So, I booked a trip. 

I’ve been lucky to book so many before, but this one took some plotting.

All of the layovers on the US dollar looked egregious: red eyes on opposite coasts, or three layovers and a red eye in Texas. Red Eye in Texas is the name of no romantic comedies for a reason. And then I had to consider other factors like “where will I leave my car in Mexico? who will pick me up from the airport in Guate?” and then everybody’s favorite travel question “how do I go for long enough to enjoy it but not long enough to call my ex?” 

So, I booked the trip the smart way: drive to Mexico, leave my car in Hermosillo, then fly to my beloved, my long-suffering, my green, gorgeous Guatemala. International tickets are so much cheaper if you fly from Mexico. No red eyes, just a 6-hour drive. Guatemala is not mine, if anything, I am hers (if she would have me). I owe my Spanish to Guatemala, therefore my career as a Spanish teacher, therefore.. well, how can you measure the profundity of that gift? 

Have I searched him up on Instagram (the students have taught me that’s how you say it now, “search up”) Yes, yes I have. Have I studied every inch of the thumbnail photo that is large enough to tell me exactly nothing about him or anyone, for that matter? Also, yes. 

Have I emailed him? No. Not yet. 

No. 

Some back story might be beneficial: I broke up with E.P. in 2019 just before I moved back to the U.S.A. at the end of two+ years with a rooster as my upstairs roommate, and true to my nature, I was the heartbroken one. I pined, I cried, I sobbed (yes, in public). I started my memoir. I finished my memoir. I started my career, and it hasn’t finished me. I still think of E.P. Now I think of him abstractly, like the way I think of Diego Rivera, “Hmm, that guy, what a fella.” I don’t cry, or even come close, but I can’t stop thinking of him entirely. Even, how many years now? So many years later. 

So, when I spoke to my host family earlier this week, they told me that someone lived in my old apartment now, but that I could sleep in the bedroom downstairs with them. Even though I shouldn’t be surprised, I felt a little replaced. I should also mention that I felt absolutely grateful that they have a renter. It’s a space that should be rented, because it’s an excellent source of income. However, I was still replaced. “Ella es mi competencia” I joked to my host sister, Clara’s, laughter. 

When I broke up with E.P., I was so bereft to the point of asking Clara if I could sleep in her bed with her. I didn’t want to be upstairs alone. I wasn’t at risk to myself, but I was at ridiculous to myself. And that is no place for a lady on the second floor who gave up pork after listening to the pig squeals of protest from the next door butcher, who had a constellation of flea bites dancing across her shins, who could speak Spanish well enough to get out of jail and K’iche’ well enough to stay there, to remain. Clara said yes. 

I think for two nights, I shared a bed with her, waking up feeling like I had smashed a major organ. I had. Then I returned upstairs to my tiled two bedroom apartment to listen to the echo-chamber of my inner and outer. Tortillas can fix almost anything. I can’t eat tortillas anymore, a touch of ye olde pre-diabetes. I don’t know how I will break that one to my host family. They might look at me like I am crazy, and it wouldn’t be the first time. 

So then I got off the phone with Clara and wanted to pack my suitcase, but waited. It is too soon still. And it will get in my way in my no-bedroom studio apartment (linoleum, not tile, in case that’s important). I wonder if the plants I left behind in Santa Clara are alive 5 years later. I wonder if my plants in Phoenix will survive the 8 days I am away. 

And then it hit me as I drove to work. You know, the itchy “it.” I searched up his number in Whatsapp. Oh yes, I had deleted it. I searched it up in my contacts. No, just the old number that isn’t his number anymore. Why do I keep that around? I have his email address. I did not search it up. I know I have it. I clicked off my phone. I put on my school badge, scanned it and beep, I walked upstairs and into my classroom. 

Over the last four years, I have labored, cried, and regretted going into education. When I left Guatemala, I was 33. It was my Jesus year. I needed to pick education or flight attending and moveon.org (as my dad often says). Eh, I picked teaching. I think my Spanish in flight attending would have been limited to beverages, and perhaps the occasional conversation. Plus I didn’t want to fly the world alone, and I already knew that I’d feel pathetic trying to get my tied-down friends., many who are wives and mothers, to fly with me. I know, you’re going to recommend I try a meet-up group. (Please, no more recommendations to join a meet-up group). Also, I loved studying Spanish in high school. I loved it. I loved conjugating verbs and taking risks and being right. I could teach it now, I could crack open a text book and make a lesson pretty. Conjugate this, suckahs! I am a magic wand of a teacher. I can make children eat out of the palm of my unmoisturized hand. I had this. 

