The Other Side

Drowning in The Homesick Blues

Posted on Saturday, 23 April

I never saw the mornin’ ‘til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine ‘til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song

Tom Waits, “San Diego Serenade”


It was late morning in the tree house and I was lying on the bed as a peaceful and cooling breeze blew the leaves on the trees outside. I briefly recognized what a pretty day it was and in what a very amazing jungle I have been living. Then, a strange feeling dropped into my chest, seemingly out of nowhere. I started to cry. It was a good cry, one with a bit of sobbing, some faint noises, and weak gasps to catch some air. Joe came over and held me in his arms and I continued on with it before eventually stopping. I did the same thing later that day. And again that night during a video chat with my sister when my cat stepped in to stare at me through my computer screen. I also had cried a day earlier. Now I am wondering if all this crying will be a regular occurrence. Nonetheless, I have taken to declaring aloud that I have officially gone crazy.

I have felt a little crazy at various points in my life. As I look back on these times—like late high school and the months preceding my college graduation—I understand that I was so emotionally whacked because I was sad, bored, and confused, or a combination of two of these three dynamite feelings. But here, on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, I am not sad. In fact, I think I might be happier than I have been in some time. Likewise, I am not confused, but rather clarified in my stance on the universe and desires and ambitions for the future. While I will be the first to admit that I am bored silly in this tiny tree house up on a mountain, there is something else at play, something that wasn’t a factor in my past bouts of self diagnosed insanity. It is that feeling that drops down from above and lands with a thud in my heart, like a coconut falling from its tree on a perfectly still day.

This feeling must be homesickness, I suppose. I don’t know what else it could be. It isn’t the feeling of boredom, for that is a suffocation in which the mind spins out of control from not receiving enough stimulation. And this usually has positive or neutral results, such as more time spent writing, or performing my own original songs with extreme intensity, or dancing like a fool in our kitchen as I swim in the invigoration of total freedom.

The homesickness, on the other hand, comes sometimes when I least expect it, as it did when I was simply resting on the bed after having done yoga. It can also come on after being triggered, as was the case when I started crying while watching my cat sitting in my sister’s apartment, which used to be our home, with his orange and white tabby stripes and whiskers and green eyes glowing just like they used to. It is an overwhelming feeling of drowning in something of a very heavy consistency, of losing the fight to be happy in the moment, of having no hope for overcoming it in the days that lie ahead. It is the unequivocal sense that I am not where I am meant to be and that I cannot do anything about it but wait and count the days as they pass away as weeks.

In the attempt of representing fairly what it is really like down here, I must state that we are happy and our lives are just fine. But homesickness ignores all of that. It eats up the details of reality and throws them up like a sorry excuse for a meal. Because if I had the choice, I would be back in Texas tomorrow. I would hold my cat and watch my rabbits hop. I would hug my mom and smell the scent of the Merle Norman makeup she’s worn her entire life, and hug my dad and feel the rough texture of his denim work shirt. I would chat with my brother about the house he’s building on the family ranch and laugh with my sisters. I would sit on the front porch of the home I grew up in, drink a Lone Star, and look out at the land before me. I would embrace the feeling of belonging in that place and would not think to question its strange power over me.

—-

I started to feel something like homesickness the moment we got off the bus in San Jose with our big backpacks and lost stares. It’s easy to miss the land of your life when you are a foreigner on the outside and half heartedly trying to make your way in. Still, these early bouts were weak and fleeting.

The longer that we have been away, the stronger it’s become. Joe and I started listening to country music more often, and I found that this caused homesick feelings strong enough to pain me. The music invaded so many portals of memory and emotion like only music can. I was transported, listening to the Texan accents of singers like Hayes Carll and Robert Earl Keen, the twang of a steel guitar, the words about cattle and beer and the friendliest people.

It became significantly stronger and more consistently present when we bought our plane tickets home. It was February, mango season, and the massive trees in La Zona were beginning to become full with the fruit of their existence. We left for a trip to Puerto Rico and had a swell time there. It was like being in America. Driving a car on wide, smooth interstates, picking up everything under the sun at Walgreens, and speaking our native language. Returning to Costa Rica, I was hopelessly sad.

