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.
