(3) Mrs. Coss, dehydrating fruit in a van.

And a Pringles can full of ashes.

May 03, 2025

I leave ceremony, I think, changed. I have experienced the darkest parts of myself, intimately. I have looked under the rocks, into the eyes of the ugly creatures. I have loved myself from wanting to die on the floor into a state of grateful prayer. Before I leave, a woman I’ve barely spoken to comes up to me and says, you’re a warrior woman; your energy is so strong.

Part of me believes her.

Roma and I and my new lighter heart take the ferry across to Cozumel and settle into her friend’s house for the week. I rent a scooter and contact a dive instructor, and for the next several days, I live my favorite kind of life — dirty and barefoot, riding my scooter to and from dive sites, breathing slowly under the cool, clear Caribbean surface. I swim with giant sea turtles and think I’ve turned a corner. Pisces season turns into a fiery Aries beginning. My 38th birthday approaches. It’s been a hard few months, but I’m different now; I really think this.

Oh, Emily.

It’s important, when faced with a task of enormous proportions, to be blessed with some degree of naivete. To have no real idea of what is happening, how huge it is, this thing that you’ve unwittingly embarked upon. I have left my home — city, state, and country — my job, my 14-year relationship. I am in Mexico using a VPN to collect pandemic unemployment for who knows how long. I have no plans, not even a hint of a plan. I am walking on a path unpaved and unmarked, and there is so little light guiding me. I take one small step and then another, never entirely sure that the one after that won’t take me off a cliff.

After a week of warm crystal clear waters and sandy hair, I fly back across the country to the tiny Pacific coast town. I’m fine now, I think.

I am not.

Change doesn’t happen like that, you know. Not in one or two ayahuasca ceremonies, not in picking yourself up off the bathroom floor the one time. I am about to learn just how many times you have to pick yourself up off the floor, and in how many different ways. Again, and again, and again. More love, more whispered sweetness to your wounded selves. More still. Again. Another drag up to the elbows; to the knees. There’s only that.

Aurin — the boy — and I truly never talk again. Sometimes, though, late at night, my memories are nearly as strong as reality —

— the two of us in a cloud of white sheets and he whispers, let’s get married. Let’s buy a van and drive around Oaxaca. Let’s, let’s, let’s —

He’s so like me, when I was 23 — impulsive, passionate, all-in and then right back out again. In the weeks leading up to that moment, he had gotten obsessively into dehydrating fruit, making calculations in a notebook full of graph paper. Try this one, Emily — an apple at 1mm. And this one, just .5mm. One morning I ask if he needed anything from the store, and he says, please get me two of the most symmetrical pears. He wants to garnish cocktails with them, so they have to look perfect, he explains. My memories are like this: I check every single pear at three different markets, and in the cloud of white sheets, he says into my ear, I wish I could freeze this moment forever.

Me too, kiddo. Me too.

I tell my friend Ashley about it while we chain-smoke on our balcony in Puerto Vallarta, where I eventually moved after crumbling to pieces, to get away from Aurin and possibly back to myself. God, Emily, she says, exhaling in a long thin line. Do you really want to be Mrs. Coss, dehydrating fruit in a van?

The great tragedy of me is that I did, very much, however briefly, want to be Mrs. Coss dehydrating fruit in a van; as much as I wanted to still be my husband’s wife; as much as I would soon want to be riding through Vietnam on the back of Eric’s motorcycle. -- You have a plan? A life? Can I come? The answer, devastatingly and also Thank God, was always no.

What else can I tell you about Vallarta? We become friends with Marco who owns the delicious vegetarian Italian restaurant down the road and sometimes spend entire days there, moving from espressos to bottles of wine back to espressos, fresh pasta and salad in between. His daughter is a skydiving instructor; he gifts me two beaded bracelets when I finally leave. We buy fresh queso Oaxaca and handmade crisp round blue tortilla chips from the corner store; there is nothing but a jar of Ashley’s moisturizer in our fridge. Some days I don’t get out of bed; some days I learn a song badly on the ukelele. On one of my bed days I eat only Pringles and start using the empty can as a very tall ashtray, which stays perched precariously on the mattress next to me, on top of one of my half-filled journals. Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman Smoking Marlboro Reposados in Bed and Ashing Into a Pringles Can, I think. The can feels symbolic, somehow; representative of me. I am alive. I am a Pringles can full of ashes, but I am alive.

April is drawing to a close and my passport is only a few months from expiring and Bruce calls me from Belgium and tells me to come live in his apartment and teach some yoga classes for him. I need someone to teach for me while I’m traveling, he says, but doesn’t add, and you need to work again, and also live in a place where you are not allowed to smoke cigarettes in bed. I am alive, but hardly a decision-making agent in my life. Having made a series of horrible decisions, I am now in a state of what could be called surrender but looks suspiciously like quitting. I am no action, only reaction. I am leaving Mexico because my 180 days are almost up. I am going to the States because my passport is expiring. Bruce says, come to Brussels, and I am obedient like a puppy. No one, least of all my own brain, has suggested anything better.

Before I leave Vallarta, I jump out of a plane with Marco’s daughter and buy a skateboard I have no idea how to ride from a local coffee/skate shop, to support the kids. I leave an alarming number of things in Mexico -- a giant and very nice suitcase, my yoga mat, blocks, Olympic rings, a ton of clothes and books. The girl who packed for this vacation has nearly nothing in common with the one who is leaving now. I go back to the States draped in handmade jewelry full of giant crystals, with a ukelele slung over one shoulder and the skateboard under the other arm, and not one clue as to who I am.