On Slutty Clothes, Suitcases, and Central American Taxi Drivers — B.G.
Friday, January 13th, 2023
Friday the 13th
I want to cry but I’m not sure why. I don’t feel emotional…I feel calm, even. But topics of trauma or domestic violence rear their heads and I feel alone. Nobody knows my story, here.
I’m actually doing better than I expected. I’ve been meditating each morning before yoga. Then, a huge delicious breakfast. Then maybe an activity, maybe not, until late afternoon when there’s more movement and then a big, delicious dinner. A smoothie seems to hold me over in between.
Last night we went to the hot springs.
I feel like my nervous system is slowly, slowly getting the hint. And all day, every day, the slow crash of the waves in the distance measures my breathing and sets the pace.
I’m so grateful to have this time. It feels almost illegal, like someone could take it away and send me back to work. Every now and then I feel a slice of anxiety but then I remember, no. I took care of everything, and I can deal with shit once I’m back, too. I’m even looking forward to being with Gale’s kids in February, and my big work project starting. I’m looking forward to finding out which fun vacations Mistress Me has planned for me next.
It’s strange not to be in the middle of any interpersonal warfare. No Richards to write letters to. No Gales to worry about. I even have a beautiful home waiting for me when I return.
With everything so steady, I can just watch my emotions moving through me. The wind of my moods. My only obligation to honor myself.
The urge to cry isn’t as strong now but it’s still there, lurking. I think an orgasm probably hides next to it.
I wrote that in my diary a couple of days ago, and yesterday I shared it during Integration. Everyone was like, “Wow, Lorelai! You sound like an audio book! Do you write?”
I wanted to tell them about my blog so bad. It’s hard to maintain anonymity when all you really want is to show your work to everyone you meet!
This morning I woke up to messages from Mommy. It’s snowing like crazy in Canada, which is weird because it’s a trillion degrees here.
It’s Shabbos today, and for the first time in…months and months…I didn’t make a challah. I brought candles but I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to light them. I’ve even had to keep my cell phone on more than normal, for practical purposes and getting in touch with the troupe. It’s okay though. This entire month feels like one never-ending Shabbos.
Tonight we rehearsed our performance. What a talented group. I feel honored to take part.
Okay, it’s dinnertime. I’ll write more later.
Sunday, January 15th, 2023:
Wow. Well, that Friday the 13th lasted a lot longer than I was expecting. We made the mistake of believing Google that the trip would take an hour and a half.
Even an hour and a half was a lot, especially for a spontaneous last minute decision to drive into the Panamanian jungle. But it was The Treehouse. The Treehouse. We had to go!
Everyone at the dinner table got all riled up about it, and suddenly we had 7 people interested, so Alba got her guy to call for a bigger taxi.
“He’s sending a camion!” she announced, after the 17th text message. “It’s happening!”
Her guy was from the surf shop. She had met him the day before.
I never would have gone, but I went to The Treehouse last year and it was fucking magical.
Also, I’m very smitten with Alba.
I just got back from the tide pools. They’re so incredible. They form at low tide. As you get closer, you start to realize that the whole area is alive with activity. Once the water starts to come in, these teeny little crabs crawl out of the holes they’ve burrowed for themselves in the rocks. They dance around, dozens of little crabs, exploring, searching, eating.
Elsewhere in the pools there are hermit crabs with beautiful shell houses carried around on their backs.
There are sea urchins too, which I’m petrified of because of that trip I took with Gavin on a cruise that stopped in Haiti. I was minding my own business, frolicking in the ocean, when bammo, I guess I must have invaded their personal space.
For the next three weeks I carried around painful little barbs in my foot, teeny tiny splinters that I simply couldn’t remove.
I try to stay away from the sea urchins.
I was down there with a few different people from my group, mermaid-lounging on the rocks, listening to music.
A woman joined. She was there yesterday, too. She found out I was from Montreal and was ecstatic.
“Me too! Born and raised,” she said. She repeated that phrase several times.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t feel comfortable with her effusive attempts at conversation, but I just knew I didn’t feel like talking to her.
Nevertheless, she didn’t take a hint and kept on pushing the conversation, so I nodded politely until I could find my escape.
She was curious to know why I wanted to be in Montreal.
I always find that question so strange. For one thing, it’s a super cool city. For another, why does anyone live anywhere? I live in Montreal because it is my home.
Samantha, an acrobat from Northern California, joined us after a while. She introduced herself to the woman.
