expat – Jezebel’s Table

Left Foot, Right Foot

*This essay is dedicated to Ryan Rickman and Daniel Vogel, who remind me to breathe, make me laugh, and love me.

A minute ago, the world was too much. Burdens heavy enough to break Sisyphus pile on like pyramid stone. Bankruptcy, weighted relationship past, family-society-personal pressures mount and disappear on currents of Caribbean breezes and the voice of a man I’ve let myself fall in love with after wrapping independence around my shoulders like a mink coat.

Cenote Zaci — Taking the leap—jumping into cenote Zaci.

“How did you do it?” They ask by the dozens, pouring off boats from Cancun. Flown in from stateside and global destinations.
How does anyone move anywhere?
I made a decision. Packed my life into a storage unit and gave the rest away.
Sold the car.
Put the house on the market–the one two years ago I swore I’d never part with.
Organized logistics: putting bills online, Mexico phone plan, get my puppy, Bea, on a plane and across borders.
Sleepless nights cloaked in anxiety.
Find a new home for Mr. Kitty. After eleven years together, losing him tore a hole in my heart. My cabin-dweller, confidant, snuggle-buddy, constant companion, couldn’t move to Mexico at age twelve. My fuzzy friend found a last-minute perfect home and now makes someone else’s life a bit less lonely.
Bea paperwork came through.
House was rented.
Ticket to fly and a red service vest for Bea so she could travel at my feet from Chicago to Cancun–the little dog from Peshtigo, Wisconsin.
I haven’t been that excited since I was a child on Christmas Eve.

Excited to leave the cold; start new; sleep without fear of my ex; live in a community as strong and strange as I am; make a life with a handsome musician and his big white dog.
Excited for change; to not move snow for months; learn a new language; scare myself; challenge myself; laugh again like I used to. Or perhaps, deeper. Longer.
After being alone so many days, nights, hours; not seeing people, speaking to another human for days if I didn’t want to. Lonely always licking the edges of my consciousness and sometimes waking up to choke me. Other days, taking the alone and wearing it like a crown, running naked into the river, bare toes tipped in crushed strawberries. Laughing, while otters played and rolled in a river current coppered by cedar tannins. Some nights, I’d lie awake listening to owls and coyotes call and loneliness seemed a distant ghost. Some nights. Some nights, I burned phone lines missing friends, company, a lover in my bed.

Nights on Isla are full of people–conversations with individuals from all over the world who want the story of a girl from small town Michigan who moved to a little island off the Yucatán coast of Mexico.
I sleep in a king size bed with my boyfriend, our 125 lb. yellow lab and little Bea. Traffic noise is muffled in our back-alley apartment, but I awake often to unfamiliar sounds of dogs barking; golf carts and motos putter and purr; the air conditioner’s cold whirr.

I walk into water so bathtub warm I can’t tell if I’ve stopped sweating yet.
I’m still working to find my niche–writing, food, editing, volunteer work, waitressing, catering…anything to make some money, but also searching out that thing that fits.
It feels closer now.
Less amorphous.
Solidifying in the silhouette of a family here, and behind that a community, and at the center me and all the paper doll layers coming together in 3D.

Last week, I awoke in the dark wee hours of morning when the big thoughts come to claim you and I missed my cabin so much it was hard to breath.
Missed the inhabited stillness.
Just as the ache turned to tears, I heard sweet-satisfied-sleeping dog sighs, and Ryan mumbled, “I love you” in his sleep, as he does half a dozen times a night, and I loved it all so much I couldn’t imagine anything else.
It’s confusing, how to fit the disparate pieces of self that make up “Rachel”, birthed and forged in rural Upper Michigan, to this Mexican island home.
All the fall season’s of my life have been made up of duck hunting, readying firewood, frosty-evening saunas, last harvest canning, apple picking and cider press churning. The first snowflakes falling.
Where does my ability to can pickles, tomatoes, beets function here?
My skills tracking a wounded deer, foraging fiddleheads, building a fire on a cold winter day?

