointedly deflect straight up mid afternoon park-gropings (it was, for the most part, first in the form of memorized phrases taught by a Guatemalan friend and later impulsive don’t fucking touch me’s. I was, of course, still left feeling it all, the complicated threads I can’t grasp of what it means to be here, to have been touched but to have first been here). 

A Sunday in March, Petén Guatemala, 2016

Things have changed drastically since I first caught a cold in the Xela house with the dirty white dogs. There’s a strange feeling of freedom in living without doors or complete walls or electricity, with a pit toilet and outdoor pila. I know this freedom is also the freedom of being able to come and go, of being able to choose this “simpler” lifestyle, of being able to comment at all on how good it feels to leave televisions behind. I’m trying to be mindful of this while also acknowledging the many realities at play, one of which is that acquiring shit and having money does have a tangible impact, that capitalism is a beast, that people here crave in many of the same ways that which we all learn we ought to long for, but that there are important differences in the day-to-day, the energy of folks here and it feels good to adjust, to let it chip a little at my own expectations and norms.

We are all just as outside as inside here (I’m speaking literally but it translates to a feeling) both because it’s hot as shit and because doors and walls cost money. I am recognizing the luxury in what I’d prior thought of as basic things, such as a refrigerator. This is cliche but I can’t help it.

Rosie and I spent the day with Adolfo searching for a motorcycle in Santa Elena. His kindness is perplexing and contagious. We learned a lot but made no purchases and treated him to lunch in Flores which I didn’t realize till I got to Peten is an island. 

The evening: street food (tamales, bags of green mango, a perfectly hacked coconut (maybe my favorite thing about Guatemalan food options though the tortillas are a close second, speaking of which…)). The tortillas in Peten are different than in the highlands, a little bigger and less dense, more browned, and made by pressing a ball of dough onto a plastic circle cut from a shopping bag instead of by the pat-pat-pat of the hand-to-hand Highlands method. Instead of the occasional house or tienda que las vende, here they’re made in the front yard of practically every other house, under a palapa roof over the same iron plate as in Xela (tomal in Spanish) set atop stones that house the fire. The tortilla maker, always a woman (all the boys I’ve asked just giggle or seem confused when I ask why they don’t learn), always with quick hands, pulls wet corn dough and rolls and pats and shapes and slaps and tosses it on the stove and flips and stacks, all like a dance, and sells to the waiting people. People are almost always waiting, especially in the dark of 6:30 pm dinnertime. The Quetzal equivalent of 13 cents for 5.

Every house is also a tienda here. Someone will sell you something, trying to make money this way for lack of other work. I want to remember what this feels like, to lie under this mosquito net in this beautiful mess of a permaculture farm and half-built structures after a day of Spanish speaking and beyond-full bus riding and tamale-eating and, through it all, mad sweating, in this poor town (aldea pobre, not pobre aldea) where I’m starting to recognize faces and starting to understand how it all moves here or doesn’t, the hum and what catches it, the rhythm and what it lacks (money, mostly, but of course it’s not so simple). In San Jose there are things to be said about everyone but I’d prefer to believe they’re all just full of love.

A Monday in March (the next day)

Today I am feeling that frustration of consistent Spanish speaking, on the verge of tears and ready to leave it behind, sit alone in silent acceptance that I’ve forgotten every word, every verb conjugation, every slang term I’ve ever half-successfully inserted into the casual conversations of the preceding Good Days. I imagine I appear very grumpy on these days and I want to care but, like a stubborn child, don’t, keep scowling. But of course, and this a sign of the growth I’m busy denying, I’m all day mixing languages in my brain, reaching for “buscar” as I explain in English that I’m off to look for fruit, realizing that “paracer” has a kind of subtle meaning that doesn’t quite exist in English though, sure, it just means “to seem.”

I’m sitting on this private beach by the lake listening to the little waves lapping, post-swim journaling in the palm tree shade. I’ve been eating a lot here, not because there’s any sort of abundance (quite the opposite) but because I’m craving something. Maybe more water, maybe something more abstract. I miss my yoga practice but not much else. I wonder if I’ll ever make it to Mexico.

I feel a familiar creeping habit of not trusting myself, a physical, sensory fear of the judgement of others (myself) that I’m so sure will come should I make the wrong move. That this should infiltrate my decision making is quite understandable considering how little I understand, considering how much I want to move through these spaces ethically, considering how much I’m moving. Anyway I’m growing and I can’t help that.

March 16, 2016, Petén Guatemala, Maria Louisa’s and Adolfo’s house

I moved in with Adolfo, Maria Louisa, and their two sons Osman (8) and Louis (3), or really in with Maria Louisa’s mother two houses down who has an extra bed in her one room house. I eat with Adolfo and fam, though, as does Doña Julia, so it’s one family in two houses on either side of another house, where a cousin lives who seems wealthier and whose relationship with the rest is kind of a mystery to me. I’ve never met her.

My first meal here was by candlelight, spaghetti (pasta in Spanish means toothpaste btw) and, yes, tortillas. This has taken some getting used to: scooping spaghetti with tortillas to make spaghetti tacos. I don’t...hate it.

Osman and I were left to our giggling after we’d all finished eating, he with his school notebook and a pen carefully drawing the lines to form what, should I fail to guess the proper letters, would later hang my hang-person (gender neutral at the least if we were going to play this violent word game--he indulged me). His first word for me was his dad’s name misspelled so I “lost” because who could guess that in any language. The second was agua. I got that one.

This morning I learned to make tortillas with Maria Louisa, pressing the ball in circles in an attempt to mimic her been-doing-it-since-age-7 rhythm. At breakfast we laughed at the obvious differences between her perfect, thin circles and my thick ovals. “Poco a poco!” she reassured me.

In the afternoon we took a family walk to a nature reserve up the dirt road across the street, guarded by a beautiful gate made of found wood pieces that was opened for us by a very skinny man with long dark curls and a sparse white mustache who was carrying a machete in a beautiful sling. 

I climbed to the top of the tallest treehouse I’ve ever seen and sat in the metal shelf-seat at the very top, above all the jungle trees as far as I could see. Everything had creaked and swayed as I’d climbed, making me tense and nervous, but as I sat I felt myself relax, maybe for the first time in a while. 

On the walk home Osman talked to me the whole way in rapid fire kid-speak peppered with “A MI ME ENCANTA [insert food item or insect here]” and descriptions of how he’d like to live in Hawaii with cucumbers on his eyes. I love the way he talks. I learned the words: hormiga (ant); trampa (trap); Voler (i knew this one but now I’ll remember it); filado.

March 17, 2016 Petén todavía

MY BODY HURTS me duele el cuerpo

MY BRAIN HURTS me duele el cerebro

los niños están CHASING el pato los niños están corriendo

Today has my head throbbing. I’ve spoken nearly only Spanish all day and am so tempted to head for the lake where I can turn it off, speak some luxurious first language, say what I want rather than departing half way through my sentence for another route more likely lined with word options I actually know.

Today Maria Louisa and I made giant flour tortillas by hand. Mine looked way better than the corn tortillas I made the other day but todavía I took way longer than M.L., a patient teacher. Adolfo and I took 3 of the finished products down to the lake to show them to Memo who sells giant burritos out of his Love Xak every Sunday. I swam for a second, then sat with Adolfo in the shade of a baby palm tree on a curb for almost an hour talking about why I’m not trying to get married.

We talked about how we both moved out when we were 16.

After lunch (more spaghetti, some fish) M.L. and I sat in the garden drinking coconut water straight from the source (not joking--Adolfo cut them from the tree above our head) and had a kind of Spanish lesson but were both exhausted and eventually interrupted by Osman, Louis, and their cousin the neighbor kid who has a T.V. and is really obsessed with fighting in this tenderly excitable and thus sad/in the future scary way. Osman kept finding really cool bugs to show me.

At one point I found him a bee with a 3-prong start to a hive, attached to the underside of a leaf. He, with determined curiosity, swatted it till he’d gotten it to the ground and could pick it up by its legs.

We eventually embarked on a garden tour, Osman (8, remember) leading me through the bush and the palm trees, pulling down leaves and fruits and uprooting plants to show me their edible roots, all the while explaining in impressively detailed rapid fire Spanish what we were seeing. “Que linda es esa!” “Lo que me encanta mas es...”

He took to lifting rocks and de repente coming upon the coolest shit, like the decaying furry remains of a giant tarantula-like spider and its likewise deceased offspring (he somehow knew who was who in the spider family), and a little frog that I don’t know how he spotted under a plank.

When we’d finished playing I found his parents in their backyard, ML raking up the results of Adolfo’s malasana-crouch swing-of-the-machete “lawn mowing.” I took to helping ML load the wheelbarrow and haul the debris to the burn pile. 

Other things: --Doña Julia is always cleaning. My room is always clean by the time I return from breakfast, any clothes I absentmindedly left on the floor awaiting me clean, folded, at the foot of the bed. I don’t know how to tell her she doesn’t need to do this, or properly thank her, or offer to help. --When Osman said to me (in Spanish) “I’m bored. Let’s play. We can play in true Guatemalan style, with no toys, no money, just what we can find on the ground.” (We built a tiny house out of twigs tied with stripped palm frond with giant leaves for the roof.)

March 18

I helped Adolfo and his dad hunt coconuts today so we can make more coconut oil. This consisted of us walking around the neighborhood and Adolfo, well dressed, asking the owners of palm trees if we could cut their cocos. When they said OK, his dad (one of my favorite people, did I mention him earlier?) strapped on his pointy tree-climbing tools and wrapped a rope around his waist and the tree.

We filled two giant plastic woven bags with cocos, something like 45 total, hauled them to the main street. Adolfo Sr. hollered at the man across the street standing outside of his tienda, “ESTAMOS BUSCANDO COCOS SECOS!” (We’re searching for dry coconuts!) The man responded “All we have are dry coconuts!” and they were off again, Osman and I left with the bags and 4 quetzales to buy some chips.

We eventually brought the bags back to the house via tuk-tuk. 

Now I’m sitting at the kitchen table while Osman and Maria Louisa work on his homework, which he “forgot” he had and tried to sneakily get me to help him with on the side (this did not work—his mom’s spanish is better than mine and she easily overheard).

We spent the night singing kids songs about Jesus, pretty much all of which end with some version of “…because Jesus is your friend/loves you”. I am learning lots of verbs this way.

Every night is by candlelight. They’ve got the infrastructure for electricity (not exactly a rarity here, but not an expectation either) but have been trying since before I arrived three weeks ago to get the company to send their people out from Santa Elena to connect it. By the sounds of it, this will continue to be a headache unless they offer someone some extra money which they don’t have.

The candlelight is charming, though. We eat our beans with glowing faces as Osman rambles about getting 3rd place in something in school and finding a weird spider and Louis disappears to the bathroom (always, about half way through the meal), one tortilla half eaten and beans with no signs of consumption but some signs of having been smeared around a little. I wonder what he does in the bathroom. Maybe it’s just an excuse to take his pants off.

Louis is a 3 year old of extremes. One: a whine the rhythm of which has become so familiar it’s like one of those repetitive kids songs that’s meant to annoy, that won’t leave the brain, the lyrics to his not “This is a song that never ends” but instead “QUIIEEERO UUUNOOOO. QUIERRROOO UNNOOOO.” (I WANT ONE! I WANT ONE!) The other: the brightest smile and giggliest giggle in Petén, delight brought on by the simple things, including but not limited to his dad fake-pinching his nose off with some pliers Louis found in the garden somewhere, or made up words that exist in neither of our most familiar languages such as “babadoobaba.” 

Osman is more relatable for me, not surprising as we share older sibling status. Serious, concerned, determined. He taught himself to hula hoop in two days and can keep it up pretty much forever now. Yesterday I challenged him to walk while hula-ing. He’s working on it.

9 Marzo, 2016—Federico’s garden, Petén, Guate

My first encounter with the organized chaos of permaculture, in the heat of the Guatemalan jungle, has me reeling. Yesterday’s 9 hour shuttle journey from Lanquin to Santa Elena was hotter and less chatty than the shuttle that brought me to the green pools of Verapaz. From the Dispensa where our very serious scar-faced driver dropped us I took a tuk-tuk to a parking lot where my backpack was hauled onto the roof of a microbus with a giant “SAN ANDRES” written in messy window paint across the windshield. We waited there for more people (I assumed) who never came and I snacked on a plastic cup of salty chopped cucumber and radish while I tried to catch threads of the most thoroughly and impossible to follow Guatemalan double-speak rapid Spanish I’ve thus far witnessed, chatter and shoulder punches amongst the 4 men in charge of things. They seemed like family. We eventually made our way slowly through town to the market, where we again waited, this time with success—by the time we departed an hour later we were Xela-style full, some people standing crouched with their head against the ceiling, some half-sitting on others.

By 7:45pm I’d been dropped at the stick gate of Federico, my couch surfing host—it’d taken a team effort, one old man, a few of the kids handling the bus production, and a lady with a bucket of tamales all having helped to get me there. F greeted me with head lamp and cheek (cachete) kiss and showed me to my room in the back of his garden, an electricity-less maze that I couldn’t comprehend in the dark. I dropped my stuff and we headed out on his moped down the hill to the shore, where we drank beers with 3 other volunteers to the soundtrack of crashing waves. Today 3 of us spent the morning digging—slow and sweaty progress toward an eventual fish pond.

March Something, 2016, Petén, Guate

How to begin to document, with even a trace of its impact, my time in this jungle. Day 2 in Federico’s garden brought the transplanting of probably hundreds of tiny green onions. I crouched in the sun for hours, digging till my hands were caked with mud and my shoulders reddened by sun. My company, a french girl named Rosie whose travel trajectory has been and may continue to be bizarrely parallel to mine, in some ways feels like a soulmate. She’s staying here with me, in the bed beside mine in this half-built cement room at the rear side of the garden. We’re writing and reading by candlelight after a day that I’m eager to document, though my hand is already hurting and the sleepiness is creeping, earlier every night, it’s only 7:30. The soundtrack: crickets or cicadas and the occasional passing motorcycle or the bread man, a teenager on a bicycle (or sometimes a motorcycle) who, in a surprisingly deep voice, bellows “EYULLLLL pan. EYULLL pan.” every morning before the sun and evening after it.

Today I spoke a shit ton of Spanish, pretty much all day. We woke up at 4:30 to catch up with Memo, a 40-something (maybe) bicycle lover with a sort of surfer faux hawk from California who’s lived here for 10+ years and speaks bastante Español with the exact same Californian beach drawl as his English. Nothing changes but the letters in the words themselves, and sometimes it takes me time to realize which language he’s speaking.

After a few busses and an impromptu fruit purchase from a lady with plastic buckets full of red pears (se llama manzanas rosas, no se porque) who was waiting on the same bus, we (now with our guide, a friend of Memo’s who may very well be the friendliest person I’ve met, definitely the friendliest de Guate, se llama Adolfo) started walking, leaving one dusty dirt road for another. We came occasionally to hand-made fences of sticks and barbed wire and either climbed through or pulled them aside, making our way into the jungle. At one point our voices, here all in Spanish, were nearly drowned out by the zombie-like croaking of howler monkeys. We couldn’t see, only hear them, and it’s hard even now to imagine their faces as any other than those of zombies straight from las peliculas.

Running out of candlelight now.

Eventually we turned off the road where Adolfo hacked a branch from a tree and showed us how it dripped water. 

We climbed through the bush, he ahead hacking a path, destination rio para bañarnos. At some point along the way I got a fierce plant espina to the finger (I suddenly forgot the english word for this… prick? sticker? poker?) and Adolfo patiently dug it out with another of the same plant (he said this was important but didn’t say why, I agreed). I got lots of bug bites so Adolfo pulled at some plant leaves and handed them to me to rub on the red mounds (effective). We eventually reached a pool that satisfied everyone, though still and kind of green I swam anyway (didn’t dunk) and sat dripping as I ate my tortillas dry (it’s hard to plan ahead for hunger at 5 am).

On the walk back, Adolfo, Rosie and I talked about street harassment and abuse in Guate, about motorcycles, about gender roles. He stopped us a few times to try green fruits that he knocked down from a tree on the path and the centers of giant leaves that he hacked at (they tasted fresh but kind of made our mouths numb, “Oh yeah I forgot to warn you about that” he said).

He invited me, Rosie, and another visiting kid from Austria to his house afterward where his equally friendly and smiley wife was making tortillas in their half-outdoor kitchen of two fire stoves. We talked over beans about my desire to live with a family to help out and work on Spanish, and by the end of lunch I’d agreed to live with them. I move in Monday. I think we’ll be good friends.

Jan 17, Xela:

There is something both grounding and unsettling about this fact of constant change, that all unease will halt suddenly or come to a slow rolling pause at the end or middle of something or somewhere in between. Learning a language is fucking with me. The bad air is too but in a worse way. I like it here, can settle here, but more feel like it’s helping me find the version of myself in myself that’s grounded and confident enough to move on, find adventure, and find my place maybe. I’m seeing all these possible places where I as a white westerner with the cultural and educational capital to make myself Valuable could decide I get to call this home, could decide I get to matter here. I don’t like that and am patient for a version that has the good with less of the bad parts of staying put. Yesterday we school-tripped to a pueblo outside of town where there was a big street fair (annual) to honor the black Jesus.

Spanish phrase of the day: dulce sueños. My host bro translates this into English as “candy sleep.”

Another day, later, maybe a Tuesday:

Today was straight magic. After a yoga class and 5 hour morning of Spanish lessons with my new teacher I caught a chicken bus with Dylan and Justin to Zunil where we paid a guy Q20 ($2.50ish) to take us up the mountain in the back of his truck. After dropping off 6 giant bags of props poop (fertilizer) to a nearby farm plot we surfed the bed of his open-back Toyota, clinging to the rail cage as he whipped around tight mountain-road corners through blinding fog. After at least 20 minutes of this speed-swerving through giant-leaved trees and past the occasional cluster of farmers sorting radishes or digging potatoes, our driver dropped us at what was def the top of something.

We followed signs and hiked down a path into the forest to the Fuentes Georginas, medicinal (and VERY) hot springs and lounged till we couldn’t take the temps. A big waterfall raged overhead. I struck up basic convo with a few of the people who came in a big group from Chichicastenango, indigenous folks who spoke Quiche natively.

