I say goodbye to Luis, the quiet bringer from afar, almost two weeks later.
We have lived in the desert of Zacatecas. This last, unplanned stop in my journey, although a whole day's drive away from where I met Luis, is reassuringly just a short drive from my first destination, Real de Catorce. This does not surprise me.
I have lived the life of the chosen one, treated to presidential suites, gifts, tours; waited on hand and foot whilst being inducted into the Ways Of The Light. In just a short time he has become a father of sorts. From the centre of my pile of presents I feel much younger than twenty-five.
Like a sparkling snow dome, the information he places within my swelling skull needs time to settle before I am able to see my way through.
A delicate network of carefully constructed threads is forming, a throbbing organism, extending primordial limbs -- fleshy tentacles that incarnate my innate knowledge and seal form in a giant web, designed to catch even the tiniest wisp of instruction blown my way.
I feel simultaneously mighty and helpless. In our weeks together he has mentally skinned me alive and left me prostrate, my bared innards glistening juicily, pulsating, vulnerable and exposed in a way I have not experienced. I react with erratic waves of rage and exhileration, swooping easily through everything in between.
It is a complete mental scrub.
I cannot sleep.
When I do, my dreams tease me with half-formed shapes and moody premonitions. I long for next week, when my long-lost love will arrive with a suitcase full of normality and eyes widening with that warming resonance. My companion, my other half. I long for his company to share all of this with, his strength to walk by my side.
And yet I do not want this time to end, for I feel myself resonating with a clear harmony that I have never felt before.
When Luis and I part, it is under the knowledge that our separation is only temporary. At some point in the future, we have a journey to make. Only I will know when the time is right for that journey.
In the meantime, I have been instructed to empty my head before bed, slow my already lilting pace, and stay completely connected to the things around me.
As long as I relax, and carry on as I am, everything will unfold, just as it should.
I spend the last days before Michael's arrival in a Holiday Inn in Morelia, Michoacan, paid for by my new benefactor. I eat books with the same zeal as I had when reading Alice in Wonderland at the age of four. I must be the only guest ever to spend every evening alone in their room, dogmatically preparing salads in a camping pan with a blunt knife nicked from the downstairs restaurant, rinsing chilli and lime remains away in the shower.
I cannot remember ever being this happy.
I look down at my neck, where two silver amulets glint whitely in the sun. Purchased in shining Zacatecas, the desert oasis; salmon stones, windows glinting, raw scents of life in a barren earth. El serpento y el caracol. The snake, half of winged serpent Quetzalcoatl in a spiraling figure eight, representing oneness and connection with the earth; the snail, home on his back, undulating with sticky strength, slow enough to sense everything in the smallest gust of wind.
As I place them around my neck I am reminded of my words, borne from the depths of my loneliness, back in November:
"The snail's head of my intrigue retreats back into its shell, leaving only feelers, slowly waving."
Now my antennae extend powerfully ahead, muscled extensions of my senses. Nuance shades my perception in a thousand rainbow colours, the sun pressure-washing my mind, blasting away a crust of unnecessary memories, bringing innate sense into sharp relief.For my last night alone, I return to Mexico City and the same hostel in which I started this looping journey.
Mi viaje solita is bracketed. The circle is closed.
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