A few weeks passed. Then we went to Cuba and had a strange and glorious experience wondering Havana and riding buses across a desolate country with vivid people yearning to be free. When we arrived back in Costa Rica, the end of mango season was beginning and the green and red ovals had begun to drop to the ground. We told each other that it was the last stretch before our next airplane ride would be the one that carried us back home. Only a short amount of time remains, we said, and we have to make the best of it.

We’ve been trying mighty hard to do just that, to live in the moment, to be happy in the present, to appreciate all the great things about this country. It works some days. But usually we spend our time talking about what we can’t wait to have back in our lives, like family and friends and a washer and dryer. We listen to country music almost every day and talk about returning to Hole in the Wall to hear our favorite bands play. We are counting down the days until my parents arrive for a visit and are convincing ourselves that after they leave, time will fly by so fast that we won’t even believe it.

It is now the end of the end of mango season. The mangos in the trees are much softer and when they fall from a branch, they bust open and splat upon hitting the earth. Piles of orange-yellow flesh sit alongside the road, rotting and smelling of rancid, sweet fruit. Sometimes I feel like the same thing is happening to us, that our time here has come and it has gone and we are disintegrating into the ground below.

I am trying to preserve what is left of us. I’ve been asking myself how we can go about surviving for the remainder of our time here. Yesterday, the day with all the crying, I decided that we should do what I did in high school when I wanted nothing more than to leave the country for the city: Have as much fun as possible so that time blurs by in a flash of ignorant bliss.

Almost America and Back Again

Posted on Sunday, 27 February

Above the Gulf of Mexico, in a plane full of fishermen, college students, Ticos, and gringos, I sat overwhelmed with sadness. We had just taken off from Fort Lauderdale and I had a seat by the tiny window opening into endless blue and white clouds. With Joe to my right, we talked about how it was strange to be returning to Costa Rica after being in Puerto Rico—a place that felt to us so much like America.

A part of me felt like we should be flying from San Juan back to Texas. But we were instead flying to somewhere quite near home and then back down south for more than a thousand miles, to a land where we have a few things, a beloved dog, and a struggle characterized by a fluctuation from hate to an almost love. I tried to explain to Joe why I was so sad, but all I could say was, “I can’t explain it.” Then I cried. And then I searched and discovered that I was heavily dreading the months ahead, which would begin with the unpredictable bus ride back to Quepos, and would continue, I assumed, as week after week of overheating, watching every cent spent, and dreaming of home. And after that I fell asleep.

A few days later, I talked with my mom on a lazy Sunday afternoon. She said to me, after listening to my complaints, “Y’all are just tired.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah we are.” The heat and the walking and the multiple grocery stores and the crazy people were starting to wear on us. I told her that we were reaching a point where we were ready to come home. “I think we’ve gotten all we can get from this thing,” I said, surprising myself with this newly uncovered position and my assuredness in its accuracy. Still, when she offered to cancel their trip down to Costa Rica in May if we wanted to come home, I rejected the offer on the grounds that we might regret leaving too early.

A few hours later, after a couple of glasses of boxed white wine, I knew that there must be more in store. I didn’t know what the upcoming months held and I didn’t much want to find out. I had some hopes and some plans, but I knew that none might ever happen. I did know that when I returned to Texas, my sister would soon be leaving for New York, and my dad would be comforted only by my returning presence in the wake of her absence for a city he has never met but is sure he will never understand.

When she told me she was leaving Austin and moving North even if she wasn’t offered the fellowship for which she recently applied, she explained it by saying, “There’s just nothing for me here. It’s just time for me to go.” Despite my disappointment in a continued long-distance sisterhood, I understood. “Well, I had to leave a year ago,” I said, “so that was my time. And now it’s yours.”

I’m not entirely sure, especially considering that New York City offers so much, but I suspect she will be back. If not soon, then maybe when she becomes too tired to live separated from the only place that will ever feel like home.

New Blog

Posted on Sunday, 6 February

Somehow the English language newspaper of Costa Rica, The Tico Times, has invited me to be one of their three featured bloggers. So, I have created a new blog via wordpress, which they will link to from their homepage (www.ticotimes.net). I’ll probably focus on my writing for the new one, but I think I’ll keep this tumblr thing going. I’ll post the url for the Tico Times blog soon. Hope y’all will follow me there.