Having told our ride not to wait for us we were without trans back down the mountain, so in broken Spanish I asked the only guy in the parking lot of he, his wife and son were heading down in the pickup and if we could ride in the back. He said ok, we climbed in with his laundry. There’s a radiant and pure and deep kind of kindness, a subtle but fierce energy in people here that seems capable of manifesting just as feircely though with less frequency in an aggressiveness that’s startled me a few times, usually on the microbus at night. The kindness draws me to talk to people with a readiness that I’d long forgotten in Chicago.

Another day, later:

We walked through the farms of Almolonga today as our guide, an ex guerrilla, talked about how he and his compañerxs are trying with what they have to do radical consciousness-raising work. We walked past plot after plot, each separately owned and on each a worker or two (5 a.m. to 4 p.m., he said). Having wound back around to town we ran to catch a chicken bus to Xela.

Jan 21, Xela:

Coping with some V intense emotion these couple days, overwhelmed by lack of belonging, by the aimlessness of this day-to-day in a town I feel like I’ve yet to really experience. And yet I’m overwhelmed by how much there is to do and learn. Learning Spanish is really fucking hard. I knew it would hurt.

My family is a strange group. David, the “candy sleep” host-bro, has taken to distorting his face and freezing in place when I enter the room.

I’m finally settled at this rooftop cafe after accidentally spending the last of my cash on curbside jewelry. Intermission: how can I get better at learning names? How can I get better at learning names when I can’t even remember how to conjugate SER in the imperfect? ERA. ERAS. ERA. The end of an era. I suddenly feel very alone. Justin left this afternoon, Dylan is sick, and my poor planning and consequent impromptu jewelry purchase meant a hunt for cash that meant I didn’t meet up with the 3 teenage boys who reeked of beer whom I met at El Cortito earlier today.

It’s strange how asleep I’ve felt these two weeks. Lulled or shocked into a state of zombie-like near-sightedness preceded by a knock-me-down resfriado. All these old versions of anxieties are resurfacing in pretty unexpected ways through this process of language-learning and it’s tough to see them again, to sit with this all too familiar dis-ease and urge tot talk shit to myself. What the heck am I doing / I’m not doing enough and so on.

This morning we PLQ tripped it with our ex guerrilla guía and his compañero whose name I forgot 4 times up a mountain to a viewpoint overlooking the active volcano santiaguito. Ronald’s friend and I talked for a lot of the hike—or he told me things I Only half understood about the work he does, politically and to make a living. He was incredibly patient with my Spanish. Nearly to the lookout we heard but couldn’t see an explosion, and thus had to wait it out for the next one once we reached the lookout. Ronald gave us a monologue in Spanish about his years fighting in those very hills, his friends lost, the current politics of la tierra. Meanwhile the white U.S. guide of the overpriced hostel trip gave a distracting speech behind us about who knows what. We shared fruit and tamalitos (the latter courtesy of Ronald) and after 45 minutes witnessed the slow build of the first volcano explosion I’ve ever witnessed. It was incredible, a build both in ash plume and in audible rumble.

Last night after the Friday school dinner a group of us went to The Cantina, owned by Doña Doris, the school’s cleaner, where Justin and I got into a deep convo we no doubt couldn’t fully follow or express ourselves in about the lack of work in Guatemala and the fact that we can come here but local folks can’t come to the U.S. and that Trump wants to deport everyone from south of the border. And more that I no doubt completely missed. It left me reeling in the same cycle of thoughts and discomforts I’ve been nursing since I got here (what I doing here, what can I really do here). Do these thoughts actually create walls of their own? Should I just stop thinking so hard and learn some damn Spanish? Probably, but T Buck brain doesn’t work like that. A balance.

After the cantina I walked home and found my host bro (50+ year old Edwin) eager to talk. He showed me in all its lit up musical glory his Christmas display in the entryway. With radiant pride (of the childlike, egoless variety) he showed me all its parts and pieces and explained things about them that I only a veces understood. It moved me and make we want to both cry and hug this white-haired man who doesn’t like the leave the house. I’m sent spinning by lack of familiarity and roots here. My name is SO. WILD, like all has been unleashed. I’m still really confused about when to use estaba.

Feb. 21, Xela:

Today I helped my roommate (living for the month in The Yoga House) teach 20+ teenage survivor chicas yoga in a community program called Proyecto Miriam. It was incredible and reminded me both of what I want to do and what I’ve already learned to get me here. My Spanish was even almost sufficient. I forgot to bring lunch and ended up eating a bag of white bread and can of beans but it’s aight.

Today I felt a little more awake, like I can start to get to work soon, like I’m almost ready to be a functional human in the world. Have I mentioned that this process of intense study and daily learning is kind of like dreaming, in a very involved way, con fuerza?

There were questions at the beginning of the class about what yoga can do for periods and pregnancies. There was such dedication throughout the mini practice, too, some girls in traje, some looking for validation in me or each other, some giggling to release the tension that comes with, de repente, feeling one’s own body. The center, a women’s only space from what I could tell, felt safe and balanced.

All the power went out in Central Xela around 8:30 this morning. It’s kind of nice to be so significantly less connected. Speaking of disconnect I kind of miss English. Not speaking, not blabbering (there is plenty of that in my house here, a house full of native English speakers, desafortunadamente) but that feeling of being moved by words, by intentional speech so profoundly moving because its reach is deeper than comprehension. I wonder often if this feeling is possible for me in another language. I suppose it’s my longing for it that has me so aggressively committed to this learning process, a part of which is rejecting English in whatever form.

One day I will feel like an entire person while speaking Spanish. Right now I am fragments and forget to smile/smile too much.

Feb 26, Xela:

First Thai massage. I must be carrying some very profound emotion and tension of heavy past lives—no one is just born this intense. Shoulders, hips, throat. I want to learn this kind of body work. Why would it mean to let go in my throat? For the hips I can sit on a tennis ball.

2 Marzo, Salí de Xela ayer:

Después de aprender el segundo serie en astanga, one of the most intense of all my yoga experiences. Kevin took me through it in a matter more gentle and sensitive than I’d till then witnessed. For me it sealed our friendship. I let the house with my life of stuff on my back and more of it left behind in the free box, scrap paper in hand on which Sam had pencil-scribbled fragmented chicke bus—microbus—pickup directions to San Marcos. I abandoned these directions by step two or three when the third bus didn’t stop at KM 148 (after micro to rotunda, camioneta to cuatro caminos, camioneta toward Guate to KM148 if I’d only known where to call “AQUI, POR FA”), and instead dropped me at Sololá where a nice Guate man informed me I was 8 km past my stop but could instead head down the hill to Pana. Two more busses and a 5 min backtrack walking, I found the lancha to San Marcos. An hour long ride on the choppy lake past giant houses crafted in the rich-person image of cabana style jungle huts and I started to feel a little mind or heart sick. There’s a particular sense of vacuousness here.

We made a few stops at docks of other little towns along the shore before reaching SM. I walked along the cobble stone shop and cafe lined path passing self-proclaimed eco-health-cafe-hostel-wellness centers and lots of barefoot English speakers and eventually reached the tuk-tuk lined main road. Walking the dirt path to Silani, the treehouse hotel where Tracy was waiting, my walk merged with that of a man who I’ll call Francisco (will I ever not forget names immediately after hearing them?). We talked about change here, about the pros and cons of this massive influx of tourism and white northern house construction, about his choice not to sell his land and the fear of the white face post-war. We’d never seen such people, he told me, and after the war we knew only the hide and be afraid. Now we are accustomed, now we even try to learn some English words. I lent him my swiss army knife and he skinned the orange he’d been carrying on our walk as we stood talking at the top of the road that led to Silani. Let’s rest here and I’ll tell you how things have changed, he said. We parte dafter some time, he continuing on with his now-peeled orange and mochila and aura of calmness that precluded his blood-shot right eye from lending any sense of threat to his appearance. I wrote my phone number in his well-worn notebook, I think because we both felt that we should at least make some effort toward the possibility of future reconnect, though he didn’t have a phone with which to call me. On the walk down a windy cobblestone path toward Silani I passed a group of 3 kids playing with hula hoops in the street. From just beyond them two dogs ran toward me, first with tails slightly wagging and (I thought) no light of “I want to attack you” in their eyes but at some point this light came on and one tore at the back of my right knee. It was strange, this shift, a thing very solitary and almost calm, almost slow motion, into fear, into the true need to protect myself. I swung my backpack as I tried to move beyond them. The same biter got me once more in the left shin but with significantly less success as I made it past, crying now. One of the girls had tried to lasso the dog with her hula hoop as she yelled it’s name and to me “lo siento…”. Tracy met me at the lake’s shore where I’d collapsed on my bag, trying to sit with and calm my sobs and having breaths.

Undressing, I found a mouth-sized bruise-wound, parts of the skin broken, just above my Always Be Shredding tattoo. A strange and violent impetus for the emotional release that was bound to follow a day like this one, bound to follow my departure from my life of these last 2 months. I’d spent most of the day before with Chobe who has rather quickly become an increasingly intimate friend.

After some time lying on the bed cry-laughing, then tending to my new wounds, Tracy and I walked into town for street tostadas, then returned to our oasis and spent a few hours drinking soda water on the dock, lying on our backs staring at the star-sky, talking and talking in a way I haven’t let myself maybe in months for fear of loss of Spanish.

