The Rules Do Not Apply

My stylish friend from New York had Ariel Levy’s memoir, THE RULES DO NOT APPLY, at the top of her list. So, when I saw the book perched on the shelf at our down-home, trusty library, I figured I’d best snap it up. I may live in the boonies, but NYC non-fiction keeps me fresh.

Of Levy’s memoir, I devoured it in the course of a few days. Cheryl Strayed read the thing in “one long, rapt sitting.” There’s a compulsion to the book’s style, an almost-addictive quality also present in Cat Marnell’s NYC tell-all, HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE. Levy’s memoir shares other qualities with Marnell’s; both analyze addiction, writing, and how to sustain the two. But where Marnell’s book languishes in the booze, the pills, and the name brands, Levy’s transcends a hip Manhattan life to encompass the realm of motherhood, the life of a New York City lesbian, and the landscape of a wild Mongolian steppe. Levy’s book is about living as an urbanite, a social climber, a hipster intellectual. It’s also about living as a daughter, a wife, a traveler, a philosopher, and a mother—even if that motherhood only lasted for a moment.

Ariel Levy, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, won the National Magazine Award in 2014 for her essay, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” The essay, published with The New Yorker in 2013, describes Levy’s decision to travel to Mongolia for an assignment – at five months pregnant. Empowered by the strength of her own body and the heat of her skyrocketing career, Levy promises herself the risk is worth it: “I would teach my child the power of fearlessness,” she writes. “I would tell him, ‘When you were inside of me, we went to see the edge of the earth.’"

What happens over the course of The New Yorker essay – and THE RULES DO NOT APPLY – is brutal to read. Ultimately, Levy loses her child on the floor of a Mongolian bathroom in a hotel room. She’s alone, and for a few moments, the baby is alive. She snaps a picture with her phone. Afterwards, numb with grief, she shows people the photo of the tiny baby, born too early to ever have survived, and the essay ends with her guilt, her sorrow, and her shame. Just when you think you’ve got everything, the essay seemed to be saying, the rules suddenly apply.

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY: A MEMOIR is “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” expanded. In just over 200 pages, Levy explores her career as a journalist and, eventually, a New Yorker contributor. Complexity abounds in this memoir, whose style mirrors a chronicle by Joan Didion or Cheryl Strayed—the narration jumps in time and place, but remains anchored a singular, traumatic incident. From stories of Levy’s grandmother, Tanya, a bold Russian immigrant, to details of assignments from all over the world—Africa, Los Angeles, Maureen Dowd’s apartment—Levy shows us how she fought for what she wanted, and how, for the longest time, she had it all.

The book’s strongest passages explore with courage Levy’s long-term relationship with Lucy, a brazen, assertive gold star who takes the narrator under her expert wing. THE RULES DO NOT APPLY is punctuated with examinations of the wealth dynamics at play in the relationship, the roles each woman assume, and, most fascinatingly, Lucy’s decline into alcohol addiction. In that realm, THE RULES DO NOT APPLY is reminiscent of Sue William Silverman’s extraordinary memoir LOVE SICK: ONE WOMAN’S JOURNEY THROUGH SEXUALADDICTION. Both narrators explore the role of addict from the viewpoints of the psychologists they’ve worked with; the result is a revelatory discussion of addiction, made more personal – and hugely more interesting – by the medium—the essay or memoir form. 

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY belies its name, for the book, in the end, is about how the rules really do apply, however hard we try to escape their scope. Slurring words really does mean she’s drunk. It really does get harder to get pregnant as you age. And as Maureen Dowd shrewdly tells our narrator, “Everyone doesn’t get everything.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien, in her sprawling, complex, and vigorously beautiful third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, manages to simultaneously devastate and inspire. The book is poetic balm, even as it tortures.

Thien begins by introducing us to Marie, who remembers the day Ai-Ming, a mysterious family friend, comes to live with her and her mother in Canada. Ai-Ming instantly becomes a part of the family, offering Marie a link, however tenuous, to the rich tapestry of ancestors she barely knew she had.

What begins in present-day Canada soon shifts to a  China under Chairman Mao's regime, where “people simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted. Everything was decided by the Party.” In this China, there are very few liberties, but, as Thien muses, “It was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing has many faces: A pair of wanderers, hunting the desert for their missing girl. Sparrow, Ai-Ming’s father, who filters everything he hears through the language of musical notes. Zhuli, daughter of the desert nomads and a brilliant violinist who, mid-novel, takes her own life and whose character lingers throughout the narrative long after her death. Always there’s Ai-Ming, coming of age in a country where nothing is hers, not even her body, not even her family, and just barely her thoughts. To Ai-Ming, Thien writes, “The only…question that mattered was, How was it possible for a person to write her own future?”

