One fine day in Chiapas

This time, we get out of bed the moment our eyes are first prised open by the waves on our doorstep. It is not as hard as we imagined. How quickly one can forget the trauma of an early morning alarm clock. How dramatic the improvement a pelapa-thatch roof and the sound of pounding waves can be on one's awakening.

We play chess while we eat our eggs next to the silent lagoon, twenty metres away on the other side of the sand bank from our hut. I lose again. Today, that does not frustrate me as much as usual.

A baby manta ray has found its way in to the shallows and basks in the bath-like water, camouflaged against the grey sand.

We take a lancha across the lagoon to the mainland, watching the spit of sand that has housed us for the last week slide slowly into the horizon.

It is like a tongue, licking the sea, the palm trees its taste buds, studding skinny barrenness with spiky bursts of flavour.

The Frenchlings come with us in the boat. They have been our casual companions this week. We decided to stop drinking for the month of June and this has in some way caused an impenetrable rift between us and any potential friends. On the other hand, the rift could easily have been Mike and I's reluctance to do anything other than be with each other, playing chess, writing music, exploring.

But this morning, however, their presence makes a difference. It means that when a taxi arrives, there are six of us waiting for a lift.

This does not matter in Mexico. We pack ourselves in, four in the back, Mike and I sharing the front passenger seat, the driver, wallowing in space, peering through a cracked windscreen with one surplus arm waving in the car's slipstream. As we accustom ourselves to the speed and the proximity, he introduces himself as Francisco with a wide smile to each of us in turn. He is visibly exalted to be sitting next to Mike.

"Miguel! MIGUEL!" he cries in happiness, patting Michael on the back and laughing. Michael appears to be enjoying the attention and replies in return, "Pancho! Panchito!"


Our driver looks about to wet himself with pleasure at being called the diminutive version of his nickname.

To celebrate the occasion, he turns the mariachi up. Stoic men in gold buttoned suits and white cowboy boots serenade us through the speakers in penetrating shades of brass and strings. Halfway through the joyful anthem, Pancho realises this song will not quite fit and slows the car to a halt. He unceremoniously removes the CD from the player. After a few moments of searching he inserts a new CD, forwarding to track number 8. A tune almost entirely alike the one paused earlier starts blasting from the speakers. Satisfied, he begins to drive again.

He appears to have installed a sub bass in the boot. The Frenchlings in the back are squinting from the volume.

He begins to sing.

He suggests going for a beer. One of the Frenchlings is in a hurry and says no. The driver is disappointed. He changes the song.

The third song hits the spot. He begins to yelp.

He pats Michael on the back again and cries his name into the wind, swerving to avoid potholes in the road. He buys chopped chili mango through the window, from a boy stood at a speed hump, and passes the bag around like juicy chips. Whenever the energy within the car seems to drop, he begins yelping again. Mike looks at me. "This is the most inspiring taxi driver I've ever met!"

I lean further out of the window in a failing attempt for more air. There is not much to do but laugh and sing along, which we do for almost an hour of back twisting, fist clenching, life dripping Mexican experience.

Michael looks like he's on drugs, such is the admiration and aspiration he has for this man. Rarely does one ever see someone so high on life as our Pancho. When we leave, uncrumpling bones in the square at Tonala, he kisses everyone on the cheek and thanks them for the pleasure of their company on this fine morning. We shuffle slowly away, marvelling at the spicyness of our early morning adventure.

But the day is not over yet. We leave Tonala having looked at a large-scale map of the area and pointed to a place down the coast with another lagoon and an interesting name.

The man in the sweet shop waves us towards the market. The man in the market waves us on to the car park. The man in the car park waves us on to a mini bus that drops us two hours later on a motorway, where there is another man who gives us the keys to a shop with a toilet and points towards another minibus going south.

That minibus leaves us in the rain. Once again, the human sponges, sloshing along in slippery sandals.
The women on it tell us we need to carry on our journey from the centre of town. We are hungry and we still haven't bought proper rain jackets. So we take refuge in a cute looking restaurant where a young man with one and a half arms serves us shrimp and black beans.


When we are finished he begins, as they all do, to ask our story. Where are we from, where are we going. Do we like Chiapas. The thing is, we're not at all sure where we're going. We picked a name from a map, that may or may not be possible to get to. So he invites us to talk to his parents, who are sitting just behind the restaurant, celebrating fathers day with their son and their nephew.