3 Marzo, San Marcos De La Laguna:

This new age cesspool has me feeling feelings of fury I didn’t think myself inclined to feel these days. Nothing upsets me like the virtual wipeout of a culture connected to their space by thousands of years, replaced by this massive influx of probiotic-loving “intention” setting fire throwing drum circle kids living in broken buses telling each other this is the life, let’s have a cacao ceremony, let’s hug for a solid 3 minutes with our eyes closed while making “mmmm” sounds. I know my anger is born from that place in my gut that is totally perplexed by how not to exist here in just as destructive a way...?

Yesterday after meditation Tracy and I walked away from S.M. in search of the goat’s milk my walking buddy had told me about yesterday. We would ourselves eventually in Tzununá, a small village with 1.5 tiendas and a big field where a group of probably 8 year old boys were practicing their handstands amongst a cluster of tuk-tuks that no one was around to hire. We talked to one of the tienda owners about how he wants to start a campground hostel and prefers extranjeros to Guatemalan tourists because the latter have terrible manners and treat him como basura. He was a very sweet round-bellied gold-toothed man named Rigo. I remember a name this once because we talked about how it’s Rigo not Rico, about how he’s not rico, or is rico in joy but not in dinero.

Now I am in Lanquin but a lot has happened in between. I got here in the dark and thus have the strangest impression of this tourism-dependent village in the jungle at the bottom of an 11 km dirt path-road. After night 2 of SM Tracy and I boated to Panajachel, past all the rich people houses. After getting ripped off on some licuados and a plate of shredded vegetables at a comedor (lesson learned, should have confirmed los precios antes), we met up with a friend from PLQ who’s in the process of Pana-permanence. She showed us to the good grub—we scarfed beans and eggs and the most intense smoothie I’ve had, the liquid version of a chocobonano, and jabbered in English about life feelings (this felt like a guilty indulgence). I decided to say yes to a passing shoe-shiner and watched as a 13 year old transformed my hiking boots. I don’t recognize these shiny things. Tess’s friend offered to host me and, after accompanying Tracy to her Guate-bound shuttle, we stopped at the market for veg and supplies to treat these friends to dinner. One is from San Marcos, works her ass off to support her little sister who, due maybe to some history of trauma which I didn’t quite understand and maybe something by birth, can’t speak much. She signs, and does so with adorable wide-eyed urgency, making me wish all the more that I could understand.

I left there this morning after a night of emotional upheaval around the likelihood of my having contracted rabies. Strange how real the threat of death suddenly felt. I’ve since talked (and googled) my way to a state of resolve and am nearly completely convinced that I will not die this way. In any case, traveling is a fierce challenge to all threats of emotional stability. This morning I left by shuttle (a splurge very worth it) with 2 Europeans and our Guatemalan driver whose name I’ve (of course) forgotten twice but whose life I learned lots about over the course of our 10 hour journey. He quit school at 15 to be a driver and has driven all kinds of drivable things on every sort of road. He makes Q80 a day for 10-12 hours of work, the equivalent of about $9. He has two daughters and an ex wife and is from Coban, a very strange explosion of strip mall that greeted us after hours bumping along a windy dirt cliffside path through tiny villages of huts surrounded by grass-chomping pigs and giant-leafed trees.

The trip, the most beautiful of my Guate viajes thus far and also the most surreal, took nearly 11 hours with stops for peeing and gas and some kind of microbus repair and a Q20 lunch of cold steamed vegetables at a maybe-hotel that just felt like someone’s confused dining room or more like a model home with 4 kitchen tables. They obvi talk all their tourists there, a relationship I couldn’t figure out and at this point was too tired to ask about. By 6:30 we had turned off the main road onto another dirty path heading down and down and down, at the top of which we’d picked up a man who spent a while on his phone speaking first in the local Mayan dialect (I’ve since learned how to say “thanks” in this language called something like ki-chek—I don’t know how to spell the name of the language nor the word for thanks, but it’s something like “bantee-osh”) and then in Spanish. Once he hung up no one talked till we got to Lanquin and were bombarded by young dudes telling us to come with them to this/that hotel. They seemed 16 but, turns out, were in their 20s. I waited with a few of them at a bench for my ride to this hostel. We talked about tourism and they taught me some other words in ki-cheq (I’ll try a new spelling here) that, of course, I’ve since forgotten. I’m sleeping in a hammock tonight, way too close to the bar but cheap and right by the river. Earplugs, serve me well. Hostel kids, party less tonight.

4 Marzo, Lanquin:

I had such a nice night’s sleep in solitary silence save the rushing of the river, until I woke up at 2 a.m. with a belly full of sharp stabby cramps. They’ve been relentless since, thought I was able to slip in and out of cozy hammock sleep till 7 and feel well rested (even if not able to properly breathe). What the heck did I eat? Was it the questionable piña or the questionable coconut or the 8 tortillas? Yikes.

I’m the only one crashing in a hammock and everyone who passes seems either perplexed or impressed. It’s foggy and damp and threatening continued rain, fueling my longing for a cozy living room. I worry that whatever I eat will make a second appearance as barf but that would at least change things. This place is unreal beautiful and a whole different brand of tourism. Less nauseating than the lake but also less Spanish-Speaking. A true vacation destination. I’d have been stoked for a family vacay here. My plans was to see the Lanquin bat caves solo today then catch a ride out to a more removed hostel this afternoon and see the pools and Semuc Champey caves tomorrow but MY GUTS!

Later:

I executed my plan flawlessly and had an incredible (however crampy) day. I walked down the hill into town around 9, where a tuk-tuk (here, maybe everywhere, a teenage boy fair) zoomed me through the mud a few KM to the path leading to the Lanquin caves. I told the driver if he came back in an hour I’d pay double (he said ok but didn’t return). I hired the guide at the entrance and paid the extranjero fee (a system I really appreciate here). The guide struck me as gentle, trustworthy, kind eyed. We made our way, the two of us, down past the rushing green river to the mouth of the caves where mi guia, Carlos, dug out a handful of partially burned white wax candles from a crevice in the cliffside. We passed a sink, too, where he said (all Spanish here) I’d need to wash my hands afterward because I’d inevitably touch a lot of bat poop. He led me with gentle, practiced assertiveness into the darkness and I wondered at the entire situation, me in a giant bat cave with a dripping wax candle and a man in rainbows from this rural Guatemalan village guiding me with his flashlight and occasionally by hand, pointing with the beam to all the stalactite and stalagmite shapes that someone once decided could be said to look like a whale or scooby doo or jesus christ.

We went deeper, climbing down and over all kinds of wet rock formations, and he reminded me not to be afraid, to be careful, to move slowly. I kind of fell in love with him in this particular and not exactly romantic way allowed by the circumstances, particularly when we reached the bottom of something and he revealed with his light a pool of water (a cave-dwelling continuation of the river), suggested I swim, then without any hint of objectifying glance laid my clothes over his knee with care as I undressed and jumped in. He guided my swim with his light, cautioning of rocks as I moved, and dug out of phone from my fanny pack to take pictures (he undoubtedly more committed than I to photo documentation of this cave journey, for which I now thank him). On the way back up he found me a giant spider and showed me how to hold it while, yes, he took my picture.

On the walk back to the hostel I found a very friendly tuk-tuk driver named Daniel who said he’d drive me the rest of the way if he could get his tuk-tuk started. I helped him push it through the mud to get it facing down hill so he could catch a rolling start. When this tactic failed and he set to pulling on a messing with things, I told him I’d walk but to pick me up if he got things running. After I’d rounded a few corners I heard the putter of a small arrhythmic engine and turned to see Daniel powering up the hill with a smile. I jumped in as gracefully and quickly as I could so he didn’t have to slow much. We made it nearly all the way and picked up another friend en route who, when the engine died again, set to helping Daniel get to the bottom of it. He didn’t want my Q5 but I insisted (hopefully not too strongly), using the wrong verb for “fix” to suggest he use it for his tuk-tuk. I walked the rest of the way.

A pickup came for me around 1130, me the only gringo amongst a group of kids and teenagers who I later learned were going to have a picnic by the river, or maybe a birthday party (I saw a cake). The ride was headache-inducing bumpy and unreal gorgeous. 10 k journey that felt like 50.

This hostel is UNREAL. Elevated amongst the buzzing mountain trees above the rushing turquoise river, it’s magic. This afternoon I hiked with 3 work traders down and around to a high bridge of shifted and occasionally missing planks that took us to the other side of the river, where a shirtless man was sitting in front of his cement house/unmarked tienda. He directed us left toward the next bridge, which we eventually reached and crossed after warning off a few barking dogs and saying our “holas” to a few gawking households of local folks. At every house what may well have been the whole family would hear us coming and crowd the doorway to stare and smile and say hello.

We recrossed the 1st bridge when we reached it and were greeted again by the shirtless man who asked us where we were from and, hearing my response, promptly asked how much I made at my job each day.

We turned right this time past his house and walked until it seemed likely that we could cross the river without being swept away by the current. This decision was heavily influenced by a small boy who’d suddenly appeared and informed us that he was our guide. When we heard this self-proclamation we collectively confirmed that none of us had brought any cash. Learning this, he began to seek resolution—You can give me your water bottle, he assured me. Or your backpack, I need a new backpack.