Ultimately, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is about both loss and inheritance, destruction and rebirth. The book hinges on revolution—first, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when China was brutally forced to erase its past. The country’s artists, educators, and thinkers become the enemy to be spat upon in the street. The gifted are forced to unlearn their abilities. Sparrow, Ai-Ming's father, has only ever known music, but he submits to a lifetime of work in a wire factory. Kai, Sparrow’s closest friend, his maybe-love, manages to leave the country while he still can, forever branded, at least to himself, as a coward, a traitor to his family and his country both. Zhuli, Sparrow’s cousin, kills herself rather than betray what’s inside her heart. No option ever seems wholly right; no character can be fully blamed. All are intensely, relatably real. As Ai-Ming remarks, “Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”

The second revolution, the student protest at Tiananmen Square, lends the book its strongest, most compelling scenes. “When the demonstrations began,” Thien writes, “the students were asking for something simple. In the beginning it wasn’t about changing the system, or bringing down the government, let alone the Party. It was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved.” In this revolution, the victories are staggered, balanced by violence. The city is stagnant with heat beneath a yellow sky, and the protests go on for days. The students weaken, starve, collapse. The city occupies an uncertain, unsettled no-man's-land. “I want to live,” Ai-Ming thinks to herself, “but nobody here knows how.”

Those still reeling from Trump’s November victory might find solace in Thien’s sensitively penned and ever-shifting saga. It is, after all, a story about survival: cultural preservation, family bonds, and the enduring strength in courageous art. Even as power corrupts, our ability – or, perhaps in Thien's world, our desire and will – to enact change prevails. Facism, however brutal, eventually fuels change. Human rights violations eventually fuel change. Censorship fuels change. Ultimately, Thien’s novel affirms, the power to enact meaningful change exists within us all. Sometimes, we just need someone to light the fire. Sparrow walks in protest with his fellow citizens - police, bus drivers, shop owners, all daring to walk in protest, all daring to risk their lives. “He felt," Thien writes, "as if all his past lives, his past selves, were walking beside him.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is about our most fundamental freedoms: the ability to think, to create, to imagine, and to feel. Thien's story is about remembering, even when the safest thing to do is to simply forget. Even when an entire cultural history is destroyed, families are shattered, and song lyrics are buried deep into the ground, “Not everything," Thien wryly reminds us, "will pass.”

Take the city home

These days, I walk the streets in a nostalgic haze. Sometimes I am laughing, sometimes I am smiling, sometimes I am crying. Tomorrow I leave this apartment, this massive city, to take a bus through the night until I reach Cordoba, one of Argentina’s cultural gems. Part of me knows that I’ll get on that bus and it will make me feel alive, the wheels on the pavement in the night and the stars all around us as we cross the Pampas. Now, I love the rhythm of buses. I can ride them for hours or even days. I can sleep on them; I can read on them. No one bothers you here if you’re weeping, or eating, or drinking wine alone. They just let you be, stare out their window until the bus rolls into the city you’re trying to reach. The ayudantes help me with my backpack and call me mi amor. The country slides past.

Still, by now I should be used to saying goodbye, but it hasn’t gotten easier. I reached this place and I didn’t know if I would love it, but here I am, sunk. It’s just like the guidebooks say—Buenos Aires will seduce you. The city makes my dreams run rich and my blood warmer. It has made me quick on my feet and quick with the language, fearless on city buses that tear around corners and into neighborhoods I don’t yet know. The drivers cry out my street when we reach it, making eye contact with me in the rearview. Gracias! I shout, and leap out. I can jump off a bus now when it’s still moving.

And so now that I’m in love, it’s time to go. I didn’t think it would come this soon, the final day, but it’s always like this—the time you have left creeps up on you until, all of a sudden, you find you can count the hours. Only now it’s worse, because after I leave this country, I’ll go home, home to a place I’m afraid will make me numb. Little offices, little desks. Commutes, money, money, things. Will it fall from me—the ability to live with so little? The ability to walk slowly, to taste fully, to listen with both ears? The ability to see beauty in a crumbling wall? In broken glass? We want so much in that nation of ours; we need so much, and because we’ll never get all we need, we don’t stop wanting. We’ve got these awful gadgets, and we tell ourselves they bring us closer to other people, but they really just force us farther apart. We legitimize interruptions, hasty choices, jam-packed days and too-short nights. Take me with you, this city says, and I begin touching things—the trunks of trees, the curved wrought-iron bar over a window, the rusted metal on a dented car. The warm wood of tall, glossy shutters. It’s as if touching this place will imprint it onto my skin, so that when I leave, the city comes too.

Do you think about what you’ll do when you go home? A friend asked. Do you have dreams about it?  And I had to admit that while of course I think about the months ahead, I dream only about the past. Behind closed lids, my dreams come to me like paintings: the crest of a rounded hill in the Peruvian sierra, or an endless stretch of Bolivian salt. Thick jungle in Ecuador, cobblestones in Nicaragua, the smell of coffee on Antigua’s streets. A border crossing, dense with night, and an endless red dirt road.