We walk into the room and they greet us with huge smiles and make us take our place at the table. They offer us coca cola and beer. They rattle off the same questions as their son did moments earlier. They are delighted with our answers.

The mother has never been on a plane and never will. The men tease her about her fear and she giggles into her beer bottle. "I like Chiapas and Chiapas is where I will stay. I won't go in a plane. Unnatural things." I agree with her and feed her glee with tales of our fifteen hour journeys to get to Mexico from London. England is grey anyway, and cold. She shivers with delight. "Yes, yes, Mexico is beautiful. Stay here, chicita, where the wind is warm." They ask how old we are and cannot believe the answer. To Mexicans we look like teenagers. They ask if we are brother and sister. We laugh a lot. Then their daughter sticks her head in the door and asks the same, and we realise that we all look the same to them in the same way they all look the same to us. They laugh with us.

Then they tell us they will host our wedding. "You must have the party here! Here in Chiapas we know how to party. We will fill this room with people and keep going for three days!" We are like Alice stumbling across the Mad Hatter's tea party, apart from these merry-eyed people are not mad, not even drunk, just high on life and happy to have such unexpected guests at their afternoon table. We leave them with sparkling smiles all around and promises for invites to our future (never-going-to-happen) wedding.

The next bus is driven by a young man who tells us he does not go as far as today's mecca. The village before it, where he lives, is called Zapotal. "Zapotal it is," I reply, and ask him if there are any cheap hotels. He laughs and looks sideways at the woman in the passenger seat, who turns out to be his mother. "Zapotal does not have visitors, but I have a restaurant, and you can stay with my mother if you like."

When we arrive we understand. This is the sleepiest little village I've had the pleasure of stumbling across yet. Thatch huts house snoozing families draped two-to a hammock, televisions barely cutting through the shrieking of the cicadas. Children sit barefoot in the pavement sand. The empty beach, just a continuation of the hundreds of kilometres of identical beach along this coastline, lays silent and unexplored next to the restaurant.

We sit at a plastic Corona table on a small cement patio with a bare lightbulb shining invitations to the mosquitoes. The bus driver turns waiter and lights a cardboard egg carton to place on the floor next to our table. The bites slow in frequency and we get out our homemade chessboard.

Within moments a steaming plate of garlic prawns, the cheapest thing on the menu twice in one day, arrives in front of us. We do not stop our game. This time I win one in four games. I make my head hurt and begin to see everything in terms of chess moves (...thank God the table is in the way of me and Mike's chair - it could take me in one move and I have no back-up. But he should be careful too. His eyes are just one L-shaped Knights move from being taken by his mouth.)

We are presented to the grandmothers bed, a small island under an enormous empty space of a house that looks more like a petrol station forecourt than a residence. As I prepare for bed I am watched by two small grandchildren from behind a curtain that serves as a door, who dart away like fishes whenever I let their attention be known.

The water tank has a turtle in it.

The night presents a continual stream of spectres to keep us awake, under satin sheets slipping against hot limbs.

The power goes off and with it the fan. Without the wind, the mosquitoes move in, burrowing into ear canals with dentist drill wingbeats. The grandfather arrives home and cannot figure out who is in his bed. The grandson, called in to help, shines a mobile phone in our faces and then apologises profusely. The cicadas grate their endless song, drilling through the concrete walls.

Eventually sleep's long fingers begin to take me. Silhouettes of our phantasmagoria of a day creep along the walls. Squinting through the warm waters of a lagoon. A cackling taxi driver and his love for music. Rain, beating on the windows of a minibus. A salad made of chopped hot dogs on the lace tablecloth of a laughing family. The kindness of an old woman and her scampering granddaughters, sleeping in an unknown location under our corrugated cathedral.

Just when we begin to doze off, our host's alarm begins to bleep.

4.30am. Time for another day.

The Void catches up

June brings a loss of direction. My world becomes black and white and blurry.



I plunge headlong into the Void.


I have felt it tracking me for a little while, catching me unawares with flashes of barely-provoked anger and periods of dizzying emptiness. When it finally slips itself under my feet, I fall, rag-doll-like, through its dank depths.


The Void has engulfed us all, once in our lives. You know it from the creeping shadows around your heart. The imps in its employ, sniggering on your shoulders, whisper insults into your ears until you believe them to be true. The tremors of uncertainty blurs lines between reality and nightmare.


This time it comes to me in a disabling lack of self-belief. The path in which I had so much faith seems to have faded.


My self-confidence, boisterous only months ago, has vapourised, leaving me achingly aware of how loosely constructed it must have been.