Observing

Posted on Sunday, 6 February

I cut my toe again today. And laid in bed all day. Before I hurt my foot, I wasn’t feeling well and called off our trip to the beach. I felt weak and tired. I wondered out loud that it might be remnants of my recent sickness or that my body is having a hard time balancing the cold nights with the boiling hot days. But a part of me thinks that maybe I just didn’t want to leave the house, didn’t want to do anything. I get like that sometimes. Lazy or sad or maybe just content lying in bed watching TV shows online or reading a book. My yoga teacher tells me I should observe my actions and feelings without judgment.

I thought a lot about spending some of my time writing. Thought about it all day, actually. And I’m doing it just now, around five in the evening when the sun is setting and Joe is out with Happy on a walk by the ocean. I kept thinking about writing, but then I wondered what would I write and what would it sound like. Then I worried if it would be any good and if my blog for the English newspaper is going to be any good and if the editor will like it. Then I thought about what Joe told me one day, something along the lines of, people don’t create art just so that it is good. They do it because it makes them happy, he said. So here I am, pressing my fingers onto the little black keys, trying to find my happiness.

Yesterday evening I tackled a pit bull to the ground and then pinned him down with my hands and knees. It was trying to bite our dog. Though the thought of it hurting me badly crossed my mind, I quickly decided when seeing it go toward her with his teeth that I wasn’t going to let it hurt Happy. Joe was there too, and he kicked it. After the adrenaline wore off and we were walking around, calming down, it occurred to me that he kicked the dog and I tackled it and that perhaps it should have been the other way around. But it wasn’t and that is fine. Today when I cut my toe open, on a broken glass on the floor, I looked at him with my eyes huge and scared as blood gushed. He kind of froze. I told him to get paper towels and put pressure on it to stop bleeding. So he did. Afterward, with his hands on his hips and eyes gazing out at the trees, he said, “Man, I’m so bad in emergencies.” It’s okay, I told him, and then reassured myself that it is okay. I’ll be good in emergencies and he’ll be the one to tell me what I need to hear to get me to write.

I’m reading a book right now about Patti Smith and her art, her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and all of the artists going in and out of the Chelsea Hotel in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Joe is reading a book about Bob Dylan, and he likes it. We’ve both talked about what we feel when reading their stories. I tell him, after daydreaming about having a little studio with a desk to write at and a city to fall in love with, that I really want to live in New York City. He tells me that after reading about people who work so hard to make their dreams come true and are successful, he wants to do the same thing, but that he also wants to have a family.

Some things never change. We still dream about many points in time that are not the present. My future is totally unclear. He is planning on returning to the University to earn another degree. I might live with my parents and attempt to finish the book I’ve barely gotten far with but have high hopes for. We both agree that after he graduates, we should move to New York. I know, and I assume he knows, that this very well could not happen. We’ll move from Costa Rica to our old home and unpack our things from storage. We might not have the energy to do it all again in three years, to go back to living in a one room apartment on very little money. But I hope we do.

Welcome to the Jungle

Posted on Friday, 7 January

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

At night it gets cold in this jungle on the mountain. So cold that I wear his sweater and we say, “Man, it’s freezing,” even though it couldn’t be below fifty five. Right now Texas is actually very cold. Next week it’s supposed to get down into the ‘teens. Well, I definitely don’t miss that, I thought to myself when his mom told me on skype about the cold front she’s dreading.

The sun starts to rise at five thirty. But because of the trees and the surrounding hills, it gives the forest a dull and very slight glow until six. Then the sky starts turning from gray to blue and patches of bright light appear like splotches on the plants. Some mornings there are a few thin shelf-like clouds in the sky that appear in shades of pink and orange. The loud hum of the jungle night quiets down and is replaced with the brisk and concise calls of the morning birds. I see and hear all of this from our bed, laying on my side, and staring out through the tree house’s walls of screen.

I never once thought about what living in the jungle might be like, not even when we viewed the tree house and told the owner that we’d like to rent it. His mom laughed when she saw the place, said it was “neat,” but added that she would not choose to live here. A friend made a face when we told her, and then said, “Well, good for you, but I’m not crazy.”

We have daily visitors of monkeys, and our dog hasn’t stopped growling at them. Some days we look out the east side window and see a large sloth climbing to the top of a thin towering tree. The breezes that come up from the nearby ocean make the leaves rustle and then come inside to brush and kiss our sweating faces. When the sun sets and darkness surrounds us, the moths and flying insects come inside to get high on the warmth and glow of our light bulbs. Often a flying bug will land on our arms, necks, or legs, and sometimes falls into our dinner cooking on the iron gas burner. These guys were the hardest to get used to, but now I see that we have adjusted to living with them. If one plunges to its death in our boiling pasta, it takes our anxieties with it.

As I write this little blog, I am looking out at a family of howler monkeys crawling, swinging, and plunging from tree to tree. Out of the three species of monkeys that frequent the jungle by our home, these are our favorites. They are solid black, with some smears of dark brown. They are the biggest and the loudest. The titi monkeys are tiny, orange-tinted little creatures that make chirping noises almost like those of birds and come in great numbers to inspect and explore. The white faced capuchins, with their jagged faces and unsettling expressions, are the drunken bandits, quick and sneaky. Our howlers are strong, slow, and graceful beasts whose roars reverberate low through all of the land.

Just now a new sound is coming through the jungle. It must be a howler because its voice is loud and deep. But we’ve never heard a howler like this before. It literally sounds like a baboon having a barbaric orgasm. “They need to get a tree,” Joe said, proudly laughing at his good joke. I have seen quite a few monkeys since living in this country, but always as a tourist on the beach with my camera and giddy excitement. Watching these animals in their natural habitat, I felt like an animal myself simply observing a life much different from the one I’ve been given to live.

Last night I looked through our travel book, the infamous Lonely Planet Guide to Costa Rica. I want to take a trip somewhere and am leaning toward the Osa Peninsula, one of the last places in the country that resembles old Costa Rica. Unpopulated, pristine, and full of wildlife. Joe is not a huge fan of traveling. He always says, “I could be just as happy sitting around with good friends and a beer and watching a documentary about waterfalls.” I, on the other hand, have the urge to explore.

But he brought up a good point last night as I was reading to him about Osa’s waterfalls, hiking, and beaches. He said, “But we have all that here. We have waterfalls and beautiful beaches. We wake up with monkeys and sloths and go to bed with bugs. I don’t really want to go if it’s going to be more of the same thing.”

“Yeah, that’s really true,” I said. We do live in a jungle paradise. But for the sake of getting out and having the Experience, I am currently trying to find some cabinas in Osa’s Puerto Jimenez that allow dogs.

It’s All Right

Posted on Friday, 12 November

For the first five days, the rain did not stop at all, though sometimes it became very light, a mist existing just for the sake of keeping the whole thing going. Only on Saturday morning were the rain showers from Hurricane Tomás broken up by periods of dry air. Before that sixth day, I wondered if it would ever stop. A bright shining sun was too hard to find in my memory for it to be a possibility. Another day of rain followed by another seemed more likely.

During the beginning, our bedroom and kitchen flooded with about two inches of water. After a couple of days of trying to fix whatever was putting the water inside our apartment, the maintenance man eventually stopped it from coming in by slapping concrete on the spot where the wall meets the floor. Still, I sometimes woke at night, the rain pouring, and walked over to that wall to poke my big toe around on the cold tile. When I realized that it was dry, I could return to bed.

I found the experience of a flooding home to be difficult. The first night it happened, I cried. Being completely powerless overwhelmed me. But the continuing days of rain taught me that we were the lucky ones. Others died in mudslides and raging rivers—a total of 27 people. We live on a hill and I often thought of our home being consumed. But the many trees with roots deep down into the dirt must have held it all together. Sometimes, though, when I was not waking up to check for water on the floor, I hallucinated about the earth falling down into our window.

Living my life in Texas, I have never experienced rain such as this. Some years, there were floods. But more often it was the droughts that affected us. The Costa Rican government declared a national state of emergency on the fourth day. Every morning when I woke up, naively hoping for it to be gone, I felt a pain in my stomach at the sight of water falling from the sky. How can it still be coming down? This was my first time to live through a natural disaster, with neighbors suffering and nearby towns totally evacuated. Usually I see it on the news and feel some sadness for those so far away, up north covered in snow, across the ocean falling through cracks in the earth. This was much different.