Or they arrive in scenes, snippets from a film. I dream about birds flying in through an open window and pecking at crumbs on the floor. I dream about schools on hills, markets where water flows in the street, bakeries crammed with people. There are men who wear kids backpacks and kids who can count money better than I can. There’s Guatemala on Christmas, Ecuador on Easter, Nicaragua on Valentines Day, when the sun rose early and hot. I dream about my teachers and my students, and about men who sell orange juice on the corner. Carlos’ dark eyes, Katie’s easy laugh, and the way Raphael pulled me to him. I dream of Buenos Aires: the concerts in the streets, the crowded parks on weekends, the brown and silty river. The dreams come every night, five or six of them, and when I wake I can remember each one.

So the places are with me in my dreams, for now, and in the meantime, this is how I will say goodbye: I will walk up and down the streets, beneath the summer leaves, and I will smell and hear and feel everything. I will teach my last Spanish class, I will mail my last postcard, I will drink my final glass of wine and eat my final supper. I will kiss my friends good-bye—artisan Felipe and Leo the electrician, Donigan the writer and the beautiful diplomat Holly. I will give Alex and Vicky both hugs, and I will try to hide my tears from Pirucho. I will leave, just like always, and my heart will feel full and empty both.

*

I bring my laundry to the Laundromat today. It’s the place around the corner, the one that’s shaded by leafy trees and always locked, so you have to push the bell to be let in. It’s the one where the nice man works, the handsome man with kind eyes and worn hands. He has a young son who comes in the afternoons to help fold.

Today, the man fills out the receipt without asking my name. You remembered? I ask him, though I’ve told him only once. How could I forget, he replies, and hands me my receipt. Katy, it says. My Spanish name. He’s a beautiful man, a man who smells of detergent, and today he remembered my name. Don’t let this go, a voice tells me as I step outside, into the sun and the wind that smells so sweet. Nothing matters more than this moment, it says, and right now you have everything you want.

What we miss

Homesickness can be traced back to Odysseus from Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus wept and rolled on the hard ground thinking of home.

Wikipedia

It is my fault, I know, for coming this far and for staying this long. It is my fault for choosing to live in this city, which has turned out to be more massive than any cement strip I’ve ever seen. And it’s my fault for being a writer and thus for needing long hours alone, not just to put my hands to the keys, to the page, but also to think, to walk, to read. And so it’s my fault for shutting my door to the friendly faces in the hostels, and for preferring, sometimes, to eat alone, because it is then that I best can observe. I chose this, I have to remember, even though the hours feel very long these days, for I am lonely.

I recently read an article Philip Graham shared with me; a well-known blogger was giving advice to an eager mother on how best to foster her daughter’s impulse to write. Give your child time to be bored, the author suggested, and I truly cannot think of better advice. Give your child books, and give your child time: this is how you teach someone to imagine. Let them grow up, perhaps, on a quiet road far from town; give them a summer without a job, and a list of chores, and when they’ve finished, send them outside or else up to their room, where you know they’ll only find books to entertain them there. It’s what my mother did, after all; she let words wrap themselves around me so now they run as close to my blood as my skin. Words, my words, are my home.

Still, I wonder whether homesickness is always going to be part of the picture. Without it, anyway, would I be able to write? Don’t you need the sadness to make your writing real; don’t you need this sickness, sometimes, because it’s the most interesting thing you can put on the page? Don’t you want the beautiful things to run alongside something ugly? Everything grows deeper that way. I have always been prone to homesickness, easily swept up in nostalgia, and perhaps, though it’s a torment, I am lucky. How blessed I am, after all, to have had a childhood so sweet I still dream about it, and to still have both parents, whose faces I continue to see everywhere.

And I know what the cure is, anyway. I’ve found you can’t let people heal you, because sometimes they’re just as sad as you are, and they can leave you at any moment. They’ll come and touch your heart, make you laugh, but when they weep in the night or get in trouble far away, it will only make the missing worse. No, the mountains are the thing, and if I can’t have those, the wind in the trees will do. It’s the outdoors that soothes: it’s always been that way, ever since I moved into my first apartment in Cambridge and realized that the walls we’d spend so many hours painting were sometimes just bricks, tight and dark and cold with the power to choke me. That’s the way cities are; sometimes, sitting in your room with the sounds of the cars and the voices a constant, you wonder whether you’ve ever felt so alone.

I look up homesickness on the Internet today. Most of the pages that come up first are for parents looking to help their children, who they’ve sent away to summer camp. Or kids from Midwestern states who seem never to have left that town until college; they’re the ones who weep in the night while outside the parties rage. So I am a child, I think to myself, but read on. My college roommate, who grew up in a string of cosmopolitan cities in Europe and, later, in the metropolitan Northeast, seemed never to be homesick. Sure, the depression we discovered came so easily at an all-women’s college in wealthy suburbia hit us both, but she didn’t look at the photos her mother had taken of her home, the way I had. I feel listless, she’d say, and zip up her tall black boots and go out. For her, the city healed, the bars that she entered and the music that pumped late at night. The cafes, the traffic—this, after all, was her home, while for me, nothing felt farther.