We waded through one of the two rivers that met at this point, then followed a trail on the widening pie slice of land between until we could see the hostel in distant trees. I secured my fanny pack and its non-waterproof contents to my head using one of my hiking buddy’s scarves and swam across, a swim that seemed, with its distracting beauty, to temporarily relieve me of stomach struggles.

I looked around and thought to myself HOW, how did I end up here.

6 marzo, Semuc Champey:

Another casi MAGICAL day, this one with more Spanish. Morning: Yoga, meditation, breakfast with the view. Around 10 a small group of us set off for Semuc where my new friend Jimmy and I hired a guide named Rojo (si, como el color) to lead us through the caves. It was dark and eerie and candle-lined, pool after pool after rope-tied iron ladder/knotted rope (choose your own adventure) cliff for jumping. When we reached the final pool Rojo and I got to talking, seated side by side at the edge, him shifting subtly closer and closer and eventually complimenting my hair (classic) which, he felt, was a self-created invitation to touch it. The route back felt more adventurous and Rojo took measures to assist in whatever hands-on way possible as we slid down natural rock slides into pools and swam one-armed (candle occupying the other) through deep pools that didn’t look familiar (though really would they have?). Just as I was shouting in Spanish across the darkness some variation of “ROJO, how did you ever learn your way around this place?!” (to which he returned the shout “SI!”—not sure what he’d heard me say), we saw light of day.

I wasn’t ready to emerge but R was way ahead so I breathed and looked around in the now half-darkness and made my way to the stone steps at the cave’s entrance. Rojo kissed me on the cheek and hugged me. I wondered at that which divided us.

Jimmy and I walked back in the near silence of having just experienced something moving, along the dirt path to the yellow bridge where 8 year olds, spotting us, resumed their efforts to sell us luke warm cans of Gallo beer and foil-wrapped cacao patties (still too early for beer, I told them). Up a hill and around the corner, we wandered through the entrance to the Semuc Champed pools where, as we took at and half-read a poster describing all the pools inside, Mateo, a dreadlocked warm-eyed Italian traveler, introduced himself in a Spanish straight from the streets of Mexico (I thought him Mexican at first, though he assured me his vocab is lacking and that Italian—>Spanish promises ease to a certain point). We stuck together to the mirador, an uphill and up-stairs hike to a lookout above the stretch of turquoise pools (much higher than I’d expected, distracted as I was by conversation as we continued up and up). We sat here for lunch, his an egg sandwich from the street, mine an egg sandwich of the sourdough hotel-made variety. Post-food, we made our way down along the path to the pools for swimming.

Jan 9, the fateful day about which I’ve been telling everyone who asks since I bought my ticket and peaced out of Chicago in July. First LAX: in the discount airline terminal where there’s one bathroom and hella gente. I have never felt like this (maybe I could say this all the time but now I mean it more), like everything is about to change and this time I’m here for it. So far I’ve only (or already) nearly burst into tears once but didn’t and recovered. I struggle with this newbie space, witnessing my discomfort and knowing that there’s no way around it while also knowing what it feels like to be around it, to know how it’s done, to be at home wherever I first feel the deep discomfort of an ego out of place, or an outsider used to a world familiar.

As I keep up Vipassana I’m doing my best to speak solo verdad but I lied once the day I left about a fart. I was already feeling insecure and couldn’t fess up. My gassiness: this alien force in my gut that seems out to stink up any room in which I’m trying hard to feel at ease, like a properly social person, the likable type. The friend who called me out kind of seems on the fart’s side sometimes but I like him for that. Keeps me honest.

I took a yoga class at the studio down the street every day I was in LA (5), and on the last day I talked afterward with the teacher, one of the best teachers from whom I’ve taken class in a long time. That egolessness that radiates is both rare and refreshing, apparent immediately, magnetic. We ended up exchanging info and, by the look and feel of it, she’s someone I’d love to know. I feel open to people. Like I don’t need them and can thus see them, hear them, be there.

Flight #1, overnight from LAX to Ft. Lauderdale, was only delayed 30 minutes, an indication of grander things to come. A 5 hour layover became 7 with a 2 hour delay and we were finally airborne by 1 pm. I watched Dana, a documentary about serving at Vipassana courses, and got to feeling even more deeply that I’m carrying too much (emotionally, materially…). I plan to downsize.

One of the servers in the doc talked about the importance of finding balance between silence and noise—about how insisting on silence can often be an act of ego, and that maybe if we speak only meta then noise is no longer noise but harmony.

Because of the delay I didn’t make the 3pm bus to Xela, so heeding cautions not to travel at night I booked a hostel near the airport before I left FL and planned for the 7 a.m. bus to Xela. Someone picked me up from the airport and drove me the 3 minutes to the hostel’s gated community where my only roommate was no hyperbole the rudest person I have ever met. I can’t really believe he was real. I would characterize him as the unhappy solo white male american traveler to trump all of his kind. I thank him, though, for prompting what would end up being some awesome turns of events, because when he mocking-laughed at my sharing that I was feeling overwhelmed after 22 hours of travel and responded to my having flown Spirit Airlines with “WHY would you do that, that’s basically the dumbest thing you could ever do,” I knew I would like to not sleep in the same room as him and packed up again. I asked the desk person in busted Spanish to call a cab and confused everyone by jumping in and leaving with all my stuff, preferring a night bus to these totally disorienting and negative vibes.

My cab driver, Hugo, radiated all the friendliness my former roommate had lost somewhere or never had in the first place. My first Spanish teacher, Hugo giggled a lot and seemed overjoyed at my company. “Tu eres feliz!” he kept saying—“You are happy!”—indicating a facet of my personality rather than a passing moment of joy, I was like hell ya I am, Hugo, or I try to be. We talked about my sister, about how I don’t need a boyfriend porque soy fuerte solo, about his religion (Christian). He dropped me at the Alamo bus station where I managed to pick a seat and buy a ticket in Spanish and flop myself with all my shit in the waiting room where a dubbed version of some Pixar movie involving a turtle was playing on full blast.

I was one of the first on the bus, an old tourism beast from the US with nearly bald tires, and watched from my window seat in the very back as it filled. A family of 4 piled into the two seats in front of me, the abuela in traditional traje including twin braids into which was woven a length of blue silk fabric. A girl, maybe 8, sat beside me and, as we left Guatemala City and started to weave our way into the mountains, promptly fell asleep on my shoulder in the darkness of the humming bus.

I was exhausted enough to follow suit but, each time I drifted, another whip around a corner shifted/jolted me awake again. I spent the two hours watching the smog shift around us as the driver facilitated what was more like a plummeting than a weaving down the steep and skinny road, then up again to the tune of the struggling engine (much like the intermittent groan of a generator or compression brake). We passed through a few small pueblos and I could see many more by their light in the distance below us. 3 and a half hours and a few quick stops later we were in Xela, indicated only by the departure of literally everyone. Making due without knowing the language is all about reading cues.

I struck up a convo with the only other white people on the bus as we made our way out onto the broken sidewalk. Their offer of an extra bed in an apartment close to the school replaced my half baked plan to make my way to whatever hostel I could find. Their friend picked us up and drove us through town. 

After dropping our stuff in the apartment we walked the cobblestone streets in search of bevvies and found some sparkling water and beer at a gas station. I slept so hard and weirdly and with so much gratitude on the slanted bed held up in opposite corners by cinder blocks in their friend’s extra bedroom.

The next day I found PLQ, my new language school, after asking the orange juice man in the park using a broken Spanish that, I’m stoked to realize, has since much improved. After orientation I hauled my stuff to my host family’s, where I was lead through a dark hallway up a half-outdoor staircase to my giant cement-block room.

IT IS FRIDAY

The one-week checkpoint and I am in LA, riding in Arlen’s car on the 134 feeling totally overwhelmed by the sprawl of it all, by being around friends, by having stayed up till 1:30 am and then also by the usual things. We’re going for a hike, I’m wearing my new used boots dusty from yesterday’s trek near Big Sur where I ended up hiking with Robert, or was it Jason, Jason, “old” (maybe 37, a self-proclaimed label), film promoter in LA.

“I went into a convenience store this morning to get some antacid cuz I ate a little too much last night” he said. “uh-huh” “and it was EIGHT DOLLARS.” Highway 1 monopolies leave you with few other options when you eat a little too much last night.

He told me about his girlfriend who he met on the internet 4 months ago. She’s a lawyer who loves Hillary Clinton. His favorite movies are Hollywood productions, especially those that thrill him. Big money style. He had a flat affect and thoroughly appreciated the sweeping view though his conviction sounded unconvincing. (”this is fucking gorgeous.”)

Right now I am feeling like: “Take me from the city and put me back in the woods.” “I need a nap.”

IT IS SATURDAY

Yesterday was a lot of shifting spaces inside me, Who Knows, I went with it and the day ended with outloud reflections of Wow, what a great day, thus reminding me to usually go with it. 

We drove to what we thought was the trailhead of a straightforward loop to a sweeping lookout at Runyan Canyon, chose to go right and, after a brief climb up the sides of hills that merged us with a visually confusing network of exposed red dirt paths weaving through more hills that came to more peaks, we found ourselves to be cheaters, having somehow come to the penultimate peak, the peak from which to gaze down upon all other peaks and the anti-human specs that moved toward and up and over them. 