They say time heals all wounds. The quick march of days on Isla seems to be doing just that. The changes are subtle, and I take note of them one by one with some surprise.
Tense lines on my face begin to fade.
My skin, prone to stress breakouts, has cleared.
Painful aches in jaw, neck, and shoulders from holding my body in tight anxiousness have eased, leaving a comfortable fluidity in my limbs I haven’t felt since I was a kid.
For the first time, I smile with my teeth–full smiles of joy that reaches my toes.
I cry less.
Wake fewer times in the night afraid, heart pumping, fists clenched, a scream held in my throat.

Two poles, north and south, stretch my rubber band heart.
Walking down Hidalgo’s main drag, a day or a week ago, I experienced a moment of awareness so strong it took my breath away.
Hidalgo, Main Street of shops and restaurants I’ve seen shift and change over the last seventeen years.
That night, a day or a week ago, I took my usual stroll down the cobbled street to El Patio, where Ryan works.

That night, as I approached the restaurant, I heard Ryan’s voice arcing out through the noise and chatter, clear and true. Familiar and joyful, the song’s words and that sweet voice spoke my heart.
If you told me, a cold Michigan-November-year ago that I’d be walking down this island street listening to my handsome man sing, I would’ve either laughed or cried.
My ideas for the future are a universe away from a year ago.
This man, our dogs, a family.
In the past, when days were long and hard, my brother used to say to me: “Left foot, right foot, breathe.”
Some days, that’s all I could do.
Left foot. Right foot. Breathe.
Step by step.
Here I am.

Between Here and There

I’ve watched the flamboyant poinciana trees burst from orange-blossomed brilliance laced in green leaves, to brown-limbed skeletons, to green-seed-pod-strung, like giant beans, and delight in the new knowing.
At the same time, I miss picking blueberries on a cricket-themed evening when the reindeer moss crunches and imprints my bended knee. Standing in a woods so quiet, when a pine warbler calls, it’s like the voice of the forest itself.
Here, on Isla, the sun is hot against the back of my neck, sweat drips. Perspective competes with every picked-blueberry-remembrance.
Moped rides weave poems in my head–make me eloquent. Thoughts, lines, and lyrics a winding narrative that disappears when I put pen to paper.
What to say about this life, this island of Islenos, Mexicans, expats, tourists–boozed, coked, sexed, sunned up one side and down the other?
Expats balanced between here and there.
Indoctrinated ideas of “normal” and “Ok” dogging us here amongst the flowing tequila and a life more complicated than those looking in from the outside can know.

***

There’s a surreal element to living on Isla–living on a tropical island in the Caribbean, sun-baked by close-to-equator rays.
A hazy, heat-dazed reality disrupted by hurricane waves, tight budgets, and news of the mainland.
Heat creates a tranquility and slowness I craved in Michigan’s cold weather, but now learn to both celebrate and tolerate. I never napped before coming here, but heat and humidity often make me feel like I’m wading through too-thick air, and my natural energy is tempered, slowed. Day sleep comes easier, and I now understand the siesta.
I turn to day to day activities for grounding. Each morning is a list: walk Bea, shake dog hair off sheets, sweep dog hair and sand, make bed, tidy, do dishes, etc. I’ve always found simple satisfaction in daily chores.
Then it’s off to any number of activities related to my writing work and/or island-living: white sand beach time spent melting beneath palm trees and swimming in ocean so warm the temperature doesn’t change between air and water; snorkeling along reefs undulating with silver-bodied barracuda, rainbow-scaled parrot fish, and sergeant majors dress-scaled in official black and yellow stripes; a bike cruise around the south end to drink a cold Dos XX and lose ourselves in impossible blue Caribbean waters.
As struggles with money, the past, and the recent death of a friend creep in, making both waking and sleeping a 24 hour hamster wheel of anxious thoughts, I remind myself to look around and appreciate the every-night-perfect-in-its-unique-way sunsets; my sweet home life with Ryan and dogs; the turquoise waters others spend thousands of dollars and hours of time to visit for just a week.

