I can never sleep before I travel. Something about being propelled through the air feels mighty unnatural. Airports- I can deal with. Irrefutable proof of bots. The way people move at airports is the way I have learned to go about life. With a hurried urgency and stifled precision. The sneaking suspicion that one might be forgetting something. But planes are forever odd.
I lugged my shit through the jungle, wondering how much foreign stimulus it would take to distract me from the resounding grief pumping through my chest. What new amalgamation of prayers it’ll take for me to stop seeing two sides of a timeline turned down. My friends have been trying to dance the pain out of me like medic ballerinas. I figure if I get enough physical traction, land-width, space, I can shake my reality like an etch a sketch. Reconfigure and stop the synchronicities.
The Mayans believed that Playa Del Carmen was an entrance to the Underworld. Not Heaven or Hell, but a womb. A meeting place for the dwellers of earth and the divine, somewhere we originated from. It's muddy hollows lead to underground cities of deep sinkholes, caves miles beneath the jungle of the River Maya. These caverns boast massive rooms of stalactite statues and high ceilings, chiming silver pools unsteadily shaded by limestone chandeliers. These underground waters, cenotes, were said to have healing properties.
We stayed in a gated community. A guarded casita by the sea, beachfront. There were ruins in our backyard that no one could tell me about.
The sand, as fine as granulated sugar, sprinkled the streets in dust. The town is built around trees that seem to puzzle in and out of clay structures, loping through the horizon in an impossible green. Every few hours , a sporadic violent rain will pour out on the streets, commanding brief reprieve from the humidity. There were colorful avenues packed with vendors of ceramic animals, painted skulls and sweet milks. The people there have wide kind eyes, warm faces. The land, the land had a heart beat of it's own. With heavy unresolution. I hear stories about cartels that use witches, about the suppression of ancient medicine. Time seems to warp and distort, twirling alongside the hungry vines that grove above and below me. These highways of vines wire out in front of us, stitching ancient maps. Their fat trunks bear witness to invisible atrocities. Their mangled fingers point downwards, gesturing towards it's caves.
I can’t tell if it's the memory of sacrifice. Perhaps it’s the general unsettled hum of ancient magic suppressed. But I cry when I get there. I cry because there are ruins in our backyard and no one can tell me what happened . I cry because I don’t feel numbed by electricity and my gut is like an empty cup. I am a vessel for something. I am grieving, but I am not certain what. There were ruins in our backyard.
After the initial euphoria of landing in strange terrain disappeared, the air got sticky. Sickly sweet. I have fanned enough of myself out to blend into the trees. I am like a sensitive Victorian boy who hasn’t seen the light of day. I get stung by a bee, quickly learn I am allergic. My gut, only recently accustomed to battling American parasites, is rebelling. I get food poisoning. I logically get a tattoo. My sensitivity hardly annoys me. At this point, it's become an irrefutable skill that has led me to uncover many valuable mysteries- but here, in this alien landscape- I am overwhelmed. I am moving through gradients, different perceptions of reality. Simplified almost. Things feel psychedelically distilled, alive, and yet ambient. The energy is loud, and I keep hearing myself say:
“The land is yelling.”
“There is grief here.”
Like the weirdest bitch you ever invited on vacation.
I couldn’t tell you what triggered it, beside the obvious dehydration and hives, but I seized. I keeled over on the pavement. Eyes rolling back in my head. Left my body. Twice.
I seemed ready to leave 3D reality. A little too eager. I have always felt was only half captured by my senses. I greeted an amorphous realm, strange but familiar. My ancestors were there. It was not heaven. Some liminal space. I could only make out jaguars. Lights. I had a dialogue about it not being time, and felt myself reluctantly return to my body.
The hard part.
I project back to my own body, all damp and matted, and Jose is crying over me. I remember duality. I have to remember who I am for an irritating second, a second that stretches out for eternity. I thought I might die that night. For hours I am shivering, vomiting. I feel like I am dialoguing with God.
I am explaining, in this infantile state, that this gift is ridiculous, impractical and overwhelming. I would like to be regular- now. Why put the psychic irritants of a character like Madam Blavaskty tucked away in the body of a Rock Stars Wife. I would like to be blissfully unaware now.
I am lovingly assured that this is not an option. That the physical is just as sacred as the non physical. I go through some sort of life review while I am awake, driving my consciousness like a ship to certain questions and themes. I ultimately conclude that most transient things- thoughts, beliefs, ideas- are temporal. I need to stop moving like I am at the fucking airport. I need to be unwavering about my love and truth.
There are ruins in the backyard. It takes a few days, but we learn they were ports to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of War and Fertility. Her animal is a Jaguar. Xaman-Há, whose name means “Northern Water,” was the ruin. The most important departure point for pilgrimages made to keep both the land and woman fertile. Ixchel was celebrated by rituals of dehydration and dance, an effortless lethargy I have already unknowingly practiced in her favor.
The ancients would evade sleep and swim in oceans, deliberate in their efforts to simulate a seizure as it was considered a visit from God.
I am careful not to underestimate the monstrosity of goddesses and ghosts when ages are misrepresented. The deception of false history makes them louder. Makes it harder to determine, harder to process. And what isn’t felt is always repeated . These thirsting Gods with ancient technology and primordial magic seem to clamor along with me. Their magic was stolen and called governance.
A few days pass, and I am renewed, catapulting above the jungle, swimming through mud rivers and crossing chiming silver pools. Leaving my sorrows in hollows in the earth. I meet a Medicine Woman, with silver hair and the demeanor of a child. We sit beside a cenote, the water buzzing brilliantly and batting off the shapely vines. She tells me to “drink more water” She traces me with feathers and I feel myself come back. I bathe in volcanic rock. I let her know that I feel stifled by the psychic stuff. She laughs and says shes glad I brought it up. We breathe. She tells me I am not unlike her. Tells me, I am allowed to have fun. My medicine comes from the heart. I need to dance daily. That I am from a tribe of warriors.
She asks me if I have questions and I don’t. I thought about asking about the soulmate stuff, but I didn’t- and she points to a blue dragonfly that had been sitting on my hand. I don’t need to tirelessly search for answers, because they seem to find me.
