Off Track

You don’t know how much you can miss grass until you find yourself in the desert. I knew something was missing but it would be a few hours before I realized that it was the color green. If grass embodies lushness and verdancy, then the desert lacks a fundamental symbol of resilience and growth. The desert is the landscape of the dark side of the moon: inhospitable, uninhabitable. You feel at the edge of something, maybe the world; but for me, reason.

Waking up I had the crazy feeling that I was back in the Peace Corps, where I had lived in Nicaragua for a few years. Sometimes right before waking, all of the rooms I’ve slept in, shitty apartments and easy-to-break-into-houses I’ve lived in revolve through my consciousness, and I’m not sure where exactly I’ll be when I open my eyes: which walls, which chipped furniture, which street will be outside my windows. When I lived in Nicaragua, the air was heavy and cluttered. The heat, the clanging noises of village life banging into my concrete walls, the smells of lime-flavored soap and cooking oil. Before I opened my eyes, something about the way the light and air felt on my eyelids and skin, made me think of those years back in Nicaragua, when roosters would wake me up in the morning and reggaeton music would keep me up at night.

That was three days ago. I woke up in Mexico, with no memory of how I got there (got here). With no passport, re-crossing the border is a tricky thing. It would take phone calls, friends, money. It would take at least a modicum of effort. Stepping out of your life seems impossible in the digital age. Debt can find you, banks can find you, there are no places off the map. But if you don’t have people who notice when you’re gone, you can still step sideways. Out of site, out of mind. If I still file my taxes and post “thanks for the birthday wishes” on Facebook every year, I don’t think anyone will really come looking for me.

I’ve never been to Mexico before, and I wouldn’t call myself fluent in Spanish, but maybe that’s a confidence thing. I can make friends in bars and pretty much anywhere else. That could be what got me into trouble and here in the first place, practicing my loose-lipped Spanish at an inopportune moment. I can make friends easily, but keeping them is another thing. Whatever brought me here originally faded away with my hangover, but at the edge of reason other opportunities form. When I think of my life back in the US, all I can think of to miss is the grass. The kind of thing you don't notice until it's gone.