At this time last year, I was plucking the last tomatoes before frost; buying, hauling, stacking firewood; making arrangements for snow-removal; fighting a deep and stubborn battle with loneliness in my backwoods, solitary cabin life; and preparing for my December trip to Mexico that was only supposed to last two months.
The contrast between these two lives is many things at different moments.
Part of me cannot imagine selling the cabin, despite the Remax sign in the driveway.

I’ve memorized the topography. Mapped the acre lawn and all its stones, stumps, and wild strawberry patches. I know where the old road and rock wall undulate, disappear, and reappear, in the thick, swampy woods. I know where the lady slippers appear in spring.

Where the otters have their den; where the deer cross; and which side of the woods the Barred Owl calls “Whoo coooks for youu?” Night after night.

In spring, I became accustomed to falling asleep to the woodcock’s lonely cheeping, soon joined by a cacophony of spring peepers. Changing seasons quickly replaced the peeping choir with a cricket orchestra carried along by coyote howls.
I like walking Bea at night here on Isla, because our sidewalk is adjacent to a salty Salina swamp where frogs make night sounds and sleepy herons croak.
Sometimes I’m lucky, and for just a moment the streets are empty of mopeds, taxis, golf carts, and it’s just me, my panting dog, and night noises.
Mosquitoes, like in Michigan, swarm at sundown.
I’m fascinated by comparisons between Northern mosquitoes and those found on the island. Michigan’s seem enormous in comparison, attacking in clouds even in daytime, but slow and easy to swat with a tell-tale whine that gives them away.
Isla’s mosquitos not only potentially carry tropical illnesses, but are tiny, silent, and fast moving.
Bug spray is an important accessory, in both homes.
It seems to be, that in the comparisons, I find a sense of self. Day by day.

***

9-25-17
The death of my dear friend Kay, who’s memoirs I’ve been writing for the past two months, has made me especially contemplative.
She lived on the island for the last twelve years, moving here from her Texas home because:
“I can be myself here. Nobody gives a damn how I act, what I wear, what I say.”
One of the things that made me want to move to Isla is the island’s sense of community, especially a community of gutsy women. I’ve had the honor of knowing many strong, amazing individual women in my 32 years living in Upper Michigan, but Isla Mujeres–Island of Women–has gathered a community of women to her bosom that I’m blessed to be a part of and ponder often with delight and wonder. I’m not unrealistic about the day to day dramas that play out amongst our group, but I’m constantly awed by these women who made their way to Isla’s shores.

My darling friend Zarah here on the island who bravely moved here all the way from Australia as a single mom with two boys.

Women who, like me, washed up from all sorts of pasts and pull it together to live here, which isn’t easy.
Women like Kay.
She died suddenly on September 13th of a heart attack, but her life and story changed me forever.
Today, for the first time since her death, I picked up her writings again. I read through a Christmas letter she wrote in 2002, and wept for the loss of this strong, sassy, wonderful woman who ended her letter with: “My wish for 2003 is peace–on earth, in our nation in our families, and homes.”

A Difference of Seasons

Walking through the door of my childhood home is a comfort after living in a foreign country for three months straight. Isla isn’t all foreign territory because of a dozen or so past trips, but the fact remains I’m living thousands of miles from home with a rudimentary, but growing knowledge of Spanish.

Sitting on the dock, toes in the warm, shallow waters of Big Manistique Lake, I look at tan lines from my sandals–my body claimed and tattooed by the Mexico sun.

Sun breaks across lake water, a scattering of diamonds. It’s such a different sun than the one I’ve been both enjoying, and dealing with in Mexico. As Ryan says, “The sun in Mexico in the summer makes you feel like a bug beneath a magnifying glass.”

But the Michigan summer sun feels so… Good.

A difference of seasons. In winter the Michigan sun is a lingering wish on a frozen horizon, little to no heat trickling through. In contrast to the Mexico winter sun, which thaws frozen northern bones.

