I love the movie “Lying” … It is soft and dreamy. About girls who don’t give a damn, stay too long in the bath water, leave their hair stringy, feel lonely and don‘t try to fake that everything is always been over. They take walks in the woods. Hear voices, talk to the little boys inside their heads, pick flowers at evening time, wake too early at dawn…Try not to be bored, but are terribly, endlessly bored. And I can’t hide that face either. I like that everything in the midst of being idyllic, poetic, gauzy, and warm, is the setting for sanity slipping away. I like how since there’s nothing to do they grow crystal rock gardens and play croquet and wave flags frantically…notice me notice me notice me…I’m a ghost. I wanted to believe. Now I just stare too long at the wind.

Make me more movies like this. Make me more movies where I can just watch a beautiful girl’s hair.

Big Beach, Yelapa

The boat was blue. As was the ocean and the sky. I was glad I had a fistful of Vicodin thrown into the bottom of my bag. Every time the boat’s helm hit the top of a wave, the center of the 30 passenger (currently at half capacity) water taxi to Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico gave a little yawning, cracking sound. I finally had the headache I knew was going to come and had therefore prepared. I had managed to survive a twelve hour layover, a flight full of margarita tipsy honeymooners, a taxi from the Puerto Vallarta airport to the Los Muertos pier (the pier of the dead, anything but) and the company of American men who bought my friend and I a lobster lunch.

**thee** water taxi approaches los muertos pier (ehoyer's flickr)

I watched as the Mexican man getting our lunch emerged from the ocean a few yards out, carrying the lobsters in a trap. When he got onto the shore he pitched the little red devils onto the fire pit that the café used for cooking. Along with red lobster, there is always in Mexico an endless supply of Pacifico and Corona beers. The American men introduced me to a local mota dealer who met me in the bathroom with a half ounce in tinfoil and a complimentary pack of orange Zig Zags mashed into the middle of it for twenty USD.

Mexico, is, as always, bienvenido.

From the Americans at the pier, my friend and I learned that the next day was El Dia de los Marineros in Yelapa. It is the biggest holiday of the year for the hardworking Yelapans, who, finally, in June, have their village mostly to themselves. In summer is when most of the tourists and ex-pat gringos are gone for the yearly summer drought. In Yelapa there are 1,000 year round residents.

Yelapa fishing by Nick Thorkelson

A small fishing village in Bahia de Bandera, it is one of several villages that dot the coast, surviving thousands of years in obscurity until the seventies when artists like Bob Dylan discovered Yelapa for himself, and would escape there from time to time to write and relax.

So, most people leave Mexico in the summer, but this is when I went. I was running away, it’s true. There are other places I could have gone, but this place, this place that Cortes had laid his blessing upon, was where I wanted to go most.

There are no cars, because there are no roads. No roads leading in, no reads leading out. The boat’s wake disappears into the ocean, I couldn’t leave bread crumbs for someone to come and find me.

I needed to go someplace where no one knew me. I needed to go someplace where I could be myself, true to my core, where I could write, where I could dive into the ocean on a whim, where I could ride horses along the beach or up into the mountains, jump off of cliffs, spend hours relating to hermit crabs and orphan dogs. The people in Mexico in June are the hard cores. I, Alea, am a hard core. I belonged there, for that moment in time, and I needed to be there. And everyday I want to go back. As the years pass I wonder if I will.

Yelapa map showing Isabel's beach along with numbers to show various accomodations

I was married then, and I wanted a separation, but my husband refused to give me one. I understood where he was coming from, that I might use the time to indulge my senses in other men was true and he could not bear the thought of it, even though he himself wouldn’t touch me. But I thought that if he really wanted to save the marriage he would give me a chance to be myself again.

At the time, it had been over four years that we had been together, married for a year of that. Things were far from perfect, I believe we had fallen out of love with each other.

But he didn’t see it that way. He told me everyday how much he loved me, he gave me jewelry, credit cards, new cars, a $50,000 re-model on the house located only a mile from Lake Michigan. I had anything I wanted, all the things maybe he thought might put a band-aid on the issue or maybe a blind-fold over my eyes, make me blind to the fact that my own husband couldn’t understand that I needed to be loved.

But had I married for money I would have been happy, but that’s not why I married, so why did he try to give what I never said I wanted? Why did he think that a diamond tennis bracelet would take the place of his hands cupping my face? Why did he think a stainless steel kitchen would make up for the absence of a warm embrace?

I tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t listen. So, I took my leave without permission. I had to.

As the boat neared the shores of Isabel’s beach it is 100 percent true that my headache suddenly disappeared. The Vicodin that I had been taking every day for two years for my chronic and mysterious headache went untouched the entire time I was in

Mexico.

