Notes of a Junglee
I returned to a sea coast after seven years. Under slightly different stars and drastically altered circumstances:
honeymoon <> getaway
long journey <> pandemic mini break
commemorating matrimony <> commemorating manuscript (I had finally finished)
a husband <> a teacher
newly wed <> novice author
The most radical variance remains:
she was alive <> she is not alive
every place ever visited existed in a reality that hosted her
these are her terms of disappearance
*
To remain faithful to headlines, I did not journal copiously on this visit but I made notes. I was We most of the time - we adventured, we bathed, we feasted, we drunk, we walked long stretches, we laughed into the orange atmosphere, we biked on broken roads, we made morning and noon and siesta and evening and dusk and twilight love, we filled each other, we questioned paradigms, we questioned each other, we asked ourselves.
I made notes:
A jungle grows in the direction of the riviera, meets on its banks.
The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all - on a typically humid afternoon, we waded in a murky cenote. The rope that hung under the water and across the length of the cenote enabled both tight rope walking and access to the far side. Treading water in the deep green I swum to the ridge and there they were, a sprawl of lotuses. White and uninterrupted. I recalled Kaveh — quiet as cotton floating on a pond — their inhabitance and possibility created an internal fountain. The horizontal root system, the petals that breed outward and outward, from mud, quietly. The trees surrounding the cenote were easily over a hundred years old, centurion figures on top of which other strange and unlikely plants grew. We saw succulents sprouting from the middle of the trunk.
……blooming in adversity: her, her, her. She blossomed and her cheekbones flushed and spread apart from her radical joy, she bloomed even when the sentence had been given to her, she kept blooming, is she still blooming? Elsewhere? What other plans can a horizontal root system have?
What was not photographed: I recall on all previous expeditions dragging my Mamiya through airport securities, demanding it’s absence from the conveyor belt, protecting the film at all cost, straining my neck and changing my body to the most awkward of attitudes to achieve the perfect frame. On this visit, the pictures were circumstantial and casual. What was not photographed: the lotuses, Annabella (and I do keep wondering what the bottom part of her face looked like), his face when he saw me emerge, the taste of the spinach and lime juice, the way the white couple from Colorado on the bike tour held hands as they rode for a few seconds, when he came to find me in the water, the woman keeping her margarita afloat in the waves,
Día de Muertos fell on these salted days. On the morning of our departure I set up an altar with large marigolds and 2 white candles, her stones which I had washed in the beach water and cast under the moonlight, I asked her to be with me, I was overwhelmed and did not choose many moments to let grief settle in or pour out during these few days on the Yucatan peninsula. It stirred me softly to see all the altars lined up in the village town, as I rode past them I was allowed a momentary flash to witness the portraits of the gone, of the beloveds, some too young, some aged by the quality of the photograph, all of them still, frozen in frame, surrounded by flame and flower. I will name it privilege to share grief with others who had lost, who suffer still, who became familiar with the the deep cavity of a love’s absence. The first love - mother. The first face, voice, smile, feeding, breathing with and around - mother. I spoke vaheguru in my heart for all of them.