On February 12 when I got back to site, I could not apúrase. I was in the secuelas of Early In-Service Training and all that it encompasses (see: Overstimulation in the Oxford English); I needed a day. I also wasn’t ready to be back in site because when one leaves the familiarity of one’s home for the comforts of the office, everbrewed coffee, proximity to cappuccino machines and (albeit shoddy) wifi to return to bleaching vegetables, a less than effective water filter and dusty floors that scream to be barrered and mopped and cold pila water always and slow language again: Vaaaaya Graaaaacias Que le vaya bieeeeeen, well it’s a temperature shock to the spinal system and I needed a day. So I took three. In fairness, I could not move out of bed on Monday. And on Wednesday and Thursday I had a fever.
On Monday as the shock set in I called a volunteer-friend in a fit of tears: “How am I back here again with no direction and what do I do and I miss- I don’t know what I miss- but I miss something and I’m sad and I’m lost and I’m mostly sad tears tears tears tears” They spilled they ran they leapt from my little eye sockets and filled my head with snot and I couldn’t leave the house. So I stayed home. In my prostrate state I got three calls from my socio, in a row, one two three, each time I looked at the phone and silenced the vibration to silence my guilt and it actually mostly worked and then I called her back a few hours later: “Hi your name is in the drawing for Dia Del Cariño gift exchange for tomorrow. His name is Elias Middle-Name”. I make a note on my phone and return to sleep. I will not remember that name without a note. Tomorrow: Figure out what to buy as a Valentine’s Day present for a thirteen year old boy. I’ve never bought a Valentine for a Thirteen Year Old Boy, including When I was Thirteen.
Tomorrow is Día Del Carino and My Heart is Hurting. It’s not the best time to celebrate. I think that’s how it is for a lot of people.
I was excited to start the second Hunger Games and tried to distract myself with that but when I cracked the book the drama was thrice escalated from the first book and I was not ready for slinging arrows and gun shots in public squares and finding rabbit meat in forbidden forests so I closed my eyes and REMed it all away.
The malaise of transition was not enough to describe or excuse my, well, malaise. But it was the feeling of emptiness- not the kind we describe in pop songs, not that kind of emptiness- the kind of emptiness that comes from wide-open space. This particular wide open space se llama 2 years. 2 years. The words flash in bold on the backs of my eyelids every night and every morning and usually 5 times more in between. Sounds dramatic, right? Most of the time I don’t realize I do it but then I’m perfectly aware of it too. And the reason why, If you’re wondering, is because of the open space. Open spaces make room for so much and that includes questions and numbers and a search for purpose.
They appear exactly in this format: 2 years. The two is not written out in letters. It’s the number and then the word ‘years,’ a word I have found acutely crippling. I have 30 of them and am in the company of those who have mucho menos que yo and what do I have to show for it and where am I going? The crisis of purpose and trabajo that underscored and overtoned and undertoed my entire cuerpo in my 20s and only crescendoes más in my first year of 30, which I didn’t know to be possible. I thought the anxiety I felt when I turned 23 peaked. I have a sad addiction to this numbers game: I give it more power over my identity as I worry about my direction and lose myself in arbitrary meanings contrived from God-knows-why Buzzfeed lists of the years of your 20s or why the 30s rock or how your body behaves in different decades and how to fight your wrinkles with collagen elastin but embrace them simultaneously and you know what’s hard? The word simultaneously. It’s very difficult to achieve more than one thing simultaneously or orchestrate everything you want simultaneously and all of this build-up from Early IST talk of Sexual Consent and Language Class with more advanced students and weekends in Antigua being treated as a tourist and weeknights with host families being regarded as a used-to-be guest-turned-extended-passerby and the option of rum and circumstance which all culminated in A Fine Frenzy in Panajachel where Ex-Pats go to belong and Tourists go to Enjoy and Volunteers go to Be Something-In-Between and the next day I returned home to what I thought was home to find this wide open space I mentioned and all the freedom and time and support from this agency with which to chart it out and make use of my talents and maybe help but support is a better word.
And this was my headspace on Monday, and so on Monday, I did nothing.
I recuperated from my own choices and the schedule of training: I shoved off of this open space into my oft-befuddled subconscious and let my conscious subsist like a piece of ice into a puddle and hope I could put on my grown-up pants the next day.
Meanwhile Guatemala does not stop. Naps are not acceptable, day-sleeping peculiar and lazy, work the only answer. Work, necessary. Calmer than US work, less frenzied, less simultaneous but just as unrelenting. Meanwhile life-altering decisions await: “Will I get wifi this month or stick it out?” “Will I buy a data plan for my phone?” Or “Will I go home for the wedding in July?”