What, on earth, have I been doing? Why the hell am I here?


I have been out of work for well over a year. I have been rolling around Mexico for seven months. My money is drying up, like the daily puddles spat down on us by June's heavy clouds, and I have no concrete plan for how to replace it. I know I can't go back to work in an office and this thought, once so liberating, terrifies me.


I have had so much time, and yet seemingly done' nothing apart from convert tacos into spare tyres.


Michael encourages me as best he can. He reminds me of all the things I have developed that cannot be written on a CV, such as my healer's hands and my understanding of myself, as well as the things that can, such as my mastery of conversational Spanish.


He tempts me with ideas for how to turn my writing into a career, but I am shocked by my own lack of motivation. I just don't want to do anything. I just don't think I can.

My listless lack of a plan, once so peace-inducing, has become a growing emptiness.


It is during this time that we find ourselves house-sitting a three-bedroom villa (complete with the luxuries of fridge, hot shower, fireplace and beds with real duvets). I cannot remember the last time I was in a room with four walls and no holes.


I throw myself into my long-term passion for cooking, producing elaborate feasts for my boyfriend, who largely sits in front of his computer, working. Mikey, annoyingly, has it sorted. He gets paid for remixes on the road. He deals with them easily and with style. At the same time, he gets handfuls of offers for his new tracks.


His need for the computer and my need for safety means we spend most of our six weeks in San Cristobal indoors. I quickly realise how incapable I now am of doing this.


We argue frequently. Admittedly, the times between arguments are still idyllic and there is no doubt that we are madly in love. But I am strong enough to know that these moments of pain are indicators of deep knots in our lives that need to be massaged out for risk of becoming crippling.


I am also able to remind myself that this journey is and was always going to be about balance - particularly the yin-yang balance of positive and negative forces within my path.


So when I feel myself slipping, I recognise the signs enough to throw out a hand. I catch myself before I fall, like I have done so many times before.


And there, I swing.


I hang on to the edge for a long time, caught between fear of the nothingness below, and fear of the choices above.


You can travel as far as you want, but wherever you are, you will still be you.

Outtakes

My mind flicks images like film memories. I close my eyes and watch the last six weeks flash by in a montage I'd give anything to record.

   Scaling the pyramids of Palenque in the searing midday heat, jungle rising on all sides under a deep, indigo sky.


   Crouching next to the fire in our borrowed, three bedroom house, burning pine copal incense and a list of all the negativity we want to spring clean from our heads.


   A moment's interrupted sleep on a concrete patio on the beach, four-way-sandwiched between a rollmat, a mosquito-net, Michael, and a love-deprived cat, who shows his appreciation with a sharp-clawed massage and purrs as loud as the waves behind.


   Rejecting Saturday night drinking in San Cristòbal de las Casas, in favour of apple juice and mariachi in the square and a packet of ham for the street dogs.


   Eating termites from a jungle tree, mouth bizarrely filling with the taste of buttery, peppered carrots.


   Laughing as the heavens open on the first day of the rainy season and squealing with delight and blessed relief as I am soaked to the bone. Retiring to a hammock under the shelter of a rustling pelapa roof, darkness so thick I am aware of my friends only from the sound of their breathing. The evening strobe lighting - so familiar now - flashes images of my swinging feet in snapshot stills.


   Running through a forest that blooms a green carpet in three days of solid rain.

   Hopping the fence to the restricted area of the ruins of Monte Alban; the highest pyramid of all. Being ordered to climb down. The surreality of the pale brown, pyramid studded landscape far below, as if it belongs to the future rather than thousands of years in the past.

   Winning my first ever game of chess in style on a home-made board (card, marker pen and nail varnish). Subsequently winning again.

   Breakfasting on pork tortas by the side of the road, from plates that have "unimpressive" printed around the edges.

   Watching the live chicken stalls in the covered market, birds passed upside down by their legs to bargaining old ladies. Shock deepening as we compare this apparently cruel treatment to the western style 6-to-a-box, beaks-cut-off factory tradition. We buy a bag of fake meat and retreat.

   Crumbling fresh-baked cookies in front of a log fire, clothes steaming, rain teeming.

   Running after my inebriated friend to save her from the clutches of a man. Feeling my feet slide from beneath me. Smacking the stones of the polished pavement with outstretched hand and smashing bracelets.

   Sitting on a bench in the rain watching the embroidered skirts of the Mayan ladies, like colourful dolls, crouched in front of piles of vegetables and coal-grilled corn.