“Are you from the retreat?” Samantha asked her.
“Oh no, I’m just here for a little while. I decided I needed to get the hell out of Canada,” the woman replied.
Samantha asked more encouraging follow-up questions, and I inched away, hiding behind my sunglasses, hiding underneath my sunhat, turning into a mermaid in the tide pool.
“The Canadian government is the problem,” said the woman, and that’s when I understood why I hadn’t wanted to talk to her. “It’s just gotten so communist.”
…And, she was off and running, regaling us with stories of the evils of my adopted country.
On our way back up from the tide pools, I murmured to Samantha, “Just for the record, I’m pretty sure that most Canadian school teachers do not tell their students that it’s wrong for them to hug their parents.”
(Allegedly, this had happened to the woman’s friend’s child, so the woman’s friends had moved to Mexico. Because of course the Mexican government is much better than the Canadian one.)
“Yeah, I kind of took her with a grain of salt,” she replied, laughing.
I went to The Treehouse last year when the retreat was over, after a rather doomed episode on Imitepe. I was traveling with Josie, which made it all worth it. I was pretty smitten with her, too. Maybe one of these days I’ll actually consummate a girl crush. At the time though, it was all I could do to stay afloat. I had just written the letter to Richard, and I was in the process of realizing that I didn’t have a home with Gale anymore. I was scheduled to return to Montreal but had nothing to actually return to.
Josie had such a calm, soothing presence. She also took initiative, which is a wonderful trait in a travel companion. She showed up at Imitepe with a rented 4x4 and we went all over the island, driving that noisy little car along the rocky, rocky road, with potholes as big as our vehicle.
You had to control the 4x4 gas pedal with your thumb. The perfect recipe for carpal tunnel. My thumb hurt after a half hour driving!!
We didn’t know what to expect at The Treehouse. All we knew was that there would be a rustic jungle campout, so we asked our taxi driver to stop at the grocery store, and we bought everything; water, fruit, cheese, chips, two bottles of wine. Of course, it turned out that they served three meals a day at extremely affordable rates, and there were signs everywhere saying not to bring outside alcohol. Oh wells.
Our taxi driver turned off the highway onto a dirt road that led to a smaller dirt road that led to an even smaller and more potholed dirt road until we were finally deposited at the bottom of a path that would lead us to The Treehouse.
We climbed boulders for what felt like a very long time, eventually arriving at what was essentially base camp.
“Keep going!” encouraged a sign at the bottom of yet another boulder trail that led straight up into the jungle. “You’re almost there!”
“I can’t believe you’re going to get to see this place,” I said to Alba now. “It’s magical. You’re literally in a house, on a tree, in the jungle. And the howler monkeys! They’re insane!”
When Josie and I first got there last year, I was ready to move in. I seriously contemplated it. They had wifi! And yoga. And calm. So much calm. Friendly people and a magical set of treehouses in the Panamanian jungle. It beat a homeless Montreal winter for sure.
The howler monkeys, though. They start their mating calls, or whatever the heck they’re doing, at 4am. And they are LOUD. It feels like your brains are rattling with the noise inside your skull. Like a rooster only way way worse. After I heard that, I decided that a two night stint was enough.
But man, the place was magical.
It turned out that when Alba’s surfer guy had said he was sending a camion, that meant, a-pickup-truck-normally-meant-to-transport-chickens.
This was not exactly the taxi ride I had been envisioning.
“Is that broken glass?” I asked, noticing something strange in the bed of the pickup truck. We got out our cell phone flashlights, and upon closer inspection realized that it wasn’t broken glass. It was simply holes in the bed of the pickup truck that allowed you to see the ground below.
The truck was a gazillion years old and it rattled, squeaked and creaked with every bump, of which there were a lot. When we tried to go in the front seat later to help the driver with directions, we couldn’t open the front door because it was missing a door handle.
“Is it too late to say we could have a smaller taxi?” asked Alba, suddenly regretful. Half of our enthusiastic buddies had experienced a change of heart after dinner, rendering the truck woefully unnecessary.
It was too late, we all agreed.
So we made the best of it, huddled against the suddenly somewhat-chilly night air.
The sky was so full of stars it was incredible. You don’t realize what light pollution is until it’s not there anymore. Soooooo many stars.
When I initially arrived here last week, I had the opposite taxi problem. I landed in Costa Rica, because that made more sense than flying straight to Panama. I met two other retreat-goers at the airport.