Wikipedia suggests that those who suffer from homesickness should practice being alone. I read that and sigh, for of course it won’t help. Haven’t I slept in foreign hostels, in rented rooms, in cold and unknown cities, for nine months now? Haven’t I had enough practice? I’m still no better at coping, and looking out the window down at the people who rush about, their plans on their mind and cups of maté in their hands, only makes it worse. It reminds me that I’m my own boss, I must work alone, and until I get an agent, or discuss my book with Donigan over dinner, there will be no meetings I have to attend, no after-work cocktails with my co-workers. You are here doing something, my brain tells my trembling heart every day. Be brave.

I realize, too, that it isn’t just my family I miss. It’s the other countries I have seen; the warmth in Nicaragua that made living so easy, and the way the stars came out, clear and white, in the hot night. It’s the way I got to know Xela, got to know Quito, and it’s the drive outside of Baños that I took with Raphael, clutching at his waist as the wind whipped our hair. Those dripping tunnels, and the waterfall we finally reached. It’s the classroom on the hill, looking over Quito’s colonial center, and it’s even that Mariscal house, where in the long hours of the afternoon, the little birds flew in through the open door and pecked at the crumbs in the kitchen. It’s the buses where I slept, where I wept, where I nibbled bread. It’s the high-up Peruvian towns, where I knew no one.

And so it helps to know that someday, I’ll miss this place too. That’s the sweet thing about homesickness; it makes it easier to fall in love. I’ll miss this funny house, where Alex and Vicky peer at the television and shout at their cat, letting him inside and out, inside and out. I’ll miss the wide, dirty streets, and the way the neighborhoods shift and breathe, now green, now black, now frightening, now bright with the light of that yellow café on the corner. This day will go by, just like all the rest of them, and in the meantime I’ll take walks alone, and I’ll watch out the restaurant window. I’ll go home in my dreams, and when I wake in the morning, I’ll start the day here. My conversations, when I have them, will taste sweet, for already how rich I feel in the hours when the homesickness lapses and a Buenos Aires moment fills me up.

Your first Buenos Aires days

You wonder whether anything prepares you. You know that the suburbs can’t—not the sprawl of bargain hardware stores, or the parking lots, or the rain-streaked condos or the parks. The skyline can’t, because it’s every other city skyline you’ve ever seen, just a smattering of tall buildings in the distance, sulking beneath the cloudy sky. Even this widening road can’t help you now, this road that’s taken you so many places already: into Guatemala, Nicaragua, Quito and Lima, La Paz. It’s the same road, you know, that brought you for the first time to New York City, through Chappaqua, White Plains, Mount Vernon and Queens. It can drop hints, this pavement, but it’s never going to talk.

The people in this bus start to shift in their seats and to whisper. They crane their necks and watch how the lives outside these windows grow tighter and tighter, more and more closely packed. This, I think—the quickening of breath—is how you best can tell. Our hearts beat faster; we’re thinking, this is it, in all the many languages we speak. It looks cold out there and suddenly I’m afraid. This can’t be it; these suburbs like anywhere else, and always the gloomy sky. I send my mind back, back to Rosario, which I loved. It’s where the heat of the sun lasted all night long, and the water from the fountain smacked the cobblestones. The cab driver there leaned over and rolled down my window for me to let the humid wind off the river rush inside. He swore good-naturedly at the car in front of him, and he joked that my mochila in the front seat beside him was big enough to be another person. Mi compañera, he’d laughed, punching the horn.

This may be the right road in, but I discover that this city won’t emerge around this bus, swallowing us the way Manhattan does, the moment you cross that bridge. Nor is it like the desert highway towards La Paz, where the red roofs swell the valley that you look down into. It’s not like the rumbling flatness of those Central American cities I rushed in and out of, crushed by honking horns and markets riddled with thieves, sleazy hotels and always, always, the warnings, whispered in shaking voices—Be careful, don’t stay here, be careful, get out. No, it isn’t like that here, for today there’s just the rain on the windshield and the wet roadside grass. The roads curve over and under each other, and along the shoulders of this highway trucks are parked. There’s a Latin Best Buy, an Argentinean Target, and beside me now is a massive supermercado, abandoned carts rattling over the lot like noisy, lost children. I could be entering Syracuse, or Kissimmee, or San Loredo or Albuquerque, because here is this sprawl, this familiar and horrible face of all that’s urban.

*

You always think it’ll come to you so slow, because, after all, these are the moments you’ve been holding your breath for. But don’t they always happen in real-time, just like every other moment in your life? And so by now you figure you should have learned your lesson, and you try not to be surprised. This arrival turns out not to be patched with meaning the way you thought for sure it would be; it isn’t weighted with the knowing smiles of strangers, or a telling, lily-scented gust of wind, or golden shafts of surprise sunlight that pour onto you, all of a sudden, through the clouds that before looked so thick.


