(1) The bird + the bathroom floor.
Brief tales from Mexico.
One late December morning, a bird flies into a sliding glass door.
She hits the door and falls with a specific, deadening thud; a noise with finality to it. She doesn’t move. She looks dead.
Then, suddenly, she is standing. She stands perfectly still.
After several minutes, the bird tries to fly. There is a high open window, and underneath it, a wooden table. She aims for the window and can’t make it there. She lands on the edge of the table and perches. Again, perfectly still.
A few more minutes pass. She tries again. This time, she flies out the window, and she is free.
The door is on a terrace and the terrace is in a tiny town on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, and I, like the bird, am there to crash and fall, so that I might find my wings.
I don’t leave my husband because I am not happy; I don’t leave my husband because I stop loving him; I don’t even really leave my husband for this 23-year-old Mexican-Argentinean surfer who is all cheekbones and eyebrows and a gaze that goes into my marrow.
I leave because I have to leave. I don’t know what else to say.
That doesn’t stop me from saying things, from trying to find the right words. I always think problems can be solved by the right words. I tell him, it’s not you. I tell him, our marriage is like a ship, and when there is something wrong with the ship, both people need to work to fix it. You want me to help fix it; I want to help fix it. But I’m not on the ship, anymore. I haven’t been for awhile. I’m in the ocean next to it, drowning.
I’m a horrid cliche.
Eventually, he tells me to stop talking.
Don’t write me anymore, Emily -- I get an email, one day. I know you can write. I know you can manipulate anything into sounding good. Don’t try to make it sound good, that you broke a marriage.
It stops me cold. I think about myself for a long time after that, running around trying to patch situations with these carefully chosen words like bandages. I think about a life spent believing that anything can be fixed through communication; I think about a little girl trying to understand language better and better and better, reading faces and bodies along with all the books she can get her hands on, desperate to never again be misunderstood.
I think about her again two months later, standing on the main street of this tiny magical town that is also my personal hell as my now-ex 23-year-old lover presses his thumb against an eyelash on my face and says, I’m sorry, I can’t explain. There’s so much noise in my head. He takes my hand and holds my thumb against his, the eyelash between us. Make a wish with me, he says. Whoever the eyelash sticks to, their wish will come true.
I close my eyes and think, I wish I had never met you.
We open our eyes and separate our hands. The eyelash is gone.
We never speak again.
I walk from this stupid interaction, his thumbprint still warm on my face, like some combination of ghost and puppet to the bus stop and then to the airport in Puerto Vallarta. I am only in my body enough to move it, or to have someone else move it. I am floating; I am part ether. I move my human suit to Mexico City and then to Cancun; I move it into the jungles outside of Chemuyil and sit down to attend two ayahuasca ceremonies, my second and third ever.
I’m begging for anything.
The night before ceremony, I sit with my friend Roma on the terrace of our little jungle hotel and blow smoke in her face while I complain. I’m insufferable -- I have the ability to recognize this, how deeply and totally unpleasant I am, and unfortunately, I don’t care. This is me now, I think. Darling, I’m a nightmare, full stop.
Here’s the thing, I tell Roma. If someone came down from the star table right now and said, Emily, you have a choice. You can stay on this path. It will be hard as hell; it will hurt in ways you didn’t know you could hurt; it will push you to the edge again and again, but through it all you will become an incredible woman leading an incredible life. Or, you can have one more month with this boy, a month where he’s only the best parts of himself, and then die immediately after and never become who you came here to be -- a long drag -- I wouldn’t even have to think twice, I say. I’d take the month. I want a light joy; I’m ready to give up. I’m never going to be that incredible woman; she’s too far and I’m too tired.
The look Roma gives me as I speak is something I’ve never seen before. Well, that’s a lie -- it is pure disappointment, and it’s something I saw from my parents every day of my life, for not being good enough, Asian enough, Christian enough, well-behaved enough, getting-perfect-grades enough, professionally successful enough. But this disappointment, from Roma, isn’t about me not filling some expectation I don’t agree with or care about. It’s someone who simply wants me to be better, for myself. Someone who knows this is not who I am.
I don’t understand fully until much later what a gift this moment is. To have someone who will see the truth of you -- and at this point, I have known Roma for barely three months -- and kindly but firmly ask you to see it too? We are so often mired in polite-ness, in nice-ness, in the desire not to offend, and we call that love. Here, in front of me, is something new -- love that asks hard questions, love that holds up a mirror and places its hand gently atop your head, saying, look here. Don’t look away.
Roma gets mad at me, that night, when I tell her I’d throw away my entire future for something as superficial as traipsing through the jungle following a boy who might, at best, throw scraps of love on the floor for me, when he remembers I am even there. If you really feel that way, she says, and in the calmness of her voice are dangerous undertones of fury, exasperation, disbelief, dragging at me, then what are you doing here? Why did I bring you here? Why did you ask for my help, for anyone’s help? Why are so many of us trying to help you, if that’s all you truly want? Her anger goes through me and jolts something deeper than the ghostly ether I’ve given in to. It reminds me that there’s flesh somewhere in the fog, and in that flesh something real, something me, still capable of feeling shame. And thus, conversely: still capable of feeling pride, or at least of feeling a desire for pride.
It is the first time I understand how anger can be a profound expression of love.
Two nights later, I am lying facedown on a concrete bathroom floor in the jungle, begging to die.