3 Memories of Mexico

 Nearly five months ago, I was in Tulum and Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula. I keep trying to write about it, but I keep having trouble finding the right words. 

I wanted to write about all the little moments over those two weeks that I think about from time to time and smile. About sitting in an underground river. About ordering seafood in crude Spanish and getting exactly what I ordered. About drunkenly running into the ocean with an entire bridal party at the end of a beach wedding. It thought that if I just kept trying, I’d find a way to turn all of it into a story.



They each make for a pretty paragraph or two, but I can’t get them to string together into something more. I write them down and it's just a list of things that happened. There’s a throughline in that they all happened one after another, but they don’t sum up in the way I wish they did.


Arguably, it is the writer's job to construct the narrative. To wrangle the facts into a shape that someone would want to read. Maybe I'm not so good at that yet. But another job for the writer is to go out into the world and find a worthwhile set of discrete events. Maybe, my time in Mexico just doesn’t make for a particularly interesting story. 


Got offered drugs, women, and a coconut at the same time. Went with the coconut. 


I think I’m ok with that. It’s a relief not to feel like everything has to be part of a grander narrative. Life can just be a series of things that happen. Those two weeks won't live on as a story, but they are still a collection of memories. I can recall a handful without too much trouble. If I try hard, there are few more on the boundary I can scrounge up. Most are probably lost for good. A few, though gone for now, will pop back into the forefront of my mind at some point in the future. With a little luck, they’ll be worth remembering. 


Perhaps these days I am something of a haphazard gardener scattering seeds in the hopes that a few will bloom.  


Three Minutes of Nothing


I’m sitting in a cramped seat on a crowded airplane going through turbulence and hating every minute of it. It’s a two hour flight and the atmosphere is never calm enough to let me forget how fierce nature can be.


Staying physically up in the sky, I move back mentally to a cenote in Mexico, sitting quietly in a river deep enough underground to insulate sound and light almost entirely. The water flows ever so gently around me, drips faintly in the echoey distance, and cools my skin making it hard to tell if there’s anything there. A whiff of humidity tricks my nose into smelling almost nothing at all. I could sit here forever, enveloped in vast deprivation. 


A different cenote


Aguachiles Verdes


The shrimp on my plate are deep fried, swimming in butter, unpeeled, split in half, and slightly disappointing. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to eat them with the shells on or tear through the coating and scoop out the flesh. I try both ways and neither seem to be particularly successful. I notice that no one at the tables around me is eating shrimp. They must all know that if you order the “prawn platter,” this is what you will get. 


I should have ordered the camarones, like I did at that one place in Tulum. Mmmmm. Lime juice would be so refreshing right now.  Some onion, cucumber, and avocado would be infinitely more enticing than soggy fries. I can feel the chewy, raw shrimp, squishing between my molars already. It’s almost mouth watering enough to make the prawns taste good. 


Into the Ocean


Hungover in a hotel room, my head is pounding and my stomach is churning. The sun is far too bright already, but the blinds are way out of reach. I can’t stand up yet. Instead of drifting in and out of sleep like a regular Friday morning, I’m drifting in and out of the night before. 


Feet in the sand. Sliding across the dance floor. A waiter hands me another Heineken. Don’t think I ordered that, but I want it. Sun goes down, strings of lights turn on. There’s no one beyond our party. Last call, final song. Run for the ocean! A woman in a pink dress runs just to my left. Turn back to empty my pockets. Dive into the waves. 

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