They were both dressed for the circus, which is fine once you’re at the circus, which we pretty much are, here.
It’s not so fine when you’re trying to cross a Central American border into Panama, you’re the only one who speaks Spanish, and your obligatory-travel-companions are wearing transparent circus pants with thongs underneath.
I think that the clothes were so freakish they just stunned everyone. We actually didn’t get a single cat call, and normally you can’t go five feet in a Central American country without a man proclaiming his desire to put things in you.
Still, I felt rather self-conscious as we walked along in our extremely conspicuous attire hauling no fewer than 7 pieces of luggage.
I had packed light. Ever since I split up with Gavin, I pride myself on packing light. When I traveled with Etienne last year, I fit my entire life into a backpack for 5 months. It was pretty damn liberating. When you travel with only a backpack, you really have to pick your priorities.
(As the trip wore on, I couldn’t stop accumulating books. I gave books away, but I just seemed to get more of them.)
I’m not really a permanent nomad like he is.
But I did learn how to travel light.
For this trip, I took a carry-on suitcase and a backpack, with Bun Buns on my lap.
The taxi driver met us outside the gate, and we walked over to the car with my two items and the other girls’ 75 trillion pieces of luggage.
The taxi was tiny. Teeny tiny.
He put the really big suitcases in the trunk first, then manhandled my suitcase on top, slamming the trunk down. After a few false attempts, it finally closed.
He lashed the rest of their circus equipment to the top of the car, and stuck the remaining items into the backseat with the two girls.
I rode up front with my backpack and Bun Buns.
The sun started to set as we rode toward the Panamanian border, and after a little while it was pitch black.
We stopped at a grocery store so that one of the girls could use the bathroom.
I couldn’t help myself, the words were out before I could stop them, “Um, you may want to put pants on.”
“I have pants on!” she replied, seeming genuinely mystified by my statement.
“They’re completely see-through,” I said, thinking, does she really not know this?! They’re made of mesh!
“I can literally see up your butt,” I said. “And there will be families in the grocery store. With kids. But…it’s up to you,” I finished, shrugging in feigned non-chalance.
Great. This is how Lorelai makes friends on the first day of her circus retreat.
My travel companion pulled her wedgie, transforming what had looked like a thong into more of a boy-shorts situation, which covered a tiny bit more flesh, and went inside to use the bathroom.
I tried to buy a bottle of water with my Costa Rican currency from 2009, but apparently they’ve updated things since then and most of my money was no longer valid. Outrageous!
We piled back into the taxi. Next stop: The border.
Except.
“Ummm, I think the trunk is open,” said one of the girls, about a half an hour later.
I interpreted this for the taxi driver, who pulled over to take a look.
The trunk was, indeed, open.
The two enormous suitcases were still in the trunk.
My bag was not.
My. Bag. Was. Not.
And that’s how we ended up turning around, heading away from the border, retracing our footsteps, driving slowly along the pitch black highway, trying in vain to find a black suitcase on the black shoulder of the black road.
I was calm at first. Acceptance of what the universe throws at you, and whatnot.
I became less calm as time went on, chiefly because I was suddenly remembering what was in my suitcase.
Everything I needed for the month, for example.
Beyond my brand new Gopro and tripod, beyond all of my clothes, charging cables, etc…
My contact lenses. And my glasses.
I would be basically blind. For the entire month.
This wasn’t fair! I was being punished for packing light!
Baby Girl started struggling to hold it together, and we were suddenly very very glad that we had brought Bun Buns with us. I hugged her tight as we looked out the windows in search of my lost suitcase.
Now, in the back of the chicken-transporter-pickup-truck-cum-taxi, I gazed up at the stars and managed to tell Alba I was bisexual.
And it turned out…she was too!
Maybe after another year or so of flirting, we’ll finally make out.
We played a question game to pass the time, and I told them about Mommy. I called her my fairy godmother, which is a pretty good way to ease people into the concept of what our relationship is.
The Panamanian boys we’d dragged along were also in the back of the truck, but they mostly kept to themselves.
Every now and then a car would pull up behind us and we would shine brightly in the headlights. Alba’s cleavage was full of sparkles and my forehead sported bright silver jewels. I felt completely on display, a slutty gringa in the back of a pickup, and a little dumb, after my whole judgy episode of certain peoples’ wardrobe choices.