On Tuesday I made it to Paquip denying the beginnings of a cold walking with my Valentine gift for a 13 year-old boy without a sweater. I wore my scarf and thought that would be enough but it wasn’t. I was cold-fingered and shivery throughout the affair which only seemed to carry on endlessly in the way only Guatemalan events appear to do to restless Estadounidenses who are in a hurry for a bunch of nothing. Each grade delivered a performance to present their Candidata I believe they were called? Girls dressed in pink and vying for the crown Día del Cariño. Cariño. My heart hurts.
I tried to be as engaged as possible, grabbed a flowered stick and swirled it around during downtime, to much laughter. When in doubt, build confianza and make people laugh and appear like you want to be there which the third part has been the hardest to do at times. But I am trying. At the same time I know I am getting sick. I know that I don’t feel normal. By 5:30pm I seflishly take refa and explain that I have to skedaddle home because I don’t have a sweater and I’m cold. Of all the reasons to leave, I’m certain this one is the silliest I may have ever presented to a group of sentient adults. “I’m cold so I have to leave early.” But I had been there 5 hours. I had withstood an hour and a half of gift exchange, one student after the other, presenting their gift to their friend whose name they pulled from a hat in a dark hallway. “Besos, besos, besos” or “abrazos abrazos” the teachers encouraged and the students chanted which I didn’t like.
I went home ate and went immediately to sleep. By Wednesday at 2am I was sneezing and blowing my nose incessantly and very cold. I attempted to stack blankets and wrap things but I wasn’t going to fall back asleep. So I read short stories from a thick compilation, attempted more of The Hunger Games 2 and pored over the MOON travel book on Guatemala by Al Argueta- who is this guy Al- “The Cure for the Common Trip.” I’ll be jimmied if this isn’t the Cure for the Common Trip.
I slept two hours more and rose to the reality: I can’t move.
Another day of hiding but this time to the soundscape of nose-blowing and eventually cough-drop unwrapping. I try to talk myself through how it’s okay that I have now evaded two days of work in my first day back which will likely devolve into three because I feel so horrid. By 11:40 I bajar (go downstairs/face my family- that’s what that word means). I see my host mom winding thread around something circular and let out a “Padre Celestial!” to her laughter. I lower my butt on the concrete stair, she starts talking and talking until she stops mid-sentence and says “Está mal?” with a concerned bellow. “Sí” I caterwaul. I am extremely mal. I am more or less bedridden but I haven’t yet understood how much of this is my fear of the great outdoors (which feels like indoors given the way the elements affect the home here) and how much of it is my body but I feel all the weakness that a person can feel. I tell her I feel sick, ask for some tortillas and the rest of my frijoles volteados and clamber to my chamber. Tortillas fix almost all things. Except I’m realizing after 5 months of comfort tortillas they are less comforting. Chinese water tortilla torture. Drip drip drip.
By mid-afternoon I have a fever of 101.2 which is high but not the highest and I drift in and out of books, nose-blowing and sleep. I keep floss nearby to ward off the plaque that comes from random spoon heaps of dried oats and peanut butter, all that’s available, and chapstick to nurse the lips. I’ve been applying and reapplying Skinner’s Salve which Ria introduced me to in Alaska and for which I’m so grateful. I sobar it behind the ears, above the brows down the eyes, lined under the eyes and along the jaw line for kicks and hope it does something miraculous. Shout-outs to my host sister, mom, grandmother and site mate who brought me a care package Bless God.
By Thursday morning I feel more normal, enough to walk around without feeling fever sweatpants kleenex weak, and after breakfast I take “Tylenol Cold- Daytime” which I learn is a LIE. A LIE. I sleep in a pleasant haze until Noon and by the afternoon I feel normal enough to decide I will work tomorrow. Sometimes decisions require all your strength. To decide “I will work tomorrow” and mean it was exactly that type of decision.
Dramatic, no? When one is alone in their tiled bed chamber in a foreign land, one is inclined to drama.
Have you read the beginning of Wild? The end of the first chapter is one of my favorite moments. The character struggles to leave her hotel room and start her hike across the Pacific Crest Trail. Cheryl is her name and she manages to get her gravid hiking pack on her back but she fights and fights to stand up straight. The chapter ends with: ‘I only knew that it was time to go, so I opened the door and stepped into the light.’
It’s how I felt by Friday morning when I delayed and delayed to leave the house. I did not want to go to this school of adolescents and new director and be laughed at when I mess up or worse not know what to say at all. I have to admit, I didn’t think middle schoolers scared me until now.
So I did go to the class. I tried to use subjunctive tense and say “Por favor Póngase de pie”/”Stand up!” And I had to high-five myself for using subjunctive tense more than I expected. Subjunctive, you and me babe! And I tried to teach a group of students “Bunny” and I started to write students names on the board when they didn’t pay attention. And even though I bumbled awkwardly about and said things incorrectly and told the students they hurt my feelings when they constantly laughed at me, I managed to leave the house, learn some new names and give 16 of them a self-esteem survey. And after this first week of the rest of two years, I am not a pageant queen but I am a rockstar and I got knocked down but got back up and out and today, this week, this life, that is enough.