No, it won’t be that way at all. The bus pulls through the slums that ring this city and then slowly, slowly grinds to a stop, and everyone climbs off without looking your way. This is where we are! You want to tell the woman beside you, but she is packing up her bag and running her fingers through her hair with someone else, someone waiting, on her mind. You feel like this moment should merit a laugh, or tears, but neither comes; you collect your bag and comb your own hands through your hair. God, how tired you suddenly feel, with no one outside this bus waiting for you. You expected to feel so much, after all, but now, with this press of gray sky, and this sharp and biting wind, all that’s inside you is a dull little stab. Maybe it’s fear, you think, though you’re hoping it’s just the weather.

*

The man in the taxi doesn’t speak to you. He has a hard time understanding you, he says, and that is that. How cold it is, you tell him, he smiles a false smile and doesn’t answer. You drive on wide, clean roads past the slums, then the parks, then the skyscrapers of Palermo. White statues, cut grass, and even white lines on the road—They were right, you think. This could be anywhere. You see, as you watch the buildings pass you by, silent through the sealed windows of this car, a hundred places you have been already. These are the cold, remarkable parks that every wealthy city boasts. You wish, suddenly, for a scrap of paper to blow across the windshield, or for a man to stop the car so he can wash it, or for an old woman with a baby in one arm to stumble forward with candies and magazines for sale. All these cars, these planes above you, but there’s not a single sign of life. You’ll take anything, you think: can’t the rain just come? Can’t the sun break lose? Why can’t you see, for just a blessed second, one glimpse of the daytime moon? But this city gives you nothing, and so you ride through it, unspeaking, trying to blink these lonesome tears away.

Donigan is kind, of course, his bright blue eyes smiling at you, receiving you into his fourth-floor flat, with the big, open living room, the elegant chairs and coffee tables, the flat-screen by the window and the gleaming, marbled kitchen. There’s the bed he offers you, with the yellow sheets and the matching blinds; this room, and the bathroom across the hall, smell just the way your grandmother’s old house did, and for that you are grateful. You realize, as you have so many times since leaving home, that you can hold your home inside of you. That, at least, is something, and how soft these carpeted floors feel on your bare feet. The warm water in the sink that you splash on your face, and the clean, white towels that sit waiting. He gives you food; he gives you wine. How long it’s been since you’ve heard this close the voice of a friend, the round and familiar sound of your very own accent. Still, when you look out the long front windows and see the buildings all around you, all taller than this one, and the clean streets below you, the even stream of traffic and the pedestrians all dressed in black, in boots, you feel the pang again. Something’s missing, you think; something’s lost on you here. Come to our city, you thought these buildings were saying, but now that you’re here you realize you weren’t hearing the voices of this town. The sirens came from inside you, and you were mistaken.

*

And so you eat, with Donigan, the fine meals that the wealthy Palermo neighborhood has to offer. You let the rich food, the rich conversation, fill you up as best it can. You walk beneath the eucalyptus that lines the wide, wide streets, and you gaze up at the balconies that spill over with rooftop gardens. Sleek coffee shops; tiny bars; little streets with dripping walls of ivy. These people don’t smile—This is a city, after all, Donigan says. This is New York. But you know that it isn’t, because New York’s streets, though wide like these, though shifting and crammed with the tiniest shops, do not have these smells, these same broken tiles, the same paintings that, late at night, the artists spray onto the walls. No, this isn’t New York, and it isn’t Berlin. Sometimes, you think that you see Montreal, but then you turn a corner and realize you couldn’t be farther from that city, either. And so you try not to look too hard for something you figure you won't find. You try to be grateful for the food, for the sweet wine in the evenings, for the companionship and the warm and quiet bed. Still, the city stretches before you and, deep down, you remain afraid, because this isn’t what you’d hoped for, and there is no one reaching out.

*

Until one evening you leave the apartment alone. You walk and walk through Palermo, through the old part, through the new part and through Soho. The light is turning as the rain fades, and in the distance you can see a pink line in the sky; this is the sun, slicing through the clouds like the knife you used on your breakfast bread. The puddles in the street are glowing now, and the leaves in the trees, because it is spring, are just starting to open over your head. The man who sells you a box of juice in the tiny kiosk on the corner gives you it for less than it’s worth when you scrounge around for change but can’t find it. How do you like my city? He asks you, and shakes your hand.

You stumble across an artisan market, where men in holey jeans and beards stand around with half-smoked cigarettes between their fingers, watching you watch them. Ladies knit, sitting beside the hats they’ve already crafted, the sweaters and vests and shawls. Someone’s weaving together a bracelet, a little girl pulls her mother’s hand, and dogs nose through. Incense floats over everything, and beyond that you can smell the faint and pungent tug of marijuana. Someone’s playing a guitar; a girl is singing. An old man with a kind face and light eyes looks up from where he sits behind his stall, a hundred different shells laid out before him on the velvet. He doesn’t say a word as you pore over them, running your fingers over their polished, spotted backs.