I tried to not let myself worry about getting kidnapped and raped in the middle of nowhere in Panama on the way to a treehouse.
It’s worth it because now I’m one step closer to making out with Alba, I reassured myself, and we continued on our way.
We had no idea when the trunk had opened or where the suitcase had popped out. After about ten minutes of retracing our footsteps, we decided to turn around. We were pretty sure the trunk hadn’t been open for that long without our noticing, although in fairness, we also had no idea.
Now we were on the same side of the road again, and we drove with our heads out the windows, searching the shoulder for any sign of my suitcase.
“It probably landed in the road,” said the taxi driver, which wasn’t very helpful, because if that was true, someone most certainly would have taken it, could at this very moment be tossing aside the unnecessary contents of my suitcase, like my contact lenses. Preparing to sell my GoPro.
I clutched Bun Buns more tightly.
At one point, one of the girls thought she had seen something.
We stopped.
It was a tire.
We kept going. More than ten minutes passed, which according to my frame of reference, meant that we were shit out of luck.
“That’s it then,” I said. “It’s gone.” I tried to imagine a world in which having none of my things, and spending the retreat completely blind, could somehow be turned into an opportunity.
I failed to imagine the opportunity.
“We still have a bit to go,” said the taxi driver in Spanish, and my hope renewed. I guess we had driven more slowly on the way back, which accounted for it taking longer. We doubled down on our search, determined, scrutinizing every bump at the side of the road, of which there were many. At one point we passed a ditch, and I prayed to the god I don’t believe in that my suitcase had not fallen in there, because we simply couldn’t stop to look down every single ditch we found along the way.
It had been more than two hours in the back of that rattly pickup when we stopped for gas. I let Alba check her cell phone to see when we would arrive at The Treehouse.
“Fifteen minutes!” she announced.
Fifteen minutes later, she checked again.
“Fifteen minutes,” she said, a little less excited than the last time.
“Permiso, senor…”
I showed the GPS map to the taxi driver.
He had indeed taken a wrong turn.
Half an hour later, it was almost midnight, but we had made it.
Almost.
The small dirt road turned into an even smaller road, and the big pickup truck struggled around corners, scraping trees as it went.
Finally, finally, we were there.
It had taken us two and a half hours in the back of a chicken coop truck, but we were there.
In the taxi, retracing our footsteps, the Panamanian border still frustratingly far in the distance, we continued to keep our eyes peeled for my suitcase.
“Can you slow down please?” I asked our poor driver. Who even knows what he thought of this group of sluttily-dressed circus girls with more items in suitcases than many Panamanians likely keep in their homes. And poor me, my vacation ruined because of…things.
Privilege at its ugliest.
“ITS THERE!” I shouted suddenly, at the same time as the girl in the back seat shouted the same exact thing.
The driver screeched on the brakes, and we jumped out of the car, reunited with my belongings.
Thank fucking god.
“I’m so glad you realized the trunk was open,” I said to the girl in the back seat. Otherwise we could have gotten to the border before we realized. We would have had no clue.
“I’m glad I was here to hear it too,” she said. “Although in fairness, if I hadn’t been there, your suitcase would have easily fit and the trunk wouldn’t have popped open.” I laughed.
“I wasn’t gonna say that out loud, but…yeah. That is kind of true,” I agreed.
But none of it mattered anymore, because we had my suitcase, which we did NOT put back into the trunk, we piled it into the back seat next to the girls, and I didn’t care that they were more crowded, because no way josé was I losing my suitcase again.
The taxi driver took off like a bat out of hell. I looked at the dashboard to see how fast we were going, but the speedometer was broken, permanently affixed to zero.
The car had 400,000 kilometers on it.
At the border, after he emptied out the bigger suitcases, he closed the trunk.
It still didn’t latch.
Our Treehouse adventure lasted until 5 in the morning, turning my newly found zen circadian rhythms completely upside down (although I forced myself to sleep until noon, so I didn’t lose that much sleep.)
The party was terrible. I guess the lesson is that you can’t repeat magical moments.
It wasn’t a party so much as a rave. I saw people doing cocaine just underneath the “No Drugs” sign.
It was loud and sweaty and full of beer and handsy European tourists, desecrating the jungle like the evil colonizers they represent. You couldn’t see how pretty it was. You barely even realized you were in the jungle.
But…Alba put her head in my lap for a moment in the back of the pickup truck, so…hashtagworthit?
Love,
Baby Girl
