The sun fills the sky with white light that the clouds make grey between fat veins of blue.
Coffee steams under cover of hard plastic casing.
I remember what it felt like to write, briefly.
It's always hard to sleep before a vacation - at least for me. Likely because I don't travel very much so there's always a good mixture of excitement and anxiety that take over the centre of my consciousness and dig in for the night. They give out pamphlets about plane crashes and terrorists but they're mostly ignored. I do my best to sleep but usually only succeed in getting the terrible tip. That's usually okay, I tell myself I'll sleep on the plane - but fuck that, I won't sleep without a strong sleep inducing pharmaceutical and (if I'm lucky) a bit of alcohol. And so it goes.
I'm sitting on the movator pretending I'm rowing a boat - there's a video of it somewhere. Just me and the soon-to-be covfefiance. But neither of us know that yet. It'll be a couple months until - 3ish. So the airport has these tablets you can pay to play games on, they're mostly shit. The food too is mostly crap - all in-transit business fare. Nothing you actually want to sit and eat but it's 3ish in the AM and no one's counting calories.
So we partake in the miracle of human flight - plane didn't get lost, we didn't crash. Touchdown in an airport in Panama and it's relatively like the Malvern Mall of airports on my list of airports I've ever stopped over in. But like, they got decent fried chicken and I start reading this book about what seems to be a sentient house. I have since lost that book, but I do actually want to finish it - wherever it is. Just that, since I haven't read it in a while would I continue from where I left off or would I start from the beginning? Likely I won't find it and I'll never end up finishing it. And yet having said that I'm more likely to want to find it... but I still don't know if I'll start from the beginning or where I left off at.
We arrive in San José - it's surprisingly less-tropic than expected. I left Toronto in a sweater and as I make my way to our private shuttle bus I'm glad I did and sad I didn't bring anything heavier. Within 24 hours I'll regret it even more when I'm like, a thousand feet above the ground flying through the mountains with a big Costa Rican man and a harness tied around my squishy middle parts.
The coach - an intruder bringing light through a rocky dirt road between howling mountain passages pressing on to the homes in the air. Destination: Monteverde - one word, not two. The two-word-one is in Chile. We retrace the cruel blade strokes, now scars, in the proud rocky face. Cuts that brought ice and fire and silent sex further into the territory of jaguars and sleeping birds. It's a long road and we only stop once. In that episode, at the gas station, I find it's my first time interacting with locals. Our guide doesn't really count - he's aight and probably more used to dealing with foreigners.
I think of that table in the corner of an open patio that looked out onto the Pacific. Deep blue walls against white.
The bohemians. The drunk and drugged living out of trucks moving across the southern continent. Her face - hair held back, bare bum on my lap, and the most beautiful night sky behind her. Racing across the green freckled black water with gravol in my belly.
Coffee beans drying in the sun open to the air beneath nets that hold out the sloths. Churning the peeler that sinewy tequila-sweating arms rolled in years past. All in-scorched. The air as it flexes and releases its thoughts through the mountain. Between the confident new forms of earth that now bring forth.
A pig - big. Stinking of shit and earth. Hair like mine but whiter, nose in mud, gaseous.
A pigs head, separated. Its body skinned and halved hanging above. Clean muscles, the sweet scent of blood.
I see the waterfall towering above a small black head darker than the deep water around it. I imagine someone falling from above, breaking bones, shattering, dripping bones. The turning off of lights. A divorce of consciousness and matter. An eviction of the soul on account of an unaccommodating structural edit.
