Do You Paint Your Hair Yellow?
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 peanut butter and DVR.
Sometimes I wake up confused. I’ve never been here this long. A whole month now. It’s like my body doesn’t remember where I am and for a moment I panic. It’s like the feeling of confusion when snow is so cold it burns your skin; the feeling of being about to sneeze, then not being able to. I’ve felt this before. It’s the feeling of change, of transition. And though I’ve done it so many times over my life it doesn’t get any easier.
One day this will be a great story. One day...but not today. Today is hard. Today I don’t understand. Today I should let go of control. But one cannot practice the art of surrender, I’m learning. You either do it or you don’t. And a lot of days, I don’t want to. I want to learn within the safety of my walls, both literal and figurative. However, the actual earth has said, “No, that’s not what I’ve planned for you.”
A few days ago, I broke down completely. I called a friend crying, forgetting to breathe, hugging my legs so tightly to my chest that I left bruises on my calves.
“You are safe, you have four walls around you, a warm bed. You’re okay, if nothing else, you are safe,” she soothed.
The date was September 19. A few hours later, I woke up to an earthquake that had worked its way down from Mexico to rattle the dishes on my shelf and shake me awake in my bed. If there is one thing I can count on my life for, it is irony.
A minute and thirty-three seconds. That’s how long the news said the tremors lasted. I realized the next morning when someone asked, “Do you even know what to do when an earthquake hits?” that no, I don’t. Hailing from the flatlands that make up Indiana I hadn’t even considered that to be something I would ever need to know. For reference, you are supposed to go outside; run into the street; leave everything; surrender.
I remember as a kid my mom giving us plans for all sorts of highly unlikely emergency situations. My brain is filled with what to do in case of a tornado, a fire, a kidnapping. Even specific instructions for what to do if our car fell off a bridge into the water. But not an earthquake. I have no training, no reference for this.
I was a competitive swimmer from ages 8 to 19. The entire point of my life was to practice. I’m finding out, a little too late it sometimes seems, that some things can’t be practiced. Surrender is one of those things. One thing I’m having to surrender to is uncertainty and lack of timelines. When I used to come to Guatemala for a week it was easy and fun to joke about “Guatemalan time” where plans change within the hour and nothing is quite on time. Now, it’s become frustrating. I know that I’m the problem and several times a beautiful Guatemalan smile has told me to “have patience.” I’m embarrassed to admit that my gut reaction is to stick my lip out like the stubborn 3-year-old I used to be, cross my arms, and dig the toe of my converse into the dust.
It hit me today that I will not see the fall. Here in the land of eternal, beautiful sunshine and exquisite rain I wish for a dry, frosty fall. I would kill someone for delivery Chinese or a freezer meal or scented candles. I miss convenience, I miss luxury. I miss blending in. I miss looking like everyone else. I miss looking at a menu and knowing all the words. I miss carpet. I miss conversations as deep and easy as dark red wine. I miss the smell of my grandparents’ house. I miss sitting in the basement of my parents’ house with my sister, not speaking, looking at our phones, legs tangled together.
While I eat my breakfast, girls in knee high white socks, dusty black flats, and their plaid school skirts walk down the street, arm in arm. Walking while touching. Such an intimate thing. So different from the American bubble. It makes my heart and arm muscles ache for someone familiar to swing an arm around me. I’d go crazy here if the people weren’t so kind. Never have I come across someone unwilling to help.
Still, I ache for familiarity. I didn’t even know that sameness fed me. It sustained some deep part of me to blend in, to look like everyone else, to talk like everyone else. To all know the same sitcom families, the same classic rock music, the same childhood snacks. I’ve never in my life been the minority and truