This post may be triggering on the topic of anxiety and mortality.

México is the most misunderstood country I’ve ever been to.
It is stunning. It is a hidden gem. It is full of fighters (not the violent type, but the type who are strong) and it is full of love.
México gave me no love on Thursday, October 15, when I drove straight into sand and beached my car.

Where were you in Mexico?- you might ask
Puerto Peñasco. It’s a small port town.

What body of water is it on?- you might also ask.
That’s a great question. It’s water from the Pacific Ocean that heads north after laying out in Cabo San Lucas.

Everyone has cautious curiosities about Mexico. What I mean by everyone is people in Tucson who don’t go, and friends and family in other parts of the US. It’s a country with so much intrigue, infamy and ill-repute that if I were Mexican, I would be fiercely defensive of my country. I know the history of the USA, and I am not fierce or defensive of it. I am grateful for my life but not ignorant to our ills.

I get it. In a country this big, it’s strange that I can hop into a car on a Thursday morning and be on the beach in Mexico by Thursday afternoon, pesos exchanged, with my friend getting a $40 hour-long massage.

But after I packed our groceries, passed three covered checkpoints and drove through the border, I couldn’t figure how to drive 10 minutes from the beach. “Disculpe” I approached a man who already had his resistance up “Es que mi amiga y yo estamos atrapadas en la avena–‘ wait which one is oatmeal and which one is sand, I think it’s arena too late “y no sé si nos puede ayudar porque no tenemos como para…”
He responded, in a hurry and a big truck, ‘no se puede. no tengo..- You need rope.’ He switched to English but it didn’t sound much more natural than my Spanish. ‘A bueno’ I responded, like I didn’t know that. ‘Y no lo tiene usted?’
‘No, sorry.’
Vieja perra.
I just spent an entire monologue defending Mexico and how kind the people are and you can’t help me get out of the sand? Apply gringa in distress filter.

I called Amber two days before. “Peet?” (that’s our nickname) “Peet, something has happened.. and well, I have bites all over my butt. And I think it could be bed bugs and I don’t want you to come down here and get them so I just said I had to tell ya and well, you’ll have to decide what to do.” I read the constellations on my butt, in triads of portent, the tell-tale bed bug trails of woe.

She visited anyway, bendito sea Jesús y sus apóstoles, and after we drove to Mexico and found our AirBnB and labored to find vegan options, walked the ocean shore and talked about everything under the Mexican sun, we drove back to Tucson 2 days later “Are you ladies US citizens?” (Border Patrol Agent at Border Checkpoint, far away from border, asked) “Yes.” “Okay have a good day” (Did you not want to see our passports? If there had been a Latino/a person in the car, would you have asked them?); then ate a vegan burger and said goodbye at the airport but before we even got that far, somewhere between the doldrums of the Tohono O’odham reservation and the other doldrums of the Tohono O’odham reservation (it’s 99% doldrum), something in my insides cracked open like an oyster shell and I began to cry like I don’t live in the desert. “Water is lost through the skin through evaporation from the skin surface without overt sweating and from air expelled from the lungs. This type of water loss is called insensible water loss because a person is usually unaware of it.”

So, we did the only thing that best friends do in the face of insensible water loss by way of tear ducts and went to Mister Car Wash. There was sand to be vacuumed from the baseboards of my humble Pontiac Vibe (the car which seemed to be on every street corner in Puerto, to my excitement), we rode through the carwash while the two dogs had a hay-day trying to figure what special hell this was that systematically slapped the sides of our car with soap suds. Washed clean, we made our merry way home.

That’s the long way around Baja California to say that, yes, we did get out of the sand. Our AirBnB host’s friend Julio came to empty air out of my tires because air pressure needs to be at 15 to get out of sand, he explained in a fast Spanish that I was keeping up with by hell or high synapses. He even led us to the closest gas station to put the air back in, where he helped us do that as well. My faith in humanity and Mexico was simultaneously restored, as I was reminded that there are selfish and less selfish folks everywhere, and maybe that guy with the truck and no rope was just having a bad night but was deep down a Mother Theresa. Not to mention, who would like a gringa on the border with the things that the US has put Mexico through?

“Peet? I don’t want you to leave” I said to her as Della was laid out on the pavement to our right. I kept looking down at Della because she was small and big at the same time, a petite chocolate lab, powerful and smart enough to be Amber’s guide dog in the adrenal obstacle course that must be San Francisco, but precious enough to be titled petite.

So that’s all to say that no, I didn’t have bed bugs. Well I think I did but they were in a patio cushion from Goodwill that has since been wrapped up in a large trash bag and disposed. I hope they are gone.

After Amber and Della walked through the automatic doors of the airport, I went to my biweekly plasma donation. I donate plasma on the side hustle because I have low self-esteem and so far, it’s to the tune of $68/week I can throw at my groceries. But this donation was a different hurricane. After two unsuccessful sticks, one circumvented to marginal success, and my red blood waiting to make it’s return into my tenuously pricked vein, I told them to keep the dang blood and get the needle out of my arm because my veins are not privy to scavenger hunts from thirsty needles. “You have a hematoma. Here’s a leaflet on hematomom. By the way you can’t come back for two months because that’s how long it takes to regenerate your red blood.” “You need a rope, and I don’t have one. Sorry” “I think I have bed bugs, sorry.”
Vieja perra.
“Can you use the red blood, at least?” “No because it has anti-coagulant in it.”
A la verga.
And somewhere between getting beached in Mexico, imagining bed bugs, saying goodbye to Amber and getting a hematoma, I thought about how Aunt Sherri died without her family close (by her election) and I was probably going to do the same some day, at the rate I’m headed down Single, No Kids Avenue (a calm, tidy and peaceful street, I might add, with excellent sanitation and little to no graffiti) and by Tuesday half way through second period on Zoom, I could not keep it together. But I couldn’t remember all of the reasons why I was or was not upset.

Is it the pandemic, is it the first year of teaching, or do I not know what it is? Is this my mental health taking a wide-swinging left turn? I swear… on Monday, I was fine Spotify-listening, Dutch’s Bros’ ordering, fine.

I grabbed my phone and texted whoever might care “I am having a panic attack” and I was. I could feel only one thing and that was my death. And I wondered what I was doing at a desk, staring at a screen, when I was only going to die someday and does anyone know if dying hurts like a feckless needle to a teacher vein or does it itch like invisible bed bugs or does it terrify you like driving into sand without AAA on a small beach in Mexico (no, there’s no AAA, Peet). Or does dying happen like a sunset in the painted desert, releasing every gorgeous color across the sky until vitality pulses and fades like air out of a tire and drives you home?

All the sing-song motivations of yesterday measured frail in the face of my inevitable end: coping skills and coloring for adults and self-care sounded as wobbly as a dancing skeleton. Funny, I had forgotten I was alive long enough to also forget that I would someday not be.

“Can I walk you through a breathing exercise?” Gretchen said to me on the phone. “Sure.” I think it sort of helped. Or I needed someone to know I was panicking and that helped. Truthfully, what could help? That’s the crux of the question. No one can stop me from someday dying, at all.

And this is when things get really good because when I was panicking the negative thoughts were invited in like bees to honey and soon they were crawling all over me In Guatemala they don’t see therapists when they’re a little bit bruised, they rely on each other. You just need support because you are alone and other societies have community but the US doesn’t. You are sitting at a desk crying and your friends across the border are planning to walk cross the desert to come to the US and work for half of what you make. You can’t be a little more grateful? You have everything you need and more and still you complain about your salary. Your parents are going to die someday. This is not the pandemic, it is your panic. I was being mindful alright, my mind was full, so full up with air like tires spinning further into the sand.

I didn’t know, during 2nd period and then 4th and then 6th, that I was grieving Aunt Sherri as tears streamed uncontrollably down my face (thank God for the camera-off feature). I just thought I was panicking.
“So you’re telling me you lost two of your aunts this year? And you don’t think that’s what’s going on?”
“I think you’re right.”
“What do you do to express yourself?”
“I write.”
“You need to keep doing that until this part of your soul is heard. It wants to get out”

So here it is, my soul speaking out: I am afraid to die. And it is not because I am afraid of hell, or ceasing to exist, but I am really afraid of physically passing from this life to another. And I am afraid to do it alone. Right now, I am very alone. I teach online alone, live with one roommate, don’t go out much and don’t see people, gave up drinking and meat except the occasional chicken burrito, and apparently gave-up donating plasma while I simultaneously decided that seashells are fascinating even though they are so stupid and I hope I never see them again except I walk past the ones from Mexico everyday.

Don’t worry: I am in Yuma because the gorilla of grief scared me. Here, I have my best friend. Here, I can do my laundry without finding quarters in a coin shortage. Here, I can be heard. And maybe death, like seashells, will grow on me. But I won’t figure that out today. Maybe if you read this and you are feeling anxiety from the pandemic, you will know that I feel it too.