And then, after I signed up and paid for grad school, they said “no one teaches conjugation anymore. Students learn verbs implicitly, from meaning and context, and with comprehensible input. By the way, speak 90% in the target language at all times, even to novices. Make them gesture so they remember what the words mean. Make it all about them! We all love talking about ourselves!”

And so I went, crying, and doubting, and staring into the deep void that is the faces of masked teenagers in a struggling school on a struggling earth during a thing called a pandemic. Then we took the masks off, and I took the desks away. “I am teaching deskless! It’s all the rage! I learned it in a training!” And then I got raked over the coals by some entitled parents who decided to spread their venom through the community about me. And then, now, this is my year. My fourth year in education, though it finally feels like my first. Like I am a teacher. Like I earned the title “Profe” and the award the school honored me with this year. 

When I walk into my classroom somewhere around 7:30, past the glass-paneled walls and my weekly password “¡Despacio!” (slow down!) that students say to come in, I switch off the sensor lights immediately. I don’t need bright lights until the children come in. I face my computer and get into the flow, setting up Bellwork and Quizlet and preparing myself mentally to speak in Spanish at a comprehensible pace for 5 hours and 10 minutes. I am woman, hear me roar. And then, I hear it, and then I feel it. The roar. It starts somewhere deep in my gut but it’s not diarrhea. It’s a contractual take-down between my stomach and my heart that nudges me “Hey.. email him.”

I think to myself: “Hey, Profe, what happened to the ‘you are going to Guatemala to choose yourself over someone else’ pep-talk you gave yourself when you clicked “buy ticket” on Aeromexico?” So, after letting it roar around in the playground of my psyche until it got tired and stalked away, I make a shy compromise with my heart and my stomach as I tape up the signs “casi: almost,” “todo: all.” My brain whispers, cowering in the corner from the scary organs towering over it, “hey, why don’t we just… wait.. a little bit? Why don’t we see how we feel later? Why don’t we.. not.. email him.. yet?”

And the bell rings. 

What was that? I wonder when the storm subsides (the storm being the onslaught of teenagers and the tidal wave that overtook my heart and stomach before the first bell). And then, I realized, it was the drug calling. Dopamine does not discriminate, y’all. She’s not like “well, you may not like me later..” She doesn’t do any of that work for you. She just gnaws away at you because she lives in the same zip code as desire. Sometimes they even get each other’s mail. 

So I stood tall in my teacher shoes (I need a new pair), I reaffirmed to myself that I will try something I have not tried before. And that is to not call, not email, and to go to Guatemala and not see him. I have not gone back once since I left 5 years ago, since I took my last drink of alcohol, he kissed me goodbye at the airport and watched me walk away and wave across the vast expanse that was the continent of circumstance between us. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the true truth my gut had tried to tell me all along: we were not meant to be. But I’ll be DOPAMINED if my heart/stomach organ labor union doesn’t try to nail a 95 theses to my brain when facing the prospect of returning so close to someone who is the closest I’ve ever felt to bliss. 

And then, hours later, I revisit one of the dramatic lies that pulsed from my stomach during the tidal wave. “I know myself well enough to know that I booked this trip because I knew I had to see him again.” Even if I made sure that the trip was 95% to see my host family, that 5% was the urge dressed up in sequins. And then I considered “Do I know myself well? Who even is the “I” I refer to? “I” am a stretched out fleshy package of bones and elaborate blood streaming services and two-day poop deliveries along with organs that want a rush of pleasure and others that know and fear the stench of loss. 

If Guatemala were a Goodwill, mountains would be all those dusty lampshades. And I know that a mountain represents a challenge, because I know my symbols. And I know that I am going back to face one. If for nothing else, because I am going to try something new. I am going to choose myself over someone else. 

And that, my friends, is why I am writing this down so that you can hold it against me later. 

But you won’t have to. As my brain is my witness.