So this, you think, as you finally leave the market, is what it is. This softness in the air as the weekend ends; this strolling pace; the woman with the long, dark hair who walks ahead of you. The guy with ten dogs on ten leashes; the crumbling bricks of that building beside you, and the glasses of wine on the table in there. You have seen just a flicker, you know, and there is so much more where that came from: so many other markets, so many other lives, so many other streets that change shape and ramble on. So many years, and so many cracking coats of paint. The veins of this city run deeper than you could ever know, and so how could you have thought that those empty parks and sealed-up cars were everything? How stupid you were, for waiting for some gift like it would fall into your lap. Sometimes, you have to find the signs, and sometimes you must wait. The darkness comes and settles over you, and though you know you must go home, you just keep walking, for you are craving more than anything to be lost.

Back and forth, the woods.

There is something the same about every forest. This one, this jungle just outside of the tiny town of Mindo, is cool beneath its roof of gray clouds and wide banana-tree leaves. Though I am hearing sounds I’ve never heard—certain birdcalls, or the weight of some tropical leaf brushing the ground—it feels the same, in a way, as it always does. The trees shade the ground; the wind shifts. The cobwebs I pass through without seeing feel just the same way on my skin as they always have, invisible threads I can't fully brush off. These woods are churning; when I stop and stand still and listen, I don't hear a drop of silence, just the rustling, the branches breaking, the leaves on the ground brushing up against each other. God, when I am still, it's just so loud.

In every wood you can hear the lives, if you listen hard. Here, it's the constant shuffle of insects working and branches snapping and saplings growing. I am surrounded. It's the teeny mites that cling to the cuffs of my pants, mites that resemble chewed up leaves or prickly burrs and won't let go. It's the termites I can hear but not see in the dead logs I walk past, and it's the occasional urgent flapping, an unseen squabble in the branches. It's the thud I hear once, a distant and heavy sound like a coconut being chucked down from somewhere high. It's the sense that I'm being watched as I pass through someone's carefully marked-out territory, or step over someone's home.

It’s the palm frond I walk past that is waving. It’s moving steadily back and forth, back and forth, and maybe you'll tell me that it had to be the wind, but no other trees are moving this way. And yet there goes that metronome branch. I stop to stare at it, but I can’t get thick enough into the jungle to see what might be going on. I listen hard. Beneath the constant breaking of branches, crunching of leaves, calling of birds, there is a very faint gnawing, like someone is chewing that branch in zig-zag bites, working steadily to bring it down. A city, this forest, with a different language.

There's pine in the wind here, mixed with the smells of the rain and the dark, wet earth and the rotting trunks of dead trees. I inhale the pine and all the other things and I know that the town awaits: the Saturday shoppers, the restaurant-goers, the shouting candy vendors. But I don't have to go back there yet. The first time I smelled pine, something stayed with me forever, and now it finds me in these woods and takes me home.

One way to see the memories...

How much Dina Aunty relished her memories. Mummy and Daddy were the same, talking about their yesterdays and smiling in that sad-happy way while selecting each picture, each frame from the past, examining it lovingly before it vanished again in the mist. But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be re-created - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

So what was the point of possessing memory? It didn't help anything. In the end it was all hopeless...no amount of remembering the happy days, no amount of yearning or nostalgia could change a thing about the misery and suffering - love and concern and caring came to nothing, nothing.

Everything ended badly, and memory only made it worse, tormenting and taunting. Unless. Unless you lost your mind...the slate wiped clean. No more remembering, no more suffering.

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Mistry/bbc.com

Writing Retreat

I need some peace and quiet, I decide. I need some time to write, some time to think, some time away from all the noise and the merciless heat of Granada. I need a room to myself, a quiet desk, maybe a view of the water, certainly a view of some trees. I think about going to Ometepe, that island that the Lonely Planet calls magical, but the four-hour ferry to get there, the thirty-minute cab ride, the huge array of eco-hostels and hippy hotels listed on Trip Advisor; it all leaves me exhausted, just thinking about it. I should go to Ometepe, I reason with myself, at least just to see it, but then I realize that, for now, I am tired of seeing things, tired of traipsing around with my heavy pack, getting off and on boats, in and out of taxis. So I choose El Paradiso, a little hostel thirty minutes from Granada on the shores of the Apoyo Lagoon. A German boy I meet in Granada tells me it's his favorite place in the world, and so the next morning I pack my bags, trusting him, and I go there.

