Infinite Ways to Nap in a Hammock

I’m on a self-proclaimed writing retreat having a hard time making a dent in my writing. I’m sitting on the tile floor for two reasons: its slightly cooler than anywhere else in the hundred degree Yucatan summer, and because I don’t want Maia, the little dog I am sharing the space with, to feel left out. Maia has been ousted from getting on the bed for the two weeks I am here, and I feel for her. We are trying to keep her from jumping up and down too much since she’s going through chemo treatments for her cancerous tumor but she’s really just a little pup who wants to play. “I am not your chew toy!” I tell her for the tenth time, but she doesn’t speak English.

I throw a tattered and gnawed rope for her to fetch and move to the hammock, which cuts across the width of the room on a diagonal. Hanging a hammock indoors forces a room to maintain its spaciousness - imposing a limit on its fullness and offering a constant invitation to rest.

Alejandra, Maia’s caretaker, is the real reason I am here. but for this week while she is at work at least, I have told myself I will write. I arrived at night with a raging fever, and slept the entire day my first day here. A very unsexy start to this risky undertaking of fourteen days staying with someone you’ve seen three times.

I brave the intense humidity for a walk to change my money at the exchange in the town center, but return home drained. I sweep up Maia’s constantly shedding short black hair, and remember the book I read as a teenager, “Pure Heart Enlightened Mind,” about a western lady (Maura 'Soshin' O'Halloran) who became a Buddhist nun in Japan, and how sweeping and cleaning was how she spent the majority of her days. Yes, I think, be like a monk.

Monk (Monje) is what I call Alejandra. The nickname came three months ago, on the day we met. She was leaning/ half sitting on the bumper of a parked car across from the destination towards which we were lazily making our way. Between the cars, I stepped off the sidewalk and stood in front of her. “I like that you’re kind of a monk.” I said as I laid my body against hers: thigh to thigh, pressing each part of us together until our mouths met for the first time. The rest of the night was long and full with many location changes, my friends and her friends coming and going, her speaking Spanish, me answering in English. The date ended, like a bookend, with her sitting on yet another person’s parked car, waiting with me for my ride to come.

Butches light up my revolutionary heart. I love how they move, how they flirt, the fact that without doing anything, they pulse with effortless defiance. Wherever they are, butches radiate a truth that debunks everything about patriarchy simply by being. Their masculinity is their birthright, without any performance or put-on. So different from how men wear it like an excuse. Despite her androgynous body type and young(er) age, Alejandra operates like a classic old-time, near extinct, butch woman. She winks at me occasionally during this first date. Checks for me with her eyebrows raising up into a perfect Dylan McKay forehead wrinkle. She spreads her legs wide, momentarily owning the space of some person’s car hood, making room for my body within her sphere. I enter it. This kiss is different. It disorients me. Everything I thought I knew after a quarter century of kissing is turned inside out and rewritten.

On our second date, we meet at the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya, which is hosting a book fair and performance. She leads me right to a table and picks up a book of poetry, opening it to a random page. It’s an impromptu Spanish lesson: she’s expecting me to read the poem out loud and then helps me with the words I don’t know, which is most of them. I’m caught off guard, but I appreciate the closeness of our bodies while huddling over the page. Once we finish the long text, the poem’s title, De cuando la palabra Libertad anidó en nuestros cuerpos, becomes a mantra for us, a self-fulfilling prophesy or spell, that by speaking becomes so. We discuss the beauty and paradox of the word libertad making a nest in our bodies, from when? From now. From this moment on. Then we stand in the unairconditioned lobby for a long performance by a charming crocodile with a human head speaking in Maya, then Spanish. Exercising my wish to become more patient, I understand nothing, then a few words. I remember what Alejandra said on our first date: “I’m a Taurus, everything takes time.”

That night, she gets us a hotel room because her living quarters are too close with her roommate for what needs to happen between us. There are countless things I appreciate about the way she handles my body. Like a good uprising, our sex is decentralized. That kiss, it turns out, was just a prelude for the ways her mouth can be everywhere at once, an octopus devouring my limbs. Later, when we are quiet in the bed, we hum together, a low and deep note, our faces close, our sounds circling and joining, making a whirlpool in the space under her chin. Her chin is mouthwateringly broad and almost clefted, supporting cheeks that drop into surprise dimples at key moments, and then resume their smooth surface.

We see each other once more the night before I leave Mexico to return home. She hands me a paper bag with the first clitoria flower (Clitoria ternatea) from her garden inside. I press the tiny purple bell between the pages of my journal and feel the bud of something monumental taking root in my ribcage. We fuck in a silence ripe with emotion. I lay on top of her, my ear to her chest. The rhythm inside is slow and strong.

“I wish I met you one week sooner.”

She says in her subtle monotone, her line of a mouth turning up in resignation.

“I have to believe that this is perfect.”

I answer, solidly. Though in the coming weeks I’ll waiver in this conviction, reaching for these words like a handrail to steady me in a sea of feelings.

It is too much to say what happened between now and then, slowly and deliberately, in two languages and across the distance, so I will just say we acknowledged the profundity of the connection and committed to getting to know each other more, while also remaining firmly rooted each in our own separate present.

Three months later, back in Mérida, I am healing from my fever, hanging out in her space without her. Not writing, which is the most fruitful way to write. Letting the heat force me into stillness. Sleeping more than not sleeping. Welcoming the extra effort it takes to do simple tasks like feed myself. Giving in to this Monk-like heightened state. Alejandra’s influence encourages these traits once so foreign in me: patience, stillness, acceptance. Eventually, I will understand that this solo downtime was as important as the highs of our adventures and togetherness. I will bring home the sense of spaciousness, learned while doing nothing in that hammock. My body swinging slightly with the currents of change and return, becoming a nest for libertad to take root.