(This year shall be known as the year all of my exes started to look like middle aged adults. No, seriously.)
A couple of years ago today I was laying on a floor spinning out my chakras into somewhere in the ether. Atop the blanket covering half of me, a woman laid a few cards that corresponded to crystals, placing some crystals on the blanket, and telling me that the energy was exploding outwards in my life right then and I should just follow it through the period of change to see where it went.
Should you think this was what she said to everyone, she moved next door and bluntly told that woman that she should “quit [her] job.”
I had flown into the city with relatively little planning. I didn’t call my friend who lived a couple of hours away and tell her, she probably got divorced later that year and I’m probably a bad friend. I just wanted to experience the city, this place that I’d thought about for a long time, without any kind of influence. I didn’t want to spend part of the trip caught in transit to make the connection to see anyone, I didn’t want to go see things someone else thought I should see.
I’m definitely a bad friend.
I’m also a bit grimy. I took transit from the airport, a thing that’s clearly not done there. Instead of catching the connection I walked about twenty minutes carrying my bag and sweating just enough to feel more than glowing on arrival.
In the end I had the trip that you’d think you would have if you read too many beat novels. One where you meet people and you have a moment, or a conversation, and it’s everything and then it’s done.
There was the German girl I split a bottle of malt with, walking along the road trading swigs, who later would suddenly grind up on me in a deep hip hop club and ask me to go to the beach with her alone. I was at least ten years older than her and while not interested in that way for a number of reasons I was really happy to live in a time where this is a thing that happens, where a lady can see another lady in a bar and not care about just going for it.
The eighteen year old who’d gone to find his absent father, a father who coincidentally lived a few blocks away from where I’d been living all these years. Walking under the night sky, hearing how he’d gone to find someone halfway around the world; even though he’d tried to put a shine on it, it had broken his still soft heart. He’d spent all his money and was on his way home in these last days of his trip, I bought him a falafel from a truck and told him that someday he’d pass it on to someone just like himself, that people had been too kind to me at his age so it was my turn, when he tried to give me what he had left in his pockets.
That Puerto Rican whose parents had voted against most of their interests, who explained that they were single issue voters who loved being Catholic and hated abortion enough to always vote for whoever was most likely to restrict access to the procedure. You had beautiful hair and terrible radar for romantic interest.
And then there was the Scandanavian, we were about the same age with the same number of miles. The one who told me to come back to an island in Indonesia that I’d been to years before and hadn’t loved so much, his second home. A conversation about alternative communities and choices, exactly what I needed to hear from someone else trying to figure it all out. I saw you get married suddenly in sneakers this year and it seemed pretty perfect.
The Mexican guy who was always a bit too dignified for this space, in town to complete a civic duty, whose online comments I’d google translate for months later to try and follow the political situation you articulated so eloquently. You made me feel like a hooligan, I don’t begrudge you for this at all.
Australians. The friend who kept slagging his friend, talking about his friend’s failures on Tinder and his unimpressive job, who I drunkenly told off because you don’t know who anyone’s type is and a good friend doesn’t talk about what a failure his friend his at getting laid. I’m glad I told you off and I hope your friend found someone new to hang out with because his biggest liability I could see was you.
And that Brazilian who assumed we were close to the same age and I was also Brazilian, who was wearing the same shoes as me. My parallel life alter ego.
To the recently divorced dad with kids our age, who worked at a local restaurant, who was trying to be positive and put it all back together but who was a bleeding wound of feelings that needed someone to talk to: I hope you found your way out of that place, to a rental, to some older people and some sanity.
(To the photographer whose baggage tags I read and name googled: I’m sorry for being nosy but not sorry for figuring out who you were and why you were carrying those hardcases. I’m sorry I didn’t just figure out how to speak to you like a normal person.)
And finally, to the kid who harvested crystals, whose mom had been part of the real scene here a generation back, with Teva sandals and a beautiful ukelele.
Kid, I hope wherever you are, you haven’t changed one bit.
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The decade started something like this.
I’ve been turning over the last ten years in my head for awhile, snapping the pieces together and breaking them apart to rebuild, maybe trying to really see it all at once.
About two years ago, on a hilltop in Nicaragua as the orange sun dropped down to light the entire bay below us, with a long, deep pool behind us, someone asked what I was thinking right then. My answer was I was thinking that I am lucky, that we were so lucky to be there, that so many people would want to have this moment and we got to have it. Unintentionally prescient given that the country would radically destabilize within months; the exact place that we were sitting would be shut down and abandoned by the long term owners as everyone became unsure if this unrest marked the start of the next civil war.
Nearly eight years ago, after a few crazy months on the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen, JS turned to me and told me that he knew that my leaving marked the end of a great summer, the kind he never thought he’d have again. “You’ll go on to charm another beach town somewhere,” he smiled a bit sadly. He’d always had this sentimentality to him but that he’d said it aloud and made it real surprised me, especially because I’d felt the exact same way about that summer with our strange little crew of miscreants.
Almost three years ago, my last big project was wrapping up, the culmination of a decade’s worth of education and experience, a sort of professional opus. At the time, it had been such a long run that it took awhile to get perspective and to appreciate the beauty of it. I’ve always been garbage at recognizing accomplishments at any time proximate to the actual accomplishment, nervously wondering what to do next instead of just enjoying it. At the time, I literally ruminated a bit on some inconsequential spelling errors and that was it, I needed to shut the door on that part of my life and didn’t know how to reconcile celebrating with the process of leaving. The truth is I had a real, big career and I did it at an accelerated pace and now that I look back I’m a little proud of it, and now you know.
The darker parts enhance the lighter ones when they’re all lined up, these fragments. I move them around but catch myself stopping to look at each one, glowing a bit in the pile, and I feel the same way I felt staring out at that bay that looked like it had fire in the sky.
Underthecurrent 