We kept going down and down, another peak, down out, another, each time pausing to feign an adequate taking-in of what we faced: a 200 degree sweep of the Los Angeles Metropolis. The Hollywood sign to the left and at least three separate skylines as you traced the horizon right, back to the mountains on which we were still trying to understand this strange trail network and on which a large handful of rich people had staked cliffside claim with stilts-propped mansions and in one case a triumphant triangle of perfect neon grass amidst redbrown dust and cacti whose faint green was washed out by dust. 

We kept down, stopping a few times to discuss turning around instead lest we get to the bottom of it all and find that to have always been our only option, but deciding to keep down. 

Eventually we were going up again. At this point very sweaty and trying to hide my headache grump and trying also to ENJOY IT TAYLOR. I did, at least in retrospect, but no I did. 

I mean I saw it all.

After a few more peaks and 2.5 hours we wound down and back to the car where a warm grapefruit took the place of the water I’d run out of. We maneuvered a few highways back to Highland Park where Jugo’s juice and torta place turned it all around for me. Garlic aloe celery juice!!! $3 for a dece-size small and $1.25 for a shrimp tostada, Friday Special!!! I couldn’t stop saying, “THIS PLACE! I would come here EVERY DAY!”

From there we brought a juice to Arlen’s and Jesse’s friend, a sales manager at the LA Stumptown HQ, where we tasted some secret new coffee and got a full on VIP tour of the behind-the-scenes. She was both confident and smitten by her very rad job and it made me miss the sense of self and of purpose that comes from that, from “working.” Not to the point of envy but to the point of clarity.

She gave us all free coffee (a bag of Guatemalan for me that I may take a year to drink, sry) and we left for the bins of the Goodwill Outlet where we TOTALLY SCORED. This was quite possibly the most successful thrifting venture of my career, both in terms of book and clothing finds and of company. We shared just enough, didn’t end up envying anyone else’s wins, and spent just enough time digging to feel satisfied but not depleted or irritable for lack of outside air. For a total of roughly $7 ea we hauled our bags home and had a fashion show/cutoffs-making party on the livingroom floor, then picked our favorites for our “constumes,” which we all wore to the little grocery store up the street. We bought questionable shrimp, tortillas and cilantro and came home to the Casino (the backyard) where we grill out shrimp-taco style halfway in the car port for light.

NOW IT’S SUNDAY (Yosemite in the dark)

I thought I had this figured out but what I thought was a freebie campground is actually a giant fully-booked probably expensive one. I have a hunch my misstep was using google maps and that my freebie internet find is probably elsewhere by the same name. In any case, I found an empty site and, with the blessing of the nice old guy with the dog by the bathroom, decided to climb in the back of the Camry and hope no one shows to claim their spot. 

It is impossible to navigate the world in the dark. The drive here was windy and spooky and completely disorienting, with nothing to guide me but the bright-to-dim-to-bright scope of my headlights or occasionally those of the car in front of me, and nothing to explain the pressure in my ears till finally a sign that read “ELEVATION 5000 FEET,” then later “6000.” I know nothing about Yosemite but can tell there’s a lot to know. When I finally emerged from the trees it was into an expanse of moonlit mountains of a kind so stark and massive under the almost full moon and crowds of stars that I pulled over and burst into tears. They weren’t just mountains but cliffs, silver and so completely towering over me, laying bare my insignificance and yet somehow holding me, comforting me, keeping watch. This overwhelmed me upon impact. The tears exploded and I impulsively held my chest, hand over heart. 

I now wish I were not alone, now that I’ve felt the ease of a good friendship. Yet today, a solitary day, was strangely powerful. I woke up to Arlen in his favorite of his GW Outlet finds, a pastel blue and pink striped button up nightgown with pockets and a collar, the shape and length of a doctor’s smock. 

It usually takes me a few days to adjust to the me that Arlen helps cultivate, the silly, loving version of myself that he makes space for and encourages and draws out by example. 

Yesterday we went to a yoga class at the YogaGlo studio in Santa Monica, before during and after which I tried to play it cool but was undeniably starstruck by Claudine LaFond, and after which we were both giddy with the effects of a strong, challenging practice. We ate Mediterranean food down the street then drove to Manhattan Beach where we stood in the waves and talked while I gut-slammed some waves and we both tried not to fall over. It felt so good to feel the tide the in and out of cool salt water rinsing me of yoga sweat. I wanna try surfing one day though I fear concussion and sea predators. 

In the meantime I wish I had a boogie board, or some less challenging more accessible tool for playing in the waves that’d take me a few steps beyond just looking at them and watching till they reach me at which point their shape and power have been mostly lost to the rest of the shallow section. 

After the beach we drove home, listened to Widowspeak in traffic and talked about our past. I think we are both afraid of being alone forever.

After some kitchen floor yoga stretching and avocado toast this morning, I packed up and left for another couple classes at YogaGlo before taking again to the highway, this time northbound. The practice was again hella deep, the deepest I’ve had in a while, followed by an hour of yin that put me to sleep. By the end I was on an island and my muscles were spent. I’d thought a lot about Claudine LaFond’s glow. She may be the most radiant person I have ever seen and I would like that--I would like a light like that inside me.

Instead I am sometimes cowering, or it feels that way, and radiance feels fleeting. 

After the double class I stopped at the Co-Op, too hungry to make decisions (when will I learn), then scafed some things from the cooler as I sat on the curb half inside the open passenger door of the Camry. I was heading of town by 2, six hours of driving ahead. It went by with really unexpected ease and was beautiful in ways completely different from the beauty that so moved me on the coast. This was a care, golden beauty, first of the expanse of mountains I climbed out of LA (poor Camry nearly overheated but recovered when I cranked the hot air, oldest trick in the book, where did I learn that, probably a Disney movie or something), and then of the midland Cali farmland through Bakersfield, and finally the bronze of the hills as I approached Yosemite and the sun went down behind me.

///

I woke up at 615 after a pretty steady night’s sleep, not warm exactly but not cold enough to wake me up grumpy. I could hear waves and see dark blurry tree shapes through the sleep-breath fog of the back windows. I convinced myself (or was convinced by my full bladder) to deal with the chill and climb out. I used the pit toilet, got dressed for a beach run, and set out south on the shoreline. 

There’s a sandy cove down the beach from camp made by surrounding sand cliffs that look like bronze rock but leave enough sand residue on hands and butt and shoes to give themselves away as compact versions of what they’re encompassing. I did a little yoga, used the sand wall for handstand support after shooing the excited sand flees, then climbed a few feet up to a flat spot and closed my eyes. 

As I tried to shut it all down I couldn’t and found myself in conversation with myself about trusting myself, about how THEN I can let all the wacky creativity flow out of me and not GAF! I also thought “I could live on the beach in summer forever” and “there is a hair tickling my face” and “THAT IS SO MUCH WATER.” When I opened my eyes I saw the boat shapes to which the lights belonged last night. 

I climbed down and walked back to camp, startling hella seagulls on the way. They left behind some pretty cool feathers so I gathered a bundle and added it to the misc collection of found road trip items developing in my glovebox. 

I was back on the road by 10 and made an improv stop at a “Farm & Outdoor” store in Coos Bay where everyone had an almost southern, kind of stereotypically “farmer” accent (maybe in the job description). I bought a $20 camp stove with the assistance of an employee who, unprovoked, told me exactly which colors combine to make the teal shade of my hair. He mends vinyl on the side, he said. I can match any color by eye, he said, just like that. 

Beyond Coos Bay I moved slowly through coastal town after weird coastal town en route to the beginning of the Cali redwoods. Each of these little towns manages somehow to sustain at least 3 “Gift Shops,” though occasionally the 3rd has gone under, shuttered up with FOR SALE sign posted, an indication that unlike the other towns this one was not thriving, was struggling, had seen better days, may need a new strategy. 

At Port Orford I improv followed a suspicious indication toward an ocean view (the words OCEAN VIEW and a big arrow were painted in massive font on the asphalt of a hill that veered right off of 101) and got out of my car to take in what proved my suspicion unwarranted and was in fact a particularly magnificent Ocean View. 

A man, an old man with white hair, my only company at The View, was standing half behind his car door looking out as I turned back to leave.

“No whales today,” he said.

“No?”

“No, I’ve been here for two hours watching for them. I’m here every day, I know how to spot ‘em, they’re usually here but not yet today. I meet people from all over the world and show ‘em the whales, they’re there but the people don’t see, they don’t know what to look for, how to look.”

“Yeah.”

“I tell ya, I’m here every day. It’s all I’ve got. I used to load up my bike and go down the coast and ride around, yeah, but I’ve got two bad arms. I fell off a ladder yesterday. But really it doesn’t stop me. You know, it’s about desire, about wanting to. Wanting to see or to use your body. I’m a vet, I’m disabled, but I tell ya, I can sit down and stand up without using my hands. I blow everyone away with that one. Yeah, you know I did yoga for a while with the ladies and that really changed things.”

He talked more about his adventures, his yoga, his communion with these beasts of the sea. About how he’s with the whales because he can’t connect with most people, people who he says are busy making their own problems. We parted with a fist bump (“Name’s Robert.”) and a few suggestions for my travels-on. I told him maybe I’d be back and he said yeah, come back and tell me how the trees changed your life.