Casa Pepe

As we got about twenty feet out I stood up on the sides of the boat and held onto the frame, when I could see the water was obviously shallow, I leapt in and grabbed the line to help guide the boat in.

With the boat pulled in, I looked up into the craggy cliffs, saw the natural and man-made haphazard stairway leading to the palapa hut where I would be staying for the next couple months, perched 30 feet up and built so as the back inside wall was the rock face.

My friend and I were the only ones getting off at Isabel’s beach. Less than half a mile up shore was the little beach and then the main beach after that was where the rest of the passengers would disembark. This was Isabel’s beach, a retired art dealer, professor, author and eighty-plus-year-old matron of the palapa villa where I was coming to make my home. This was the beach a terrible storm had made the year she first paid the lease, twenty years ago.

Isabel was not there to greet us. She was in Puerto Vallarta on a two-day supply trip and would be arriving back on the last taxi several hours from now. When I met her finally, she was carrying arm loads of packages up the long winding steps to the main house.

Yelapa point by Nick Thorkelson

The drought had begun to settle in awhile back, she explained, as we helped carry things up the mountainous slope.

Soon, some of the Mexicans Isabel employed at the villa came to help and the six of us about twenty feet apart from the boat to the front door formed a line to get the packages up to the house

Later at dinner, Isabel explained that no one doubted the drought would end naturally, but just in case the Huichol Indians were going to come down off the mountain and out of the jungle soon to do the full moon peyote rain dance ritual on the cliffs overlooking the bay. They were already on the way, making their way through the thick jungle, it would take days, there are no roads.

The trip to the current location of the Huichol village is by foot and it takes a long time. The people are almost completely untouched by the modern world and have remained thus for thousands and thousands of years. They are direct descendents of the Aztec.

Isabel explained that as little water as we have now, would be as much water as they would have later. That great torrents of fresh water would fill the two rivers to overflowing, that sheets of water would come rushing down the mountains, tumbling hermit crabs and pebbles, rotted mangoes and coconuts that would heap along the mountain-side perched palapa houses.

She told me for the first time then, and over and over for the next several weeks that when she left in September, that was when the rain would come. She told me about keeping the drainage holes free of leaves and other debris so that the water would have a quick escape to the sea and not swell up and fill the place with water ruining everything. The whole affair was of great concern to her because it happened that last year’s caretaker didn’t do a good job keeping the drainage holes free and it was a disaster.

yelapa waterfall after the rains

I left before it started raining. I left too soon. It was months before I told my husband our marriage was over, but I came back from Mexico wild again, and he must have known from my dirty toes and the look in my eyes that it was over. He let me go easily, and I still love him for that, because it showed me I made the right choice. They say marriage is a leap of faith, but so is divorce. No decision that changes a persons life is easy and I was waiting for a sign. Maybe one of my biggest signs is I didn’t have to take the headache pills while in Mexico, but had to start again as soon as I got home.

Or maybe my biggest sign was how, as the boat came to shore that first day I hiked up my white skirt and leapt into the ocean, feeling the warm gulf waters envelope me up to my thighs, wading to shore with one of the crew, helping him to guide the boat in.

I guess this was when I knew the uncomfortable truth of me having to leave my marriage. Because I knew I was being defiant, and I didn’t like having to feel as though I was being defiant at thirty years old. At thirty years old I should be able to leap from anything I wanted to leap from, no one should have that power over me to tell me what I could and could not do.

In the back of my mind as I leapt from the boat I heard my husband telling me to get down off the sides of the boat, I saw my husband turning red with embarrassment when I hopped into the water, my skirt up, grabbing the boat line in one smooth movement as I hit the water, pulling the boat in like I lived there and did it everyday. In my mind I could see that if he was there, I would be beside him, only wishing I could do what I did.

Yelapa dawn

frio frio corazon by Edith Tequila on Flickr

I know what today is;

I will not try and tell you that personally.

But if you find yourself looking to

Be reminded

One day, bubula

– if you are looking for the words

That connect you to EARTH

– then you should know,

I know

what today is.

Meditation by Yoshimitsu Nagasaka

What gave you the impression I was weak?

Is it my two streams of tears flowing, my lamenting, what?

Don’t you know, you should know, the weak don’t cry,

Not the truly weak, they refuse to feel pain, they refuse to even try to feel pain.

The strong go down into it, they just soak it up.

You think the coal’s heat died down and that’s why I can take it?

You should know the strong have learned to let it in all over, surface ratio dispersing it into warmth instead of searing blisters.

So my little finger takes it’s lumps at the loss, so does my eyes

And lashes

– Takes lashes, my full back, the patella, the olecranon process,

the bursa sacks, and the invisible wings I’ve earned:

To float above it all, but also to swoop down through the flames,

when poetry needs me.