   Plunging my hands into giant sacks of dry black beans, cool and liquidlike.

   The dampness of the sheets around Michael as he moans with the aches of Dengue fever. Reversed roles when I contract a stomach infection the following week.


   The utter silence of a mountain morning, lit by the ethereal beams of sunlight through a tent door.

   Burying feet deep into sand the exact shade and fine texture of wholewheat flour, lapped by coral-slowed, translucent waves.


   Running through the drenching rain in San Cris, where the cobbled streets flow like rivers and the lightning freezeframes the mountains around us; fairy lights in the central square twinkling through the blurred darkness.

Rain, rain, clean my brain

In the middle of May, the rains began.



Until that point, the world held its breath. It pushed as far as it could under an airless environment -- began to swallow down on barren lungs.


Everything was brown. Plants were skeletons that crumbled at the touch. Even those that remained green -- banana palms, coconut, papaya -- seemed almost frozen in a vacuum that pulverised the life from us.


We flailed limply, like damp dishcloths, drinking in water by the gallon only to vaporise it almost instantly from our pores.


In Mexico, the dry season, although one of the wettest on record, was the only reality I could conceive of. It had always been dizzyingly hot. Rivers had always been dusty. I had always balanced the dry heat of the coast with an escape to the cool, pine-clad mountains forming the spine of the country.


But in the month before the rains came, I barely moved. Things stopped quietly around me, without me really noticing. Wasps lurched drunkenly from one melting pastry to another. Ice cream paused briefly in its frozen state, before giving in to the shimmery air in a sticky slide of white along the forearms. Even birdsong became lazy.


When on the coast, the only way to survive was to stay under cover. Ideas came and went, too slippery for the lazy thinker to clasp his sweaty fingers around.


The world around me and within me was pregnant. Pregnant and uncomfortable, with all the things that could be and that weren't.


Energy built up and intensified and waited; steam in a closed kettle, whistling with impatience.

My head pounded.

And then, in one day, everything changed.


I was at a petrol station at the time, on the side of the carretera running down the Pacific coast, having just crossed into Chiapas, the southernmost state. We were packed in the back of film-maker Dan's van, sulking on the bunk under the weight of the cloying air. I had stepped out for a little respite and to clean the windows. The grease on them almost obliterated the waving palms and swelling mountains taking over the landscape with heavily approaching footsteps.


I had just picked up the bucket, much to the amusement of the macho service men, who hollered and stared as I took their job from them.


Within less than a minute I was soaked to the point of dripping. Or was it flowing? Hard to say. It was more that me and the water were one and the same; I was wetter than I would have been if I had just climbed fully clothed from a pool.

The air was my sea. Around me, people fled like animals from a fire.

Dan banged on the window, urging me to get inside.

I just stared at the sky, blinking the water from my eyes and feeling the streams running down my cheeks.


This rain was to me the sweetest gift in a long stream of beautiful moments. I had waited for a long time. With it came the release of a million trapped thoughts and the relaxation of muscles turned taught by stagnant energy.


Bizarrely, I remained the only person outside on the petrol forecourt, washing the windows with soap that slid off the sodden glass in an instant, laughing at the ridiculousness of all those damp souls hiding under shelter, staring at me with confused faces.


The interest they offered me evidently discarded memories of just hours earlier, when they had all hung desperately from car windows, tongues flapping in the wind like dogs, or fleshy sails breached wide to catch the wind.

The concrete soon ran with inches of warm water that sluiced residue from roads in greasy channels.


Eventually these new rivers would find their way to fields, where earth lay waiting, imitating rocks, anticipating the day when the water would release their particles in crumbling mini-avalanches.


Under that earth lay seeds, dormant, parched. Many were dead.


But for some, the water brought life. As I jumped up and down in the Petrol Station Lake, tiny proteins started forming within them, deep below the ground. All over Mexico, seeds began to germinate.


By the time I climbed, sodden but happy, into Dan's van, laying a towel on the bunk to catch my drips, things had already started to grow.

The windows were sparkling and so was I. I watched the mountains stand straighter, like pictures of evolution from monkey to man, becoming more confident as we progressed, and yet smudged into doubt by the rivers of water that raced in diagonals down the windows.


Water dripped through holes in the roof. The bunk grew damp. The road became rapids, but the cars did not slow down.


And in my head, the thoughts that had been hanging unattached like dust for so many months began to congeal, like the earth in the fields.

Within them, awaking from the incubation of many months, things began to germinate.