After a few more stops, including a hike break along the Coastal Trail by the Natural Bridges, I got to the Redwoods National Forest info center in Crescent City, CA around 3:30 where a guy age 23-tops who was very awkward and maybe trying his flirtin’ game talked me out of taking the hour+ drive out to the Big Flat campground as planned and instead suggested Flint Ridge, a hike-in CG on the coast a little ways south. 

I didn’t fully understand the logic and scope of “The Redwoods” and that south meant more trees for a very long time, so I felt compelled not to miss out on the Jedediah State Forest I’d passed on my way to Crescent City. I said “maybe I’ll be back” and went to check it out. I pulled up to the ranger hut at the forest’s main campground where a girl (also mayyyybe 21) didn’t seem to know much and where a campsite was $35 (the Cali standard, turns out. No thank you). 

I didn’t feel good about this option and resolved around 4:50 pm to attempt the hike-in site, which meant catching the flirty guy before they closed up at 5. I drove very fast around giant trees while intermittently looking at my watch and cursing to no one, and pulled up just as they locked the door/unlocked it when they saw me. I was let in to “Hey! Just in time!” The guy looked happy to see me but was playing it cool as he wrote up the back country pass and rattled off the BC camping rules—only gather firewood within some distance that I already forgot, use the bear box, don’t leave fancy stuff in your car. 

All set and kind of nervous, sun well into setting, I turned south on 101. Eventually the free visitor center map guided me off an exit and down a road that eventually turned dirt and upward climbing. After what felt like 30 but was probably more like 6 minutes I came to a small lot on a high bluff with 1 car for company. 

I started to try to shift from sleeping-in-car mode to all-i-need-is-backpack mode, which proved disorganized and difficult and led to a dramatic case of overpacking. As I worked at it another car pulled up, unexpected since the Visitor Center guy had told me I’d only have camping company of 1. He had come from south and had just run a half marathon through the Avenue of the Giants, the whole avenue having been shut down for the race. He was on his way north back home to Eugene and had taken Monday off to camp and hike the RWs. He offered to share his firewood and I offered to use it to roast him a foil-wrapped sweet potato and thus we were happenstance camping buds. 

We hiked the quarter mile up to camp and chose our sites, his near the entrance among some trees and mine up a ways amongst more trees and with a tree-streaked view of the Pacific whose crashing waves were audible even from this high. 

I dreamed strange dreams that I’ve already mostly forgotten as the rain came down on my car and the trees and the bridge and the creek. I woke up at 7:30 feelin’ easy and got things together to hike beyond the bridge. As I put a bag together more cars pulled up to the trailhead. As I made my way down I saw a tent set up and some people making PB+Js. They said good morning and didn’t explain themselves or offer me one so I moved on and started hiking. 

I saw no one but passed a few orange cones as I trekked up the switchbacks. I hiked alone for a little over an hour then decided I was anxious to head south so I turned around. On the way down I passed (or rather had to step off the trail for) an increasingly steady stream of runners for whom I gathered the PBJs to have been meant. They were all wearing numbers on matching pinned-on cards but each had their own take on legit trail running gear and I got a good fashion show. Some carried plastic water bottles, some sloshed camelbacks. Some silently bragged about their college cross-country days via jersey. Each huffed in their own way too. 

When I got to my car it had new neighbors— a truck full of teenage boys whose dirt bike bro obnoxiousness was the stuff of cliches. One of them in particular was VERY loud and annoyed me VERY much. I didn’t hear anyone say “faggot,” though, surprisingly, since that would have been the first thing I’d write into this cliche. Maybe that bash went out of style with marriage equality. Or maybe they were too busy talking other kinds of shit. 

I stopped at the Tillamook Forest Visitor Center for a (kinda ugly but OK) sticker then drove on through Tillamook (where I stopped for self-serve eggs out of a standard house fridge on the side of the road), Lincoln City (where I accidentally ended up trapped in an Outlet Mall parking lot), and past so many incredible coastal views. 

I stopped a lot today, and until I finally got all the random stuff I needed at Walmart (YEP) in I don’t remember where it felt like I was barely making headway. But from Newport, OR I drove pretty much nothing but onward and got here, to this magically free beach camping at Bastendorff Beach south of Coos Bay, around 6. I pulled the Camry as far onto the beach and into this little tree huddle as I could without full on spinning the wheels. 

I have maybe never seen so many stars. I can also see lights in the distance on what can’t possibly be land and thus must be water and thus they must be boats! Interesting. I wonder what they’re up to out there. If they’re moving, and where to. How far away.

I poured myself a glass of $4 Wal-Mart wine (sorry) into my metal mug and sat just up from the beach in the fancy aerospace camping chair I borrowed from my dad. Sensory soundtrack: waves, salt, camp fire, boat lights, star lights, a group of 6 year olds running around playing a very serious made-up game involving rescue and glow sticks. I can’t believe this place exists and is FREE!/am thus enjoying it extra-thoroughly.

As I drove today I decided that with the exception of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen I may keep this trip pretty coastal. It’s like I’m feeling claustrophobic. Maybe I have been for a while because these ocean views to the nowhere of the horizon have me feeling an unfamiliar ease. Weaving around oceanside corners as the Pacific moved in and out of view, Bjork on speakers (obvi), I was finally breathing. There is SPACE.

Diamond Mill OHV Camp, Tillamook State Forest, Oregon

It’s October something. I need to realign, center, Here in Myself without want or need, craving or expectation, and thus without fear. I am lounging in the back of my 1990 Camry beside my backseat trunk-bed; after a convo over dinner last week about how I wish I’d bought a truck, my dad and I had taken out my backseats and replaced them with a plank bed by 9 pm and I’d started planning a trip south along Highway 101 to the CA Redwoods. I can hear absolutely not a damn thing but the scratch of my pen. 

I am in the woods by a creek down a long ass dirt road that I feared would shake my car apart as I eased around potholes at 430 pm, the dusk just starting to settle. I left Gig Harbor around 11 am after an emergency stop at the mediocre chiropractor and a failed attempt to buy car blinds at Target (the were clearanced, I missed out). I stopped to eat my lunch at a rest stop, leftover bok choy garbanzo red onion green apple salad. Future Self, remember this one? Dress with coriander, lemon, and some oil. Add buckwheat if you’re feelin’ it. 

The only person who talked to me at the rest stop was a guy I’d earlier seen leaning against his coup sports car smoking a joint. He pulled up behind me as I rifled through my food bag, his window down, his indistinguishably also-douchey-looking friend in the passenger seat, and said something like “Yo, sorry to bug you but I gotta ask, what’s that ink on your arm?” 

I told him buildings from Budapest, and he showed no signs of knowing or not knowing where or what that was but was apparently still impressed because he said “That’s fuckin’ phat.” Now I was impressed. That is a word I ought to incorporate.

I made Portland around 2 and was complemented by a few of the men outside the mission on Grand on my parallel parking skills. “I want YOU to teach my daughter how to do THAT.”

I ended up sorta-flirting awkwardly with the guy with the customer service person with the beautiful eyes who knew a lot about camping gear but it kind of felt compulsory, or impulsive, or compulsive, or convulsive. I found some used boots that may not totally fit me but could still work, a weird old bike pannier for future adventures, a couple hip packs, and some very worn in (almost out) Birkenstocks. I left Portland and drove into nowhere/the Tillamook State Forest where there is no cellular service so you can’t text me right now if you try. 

I saw the “Entering...” sign and kept driving, passing a few campground before realizing the forest may be ending soon, then turned into one that wasn’t on my list of campgrounds someone on the internet suggested. The sites were hike-in and looked beautiful but I couldn’t be troubled to repack and wanted to try out my car bed and only had a 10 (the fee was $5, self-serve). 

I decided to turn around and, after a 5 mile backtrack, found signs for Diamon Mill OHV which my list said was freezies. I wondered after what felt like 10 but was probably more like 3 miles if it actually existed but kept winding along the dirt road and eventually ended up at a big square lot. It was empty save for one big camper and its ATV companion and a guy packing his dirt bikes into his pickup. 

I drove to the far end where the parking lot drifted into a less dusty more Real Woods group of trees that drifted into more legit, thicker woods. I backed up into the tree cove and only hit one stump (no damage). Well hidden and very alone, not at all in need of car blinds. I almost cried when I got out and walked around. It’s a lot, this kind of total solitude.

There is a bridge here that I love. I sat on it in the dark with my eyes closed for a while tonight and would have stayed put for a while longer but I had to pee. The only people I’ve talked to since Portland are a guy and his bad ass 9 year old map- and axe-wielding daughter. I watched them as they packed up and headed out in the almost-dark for some gold mines that she’d earlier pointed out to me on the map as her dad searched for change for my 10 (turns out camping was $3, self-serve again). 

They assuaged my gut ache fears that come with going at this alone. They’re probably setting up camp just now, somewhere in the mountain. I envied them and wanted to be invited, even though that wouldn’t have made sense. I ate kale and stuff out of a jar then went for a night walk (inspired) with a flashlight along the creek and eventually across the continuation of that dirt road I’d driven, then up the mountain.