Statue of Acala Covered with Snow, Yoshimitsu Nagasaka

Come Snow

and cover,

everything I know is there

but don’t want to look at anymore.

Come Snow

and fill in the edges and cracks

of everything I left unsaid, undone and

got tired of,

like those rows of terra cotta pots on the front porch with dead, twisted, brown flowers

that used to be red, yellow, purple

green, luscious, luxurious: Cover them.

Come Snow with your ever present bride, Wind.

Let her howl through the carpenter’s

miscalculations of millimeters in the new buildings downtown,

through the single panes on the old houses let her howl,

through my coat, let her howl,

and let her rattle at the buttons on my dress.

I will open my throat, veins, ribcage,

I will open my brain, heart, eyes and I will open my motivations, intentions, desires to her sweeping momentum, Wind,

she, the agent of change from a distant place,

let her howl her travels and ruminations through me.

Come Wind and Snow

What one can’t scour clean

The other one can cover.

Together work together. Come.

And sweep through the corridors of my life until it is hollowed out;

eroded to a smooth, smooth, glass-like surface, white and endless, endless, covered, and all around me it comes down, the ink black night, my arms outstretched to let Wind whisk through me, taking last minute bits of bitter and clutter

sending them out to be covered by Snow,

swirling all around, glowing from the inside.

it was nice out today.

frozen angel

For now it is bitter cold. Our blood cannot be heated. Our hunger never sated. The wind has stripped the branches bare, our angels stay a bit away.

I want to write a love poem to Snow, but the language itself is frozen.

Isa has come and kissed my lips, frozen my teeth, they will shatter if I speak, my tongue is a pink, swollen piece of meat.

That knife wind coming down will slice my skin off clean, sweep through the hollow of my ribs and empty eyes, howling a lullaby.

The pond is ice. It is black and bare. Beneath the thick layer, all things there are still and waiting, waiting.

Black birds light across the gray and sullen sky, in swirling formation they fly, on hills they land. Together they silently search the ground, together they leave again.

I am at the outpost, giving my witness as God wants. God declares a love poem appropriate observation. He says he wants Snow to feel welcomed in our hearts, to solidify our good intentions. Freeze Romeo and Juliet at the ball, Desdemona and Othello on the ship, Antony and Cleopatra on the eve of Actium.

It was 1999. Our shit hotel across the street was only for sleeping. We sat in the water, telling stories about the Jones on T and thought we were wise for our years. Did we think we were clever? Did we think we had gotten one over on the whole damn world, that we had some secret to living life that could only be attained by the chose ones, us? Maybe. It was no secret we had maddening Ninja-like moves on territory. And while our five combined ages were less than one hundred years and certainly we didn‘t know much: We knew some things for sure; like how to put on an act that would convince at least ten people a day to buy a magazine.

treasure bay casino

As we sat and watched the surf come in, the blue light from Treasure Bay the only light in the sky, the water so dirty, but we didn’t even notice, but I notice it now, looking back, the water so dirty and the casino’s light the only light in the sky. The air almost green with envy at our carefree ways, our naivety and wet legs witnessed by the black cherry and sycamore trees. The heat clinging to the air, coating our lungs. We passed a cigarette around and I know I was the only one who searched for the moon in vain that night and went back to that dark, little hotel room too early because the only thing more depressing to me right then was the beach.

Those girls, those lying bitches. I wonder what they’re up to these days. 

Not really.

robot-fish

It’s alright now.

That you reached down deep and pulled my heart out, by its tentacles;

washed the blood off,

scraped my shining blue-green scales into the chum bucket,

sawed my triangle head off,

popped my telescopic eye out

what a prize I was alive,

you did take a picture with me before I was in a million pieces, so you can show what a meal I would be, how willing to bite that hook I was, you brag, later, to all your

two hundred friends who laugh at me.

They didn’t know me.

Long after you had drug me up by the gills from the bottom of the sea

I gasped for breath on the deck under the sun,

you left me there for so long.

Threaded through my gills,

a hard wire you could lift me by

and dip me now and then into the sea

keeping me alive for the knife that would come later

you acted like you cared when you put me in the water

I loved you for the kindness, I made my fish lips at you, did you see me blow you kisses when you pulled me out again? I didn’t know then, how long I’d be left there.

It doesn’t matter

I went a little out of my mind with the constant edge of live or die

with gasping for breath and being bathed

you checked the strength of the lock where you kept me strung up

it was effective whether you noticed me or not

I would flop sometimes, violently,

at times just a wave of a fin,

rotating my eye for a glimpse of the fisherman who snagged me, nowhere in my view, but I knew you existed, you had taken me from the depths, you had done this to me. Where were you?

Gone fishing?

That I am nothing, was disappointing, so it’s alright.

That you took the knife, finally, was the word I used,

— finally.