And so this is my gift to myself: a room with slatted windows and a hard double bed and red-brick floors. A breeze that blows straight off the lake onto my body when I'm sleeping. A little desk and a faulty plug, a broken fan, a twenty-dollar price tag for each night I'm here. A small, open kitchen with free vegetable oil and salt and pepper and use of the stove and fridge. A shared bathroom with brick half-walls and a shower with water heated by the sun. The lake, which tastes a little salty because a river flows into it straight from the sea. When I am tired of writing, I put on my swimsuit and walk down the stone path to the shore; I drop my towel onto a chair and swim out, bobbing in the high waves, to the little dock two hundred feet out. This lake reminds me of camp, those summers so long ago when I was just a little girl. The water smells just the same, and the ladder is greasy with moss, just as it was back then. I climb up onto it and lie on the sun-bleached boards, look up into the cloudless sky, and in my peripheral vision I can see the trees around me and the little hills that rise up. This lake was formed by a volcano, and it's so deep now that I don't even want to think about it, lying here on its surface. From the shore, the maids watch me swim out, then pick my way back in along the rocky shore, wringing out my hair and wrapping my towel tight around me against the wind.

On the first day I am happy with the one conversation I have; I meet a couple, the man South African, the woman Irish, who have been traveling for two years already. They make my four months in Central America seem like child's play, even though of course they never say that out loud. They tell me about Burma, the way the people there never tried to sell them a thing, only wanted to learn about their culture and to look at their maps. They share their rum with me, pouring it into a pink plastic cup and adding Fanta, warning me jokingly never to tell anyone that I consumed it, since they brought it illicitly from Cuba. I finish my dinner of rice and broccoli and carrots cooked on the little stove, and the rum helps me to sleep deep and long in the hard bed, the wind pouring through my slatted window, all night long.

While I'm preparing my breakfast the next morning, the South African guy shows me the cantaloupe he found at the little tienda down the street. They have pineapple, too, he says, and splits open the prickly fruit to reveal its stringy white meat. He offers me some. This couple is kind, I say to myself, and the pineapple is sweet on my tongue. At lunchtime, I walk to the tienda myself, down the dusty dirt road that connects all the homes and hotels that ring the Apoyo Lagoon. They have run out of pineapple there, so I buy bananas and eggs and a can of beer instead, and when I walk home the only person I see is a guy on a motorbike who turns his head to look at me as he drives by, his lips pursued in a kiss.

By dinner I begin to miss talking. I crave conversation, and I wonder where that couple has gone to. I swim as the sun is setting; the waves have gotten higher, and the maids warn me to be careful. But the water is still so warm from the sun, and even when I emerge covered in goosebumps, I know that that deep, round lake is good for my soul. It's good for my mind. I drink the can of beer I bought at the tienda and I look out onto the water and into the sky, which is turning pink. I can see beehives high up in the trees.

For dinner, I fix more rice, more broccoli, more carrots; I boil potatoes, I heat a tortilla, I do without salt. I find myself thinking of home, thinking of that pale maple table in my mother's kitchen, and the way my father, my mother, my brother and I each sat in the same seat every night, years ago when we still all lived together. I realize I can't think about them, sitting there in that open, empty kitchen with my plate of rice before me, without feeling tears form in my eyes. I hear a cat crying from somewhere in the woods and I know I can't let myself think of my own cat, either, thousands of miles away in a big, fun house with a basement and a drafty garage to play in. (I know my parents let her in there, even though I told them before I left that it wasn't allowed.) I bite my lip, wash my plate, and take out my book to read, because it's the closest thing I feel like I have right now to a friend.

I wonder how people do it, two or three months at those writing retreats in Vermont or Maine or Colorado. I haven't felt this lonely for a while, even as the water in the lake, the trees that surround it, the smell of the water, all remind me so acutely of home. I am so close, and yet I'm so far away. I look over at my empty, unmade bed and I wish, ridiculously, that I were nine years old and vacationing in Nova Scotia with my parents again, sharing a drafty hotel room with my brother, my parents just across the hall. It's been so long since I've thought of that trip, those miles covered in the old minivan, the dog left for the week with the neighbors. It's been so long since I've thought of a lot of things: those summers at camp, Kendra's grandmother's dock in Maine, the way pine needles carpet the floor of an Adirondack woods, the view from my childhood bedroom in summer. I thought this would be my writing retreat, but more than anything it's served, so far, as a time of forced memories. The things that come into my head here are the ones that have been waiting, just waiting, for a stretch of time that only the sound of the wind and the waves might fill. Without the noise of cars, of friends, of chores, I have to look myself in the face, because there aren't any buffers here. I see the water, the table, the bed, and I think of a million things that, for so long, have kept themselves hidden. I think of those things, I write them down, I try not to blink, I try not to weep. And at the end of this day I am grateful, because God, I am lucky. After all, these memories, these sweet little moments that pour in through the cracks in the walls; they are the things that have built me a life, and here is this time to hold them in my hands again.

