Guateday

Chorizo and eggs taste so much better when someone else makes them. Actually, everything tastes better when someone else makes it. My favorite breakfast place, hidden behind a white storefront, has become my favorite place to write. I could sit here all day and simply watch traffic. It would be enough to calm my mind, my heart even. I feel good. Writing, sipping coffee and milk, watching, smelling the rain come in, mixed with exhaust from the motos and some onions they’re cutting in the back. There’s a table of American tourists next to me today. I congratulate them for braving the rainy season during their vacation. Folding eggs and sour cream into my tortillas, I listen to their conversation, not for the words, but simply for the cadence of it. Their accent sounds almost brutish after the trilling “r” and crisp “t” of Spanish that normally surrounds me, but something deeper than my gut jumps with recognition whenever I hear it here. I’m starting to miss things deeper than sugary...

It takes about forty minutes for the bus holding me and a year's worth of my belongings to break out of the dirty air of Guatemala City. From here, I pull open my window and much to the amusement of my guides Edy and Daniel, stick my head out and close my eyes, feeling the wind  separate my eyelashes and whip my curls around my head. Air thinned of oxygen must be my body’s favorite type. In the city, I pulled thick air into my lungs begrudgingly, submitting to its pollutants and gases that I must breathe to stay alive. But now, Guatemalan mountain air slips easily  into my lungs; it tastes like swaying green leaves thick as card stock and lemons not yet ripe. Black tires on the van spin along the grey road until you can see the lake, the bluest blue in a sea of green trees and vines and weeds. There are mountains thickly shrouded in trees on either side of me. The valley in between is like a 3D patchwork quilt, each tile a different crop. If I look hard enough I can se...