3 July, 2014: Lyon, France

It's been difficult to keep written track of my time in France. I've been exhausted and excited and also underwhelmed but in all cases constantly moving. Eryn, a friend made in India who, born in the US, has spent the last 7 years in France, has kept me busy. My first day in Lyon (after an inarticulably GORGEOUS train ride from Toulouse) she made us a tofu scramble and led me via city bikes along one of the two rivers past breathtaking views of the buildings every dreamer of France would dream, stacked along the riverside and up into the hills. Churches abound here, all different and all gorgeous, some set into that same riverside view.

E led the way to a little island up north where we sat near the water, ate street market peaches, and swapped Vipassana stories. Sticky-handed and sun-warmed, we then took to the main road with thumbs out and within a few minutes had caught a ride in a maroon sports car driven by a vacationing French man. He dropped us at the entrance of the Abode of Chaos. I'll need some internet research and maybe a viewing of the free DVD I grabbed in order to fully understand its background, but it's basically a guy's house in a little super sleepy, uniformly old village just outside Lyon. The house is surrounded by a wall covered in the owner's own spraypaint art, all heavily political and intentionally disruptive to the stuffy infrastructure surrounding it.

The house itself looks to be the product of a sequence of dark artistic explosions. His messages are fragmented (an important component of its glory if you ask me--schizophrenia incarnate in a sense) and the whole "abode" is unsettlingly seductive, closed on weekdays and thus allowing views only through the gate and a few holes in the colorful brick walls at its perimeter. 

After wandering a bit we hitched back with a friendly bearded man in an old car that reminded me of the Jetta I had when I was 16. Turns out he and Eryn had a mutual friend and chatted in rapid French as we swung around corners and weaves our way back into Lyon. He dropped us off in a pretty neighborhood on a hill and the 3 of us walked together, him on his way home and us toward a bar patio down a cobblestone side street. After parting ways E and I sat and chatted about travel, language acquisition, life plans... We eventually made our way a few streets farther to another nice spot for patio drinking and shared a bottle of rose wine. Sufficiently (late) day tipsy, we biked home, ate quesadillas and played around on guitars and banjos till evening.

The view from the hill:

The next morning we slept in--by now I've truly abandoned my usual bedtime (or at least paused it, with dedication) and haven't gone to sleep before 12:30 in days, some nights closer to three (I don't believe it myself!). Around 1pm I headed out for a run, promptly losing my sense of direction. My intention of a quick jog north along a river turned into a 1.5 hour adventure up and down both rivers and through city streets. I eventually found my way back toward the flat and stopped on the way at an open market for a 1 euro basket of apples and some fresh goat cheese.

After a shower and snack, E and I set out again toward a giant Roman amphitheater on the hill, where we hoped to catch the Pixies sound checking before their nighttime show. We likely missed them and instead saw only a mediocre bad neither of us had heard of, but had a nice long wandering walk through the neighborhood--gorgeous panoramic views of the entire city from up there.

Sunset brought us down the hill via an ivy-lined staircase and into the heart of cobble-stoned Old Town. We met Amy (my other lovely host, friend of Eryn) and another friend at a bar called The Beers, where there are in fact lots of very legit beers, and drank and ate and repeated until late-ish, then walked home across the river.

Today I made my way solo to a giant park and walked slowly around the perimeter of its beautiful lake, where I soaked in the silence and alone-time, things I hadn't quite realized I'd been so missing since leaving Budapest.

Later in the day I met Ruth (a friend from CEU, here for a school program) at another outdoor market (this one riverside) where we snacked on fruit samples, stumbled through our tiny French vocabulary and filled our bags with shockingly cheap vegetables.

Then we walked through a part of town I hadn't yet seen (this one, like all the rest, feeling remarkably like a new town altogether) and found a cute cafe for a coffee, market cherries, and catch-up life chat.

Afterward I biked back to the flat, feeling fresh and positive, and found Eryn and Amy ready to start our dinner-making adventure. E's competence in the kitchen meant a feast of spring rolls and a spicy green curry that tempted us all to overeat. A pleasant family dinner.

4 July, 2014: Lyon

Today started with a bike ride in the humid gloom (a nice break from sun) to the confluence and to the market for lunch veg. E put together a delicious potato salad and I took a tupperware-full to the riverside where I met Lola and her friend on their break from school. When they returned to class I biked back up toward the giant park and walked through the trails along the river, finding myself more and more isolated fromt he sounds of cars and city life as I went. Eventually alone (and inspired by a few topless old people I'd passed) I found a spot under a tree to set my stuff, stripped to my underwear, and went swimming in the cold fresh lake with only ducks as company. 

I'm sitting here now by the lapping water, letting my hair dry in the breeze coming through the trees. Swimming always leaves me feeling clean and clear and calmer.

26 June, 2014: Madrid

Post-presentation. A few people asked questions, and one woman said she hopes I do more with my project because it's very important. Afterward D and I ate tapas, had a beer, then wandered elsewhere for a coffee. He tried to show me a secret almond shop run by silent nuns but it was closed 2-5 and we arrived at 2 sharp. With the exception of my one new friend, I was perplexed by my total exclusion at the conference. Aside front the questions at the panel, I received not even so much as a smile or hello from really anyone. I was either invisible or stare-worthy. What is it?

Back to Madrid now, with a faint stomach ache that's starting to feel familiar, or at least characteristic of my Spain time. I could live here, but my guts would have some serious adjusting to do. In the meantime, I see more beer and bread and potatoes in my near future. (What is traveling for if not accepting digestive destruction for the sake of local culinary indulgence!) 

Later: I passed on the sidewalk a pair of old women twins, matching in pink flower dresses and diamond necklaces as well as in overall physicality. A kid in a stroller dropped his football, and sidewalk traffic was held up as one of the twins patiently bent down, picked it up, and returned it to the kid with a smile.

27 June, 2014: Hendaye, France

I'm lounging in some grass under a tree, just above the beach in Hendaye, a strange little French Basque town. I can feel my body releasing tension with the sea breeze.

Post-grad school, pre-U.S. two week travelin' around Spain, France and the UK in a few throwback segments as I find the time and the computer access:

24 June, 2014 Madrid

I arrived to Madrid yesterday. The view from my airplane window seat was pretty incredible--fluffy cloudscape over planes and valleys and rivers and lakes well lit by 7 pm summer sun. We also flew over a giant housing development wherein only the odd home out didn't have a backyard swimming pool.

I'm here presenting a conference at a feminist philosophy conference put on by the IAPh, an intellectual, partly school-related detail of these travels that's provoking a vague anxiety, and whose character is completely antithetical to that of my couchsurfing hosts' late night fire party lifestyle. Last night they took me to a giant fire party in a giant park, where we drank 40s (obv not "40s" here) and their friends made the sweetest efforts to include me by speaking (sometimes very fragmented) English. We stayed out till past 3 am and I realized I'd better leave my bedtime standards behind. I am exhausted.

30 March, 2014 (Budapest):

I'm sitting in the sun in the city park after wandering for a while half in search of the perfect spot. I settled on a hill by the little lake that used to be the ice skating rink. It's feeling like I made it through the winter, a feeling that I (luckily) forget gets to come. I remember what it's like to get to live most of the day outside, and not have to try so hard not to sit still all the time. Day dreaming about some summer time day-beers on this hill.

Feb. 15, 2014

Today is fresh and sunny and clear and really lovely. Lola and I biked to the central market this morning, in awe the whole time of the city's sudden shift out of winter. At the market we managed to fill both our backpacks with fresh fruit, veg, and nuts, then walked to the bridge and climbed up on the lowest part for some snacks and a killer view.

Every day surprises me/every day I surprise myself. The Vipassana mantra that everything is constantly changing has been kind of at the core of things lately. It's always an impossible project, pinning down what exactly is changing and in what ways I really am who I think I am, or am in some way becoming. Seems the only time I notice change is when I'm not trying to articulate or achieve it, and the only time I see people seeing me is when I'm not trying to exercise some kind of control on their vision. Something (a lot of things) about this year in BP has let this, something I've learned and thought about and read about plenty, really settle in me.

Today, like every day, I've got a lot of reading to do. I'm struggling a bit with my thesis topic, largely because of the emotional investments that make it interesting for me in the first place. I think I've settled on some kind of queer analysis of the ways disability rights discourses require a normative disabled subject--someone who fits our understanding of what an "individual" is supposed to be (capable of). This not only excludes the 'schizophrenic,' but constructs them, because to even conceive of the bounded subject requires its potential opposite/destruction/a space of unintelligibly against which it can be defined at all. That madness is the constant haunting of our individual sanities means the mad person can't have the kinds of rights we learn to strive for and help others achieve. So maybe there's something wrong with the idea of "rights" and "subjectivity" itself...

December 31, 2013 Budapest

Now that I'm a few weeks out of what felt like the most difficult academic term of my life, I've picked up the task of jotting things down in an effort to document at least bits of what I'm doing and experiencing here. I've been overwhelmed, depressed, excited, enthralled, confused, bored, lonely, and shocked by the depth of some of the friendships I've formed over the past few months. The simultaneous intensity and monotony of living abroad and alone in central europe has made it difficult to articulate. So anyway. Here are some of those bits, starting way back in September when my landlords invited me to lunch at their flat.