Joe and I passed the time inside with each other, though sometimes we would venture out onto the eerie and empty streets with our umbrellas to pick up food. He started practicing Chet Atkins songs on his electric guitar, in hopes of getting a gig when the rain stops and the tourists come. I read poetry and the New Yorker and wrote a little. I cooked a lot. Toward the end of the rainy days, I made my first batch of ratatouille. It turns out that this traditional French dish contains the few vegetables that are available in Costa Rica. We watched several movies, including Twilight—something I thought I would never do. During the course of the film, we were relieved that we both found it to be worse than the water that was then creeping into our kitchen.

I called home a couple of times, once in search of advice from my dad on what to do about the water inside our home and another time to catch up with my mom. It is funny how I tend to talk with them about what is going wrong, but I guess the bad has the ability to leave a stronger impression than the normal and the good. So lately my conversations have featured discussions on the flood, the shower’s heating device blowing up, or the sewage problem, now notoriously known among my family back home as the “turd river,” a misnomer I can almost surely attribute to my beloved uncle.

They must wonder sometimes what we are doing here. Without fail, my dad tells me every single time we speak, in a low and earnest tone, “Lindsay, you know that y’all can come home now. Nobody’s gonna think anything of y’all not making it as long as you thought.” This makes me happy, for he will say it even if we have spent the entire conversation talking about an amazing trip to a nearby beach town. He is a Texan at heart who literally cannot fathom why somebody might want to leave the state for anything else.

Sometimes I do miss Texas so much that it affects me physically and I ask myself what the hell am I doing. But I eventually find my answers. My family does not fully know about the happiness I have here, mostly because I do not bring it up. It might be a strange thing to mention in a casual conversation between two people thousands of miles away who miss each other dearly. I think I once told my mom or dad that despite all of the hardships, we are very happy. But that was the extent of it; I did not elaborate or give examples that might support its validity. I assume they took my statement as a simple motion to give them a peace of mind, and that we pridefully wanted to assure them and all who might ask about us that we do not regret moving down here.

But I say that I am happy, and quite effortlessly so. I feel strange thinking about this occurrence because I cannot definitively name what it is that makes this true, and perhaps that is another reason why I do not bring it up with them. I do know it is not that the country has universal healthcare, a pleasant climate most of the year, or no army, as all of the newspapers claimed last year when Costa Ricans were labeled the happiest people on earth. The longer I live here, the more those writings bother me. Because whatever it is, is mostly invisible. It is something that just happens.

I can now go outside, into town, and into the world without hesitation. I simply get dressed, stick some colones in my pocket, and take off. Though I do not look like the people here or speak their language very well, and some of them still look at me strange and many men whistle or comment, I am not afraid to be there, out of the safety of my home, whirling through life with them. This never happened back home, where I would embrace yet curse the shelter of my walls and a roof, often avoiding what was beyond them.

I have lost much of my restlessness. Instead of feeling that strong and needy pull inside to be doing something, I can now sit still and be content. Sometimes I surprise myself with how long I can sit on our blue couch, look out the window at the sky, and the palm trees, and the birds flying. Perhaps I should not do this so often and for such lengths of time, but I cannot convince myself that it is time being wasted. It is different than when I would sit around on our old, red couch in Austin. For then I was thinking about the many aspects of my life that I was not pleased with. And now, now I am just thinking.

Then there is him. And I am almost afraid to jinx it, but it is all feeling good and easy and right. Before we came here, I knew that we would be spending a lot of time together. And that is how it has been, though more so during the first three months than now. I wondered if he would drive me crazy, or I him. I worried that we would move apart. Instead, opposite things are happening.

Maybe it is being here that all of these things have been able to happen. Or maybe it is me wandering the natural progression of time. On that memorable sixth day, we were sitting around inside, not doing much, and Joe glimpsed out the window to catch the sun, secretly shining for the first time in days. “Look!” he said, “There’s the sun. Let’s go outside.” So we sat in our lawn chairs on the front porch. He wore wore his knock off Ray Bans and I wore my over-sized Yoko Ono specs. We listened to the Beatles sing Here Comes the Sun on my busted computer speakers, and did not at all, though perhaps we should have, feel cliché or silly. As it shone so, I tilted my head up, smiled, and silently asked it to keep thawing me.