The feel of warm lake water is so familiar.
Three months isn’t that long. But for someone who’s never lived more than two hours from home, it feels long.
The place I chose is so different from this one.

Two bass hover beneath the boat on its lift. Broken clam shells from ducks feeding litter the sandy bottom. One of the biggest leeches I’ve ever seen undulates past like an underwater magic carpet.
I’ve always noticed these small movements in the world around me, but being away makes me notice them in a different light. My senses are heightened. Aromas drift heavy in the air.
All the blooming: lilacs, end-of-spring apple blossoms, spicy-sweet lupin.
The aromas in Mexico are a fast-paced scent-slide-show. Fried chicken overlapped by a tortilleria redolent of popcorn. Moments later overtaken by exhaust, or sewer, or a hot salty breeze overlaid with rotting fish. Aromas in Mexico are heavy, hanging in hot air. Aromas in Upper Michigan are sharper, more pronounced.

It’s so good to be quiet.
But it’s not silent. There’s a cacophony of bird sound, and that’s nice too. A kingfisher, crows, all sorts of warblers.
I was telling my parent’s yesterday, something I thought as we came out of the clouds over Michigan, and I could see an expanse of green and water: ponds and lakes and streams and rivers and swamps, and in the distance the big expanse of Lake Superior. All that fresh water.
I cried. And I laughed. And it came to me that, to be an expat is to always have a little bit of a broken heart, because no matter where you are–here or there–some part of you, and your loves, are someplace else. That’s both such a beautiful thing, and so hard.

***

Perspective and juxtapositions lick my temples–the edges of my ears.

Jungles and mangroves.
Maple woods and spruce swamps.

Salty ocean aquamarine.
Icy cold, deep Superior blue.

Spicy ceviche, taco, tostada, tequila burn.
Green vegetable, fresh berry tang and burst.

Mexico, a love in my life for the past twelve years.
A siren song from the south calling me home.
Michigan’s familiar paths, rivers, lakes, fields, and seasons I know as well as the freckle constellations mapped across my body’s universe.
There’s a familiarity to the heat, laughter, living-closer-to-the-edge-attitude here that echoes deep beneath my breast bone.
An anchor with elastic chains that flex as I board the plane going north.

I’ve shaken with anxiety, awoken from nightmares screaming, pounded stone walls with fragile fists, frustration gasps choking me.
Now.
It’s time for strength.
I stretch my fingers. Stare down at the tattoos, ink and meaning imbedded in my ring and middle fingers.
Reminders.
Remembrances of how easy it is to lose yourself. How love can become a slowly tightening noose.
He was always sorry, later.
Every day fading, a living ghost, shrouded in layers of self-hatred, sadness, confusion, fear, exhaustion, anxiety. Always trying to get back to that place when things were good. Until days went by looking in a mirror reflecting, nothing.
I’m one of the lucky ones–a woman who remembered. A woman who pulled apart the veils and shrouds and found her voice again.

Found it living alone.
100 year old, one-room cabin.
40 acres in rural Upper Michigan’s wilderness.
¼ mile Laughing Whitefish River tangling itself through the property.
Found myself in warm summer nights standing barefoot in cricket-symphony darkness watching fireflies wink and float like tiny lanterns.
Found myself in lazy afternoons alone on the river watching iridescent damselflies dance above eddying currents.
Found myself in back-breaking wood hauling and stacking. Hauling and stacking. Hauling and stacking.
Found myself in nights so cold the split log walls popped and shifted and if I didn’t feed the stove every four hours I’d awake shivering, breath hanging in smoky puffs.
Found myself walking wooded paths, Bea-pup by my side–each mossy rock, knobby tree-trunk, and curled leaf edge familiar. Known.
Found myself in long nights half-slept, a loaded gun at my feet, a knife at my head. Stretched between the two stone pillars of fear and determination.
Found myself in a solo July trip to my beloved Isla isle, when the familiar voice of past and future called out together and my answer was laughter and a one-way ticket to Mexico.