Saying Good-Bye to Guatemala

Good-bye to the place that taught me my first words of Spanish. Good-bye to the music on those buses, the cramped seats, the teetery routes, because two days in El Salvador have taught me that no bus is quite like a Guatemalan one. Good-bye to those microbuses and to the little children that quietly get sick in bags as the roads wind and dip. Good-bye to those mountain ranges, those blue peaks that stretch all the way to Mexico, and good-bye to the black Monterrico beach, the one that's littered with trash but beautiful nevertheless. Good-bye to the volcanic rocks scattered everywhere, the climate that grows colder and colder the higher you get, and good-bye to the eucalyptus trees, the alpine palm trees, the sapodillas, the ceibas, the cedars, the acacias. Good-bye to the flowers. Good-bye to those 62 stoves we built in Uspantan, those Mayan ladies in their traje, Hilary's apartment with its deep blue pila and good-bye to her sweet cat, Suerte. Good-bye to the lake, the deep Lake Atitlan with her ring of volcanoes around her. Good-bye to her waves, and the room that we had, that high-up room with the view of the fireworks on New Years, the fireworks that went off like brilliant dots, now in San Pedro, now in San Marcos. Good-bye to the orchids that hung in the bathroom; good-bye to that wide, white bed; good-bye to the sickness, the recovery, the market in Chichicastenango, that journey with you. Good-bye to the love that Guatemala gave, the love that I found, in so many corners, so many forests, so many different rooms. Good-bye to the hugs, the patience with my Spanish, the kisses on the cheek, the gifts of food, the gifts of juice, Norma's house in Xela, the dark, quiet streets at night, the dogs that come out when it gets dark. Good-bye, good-bye, and thank you for everything. I love you, Guate.

Missing you...

When you’re looking for the memories, they’ll turn up everywhere. They’re little reminders of your other life: your family, your home, the good times you had, and the bad ones. Familiar faces, familiar mountains, familiar voices, familiar songs. They come when you least expect them; you’re walking down the street on the side with the most sun, taking care not to stumble off the disappearing sidewalk, when all of a sudden you hear bells, bells, just like the ones you heard all your life, growing up. But these aren’t bells from the stone church across from the post office; these bells come from an unknown place, and so although you want to stop and strain to listen, you must tell yourself to keep going, those aren’t the bells you wish they were, they’re just an echo.

And even if you aren’t looking for the memories, they’ll find you. They always do. The radios play Christmas songs here, sometimes the same exact versions you learned growing up, but you cannot let yourself daydream about that upcoming holiday, and who you’ll eat with and what you’ll wear and which gifts you’ve bought, because those things don’t really matter for you now. You can’t stop and let yourself remember Christmases in the Albany house, when everyone came to be under the same roof, and your grandmother put you in your father’s childhood bed. On those nights no one got any sleep, really, and when you went downstairs in the morning a sheet would be pinned over the doorway, and your brother would peep beneath it to get the first glimpse of the Christmas tree. No, you can’t indulge in memories like that, memories triggered by some carol playing on the kitchen radio, because without anyone to share them with, those memories will suck you dry. They’ll leave you feeling empty even when you know you should feel full, heavy with exhilaration, breathless for what Christmas in this country might hold. And so you’ve got to shake the memories off and walk away.

But, try as you might, the memories will always be everywhere, even if you forget for a while to look. I promise you this will be true. Like I said, they seek you out. Look at that man’s hands as he counts your change at the grocery store. Those are your brother’s hands. And when, in the middle of the night, you wake and step outside and see that the full moon is pouring its light over everything, blotting out the stars, you will wish your father could see how bright it gets here, because he was the one who always made you come look at the beautiful things in the sky when you were just a little girl. And while you’re walking back from the market, you will notice a man, that one, there, who is leaning against the wall looking in at the Sunday wedding on Avenida 13. Do you see his eyes? He has your grandfather’s eyes. And do you smell that, as we walk past the bread-shop? That’s the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen in winter. You see faces you think you know, but they are really the faces of strangers. You taste food that you’re certain your friend has prepared, except she is thousands of miles away. And there’s your mother’s voice, which you hear everywhere.

The memories will come to you most often when you are asleep. During the day, walking around, eating lunch or sitting with your teacher, you might forget that the memories live everywhere: in the little nooks in the walls, in the spaces between buildings, in the trees and in the stained glass windows you pass each day. But at night you must surrender, or you’ll never get any sleep. You’ll dream of being home, because that is impossible. You’ll dream of cups of coffee at your mother’s table, snow in the woods behind your home, the curve of your lover’s back. You’ll wake to the sound of the neighbor’s cat—gato feo, everyone calls her—and you will think, from the sound of her yeowling, that she is your own, and that this is your apartment, and that in a few minutes you will open your eyes and have the soft weight of her on your bed with you. But, soon enough, you will realize where you actually are, and you will find that for several long and lonely moments you just can't push down that ache that has formed in your heart. It comes from a sadness, a distance that’s measured in more than just miles, because all you’ve got are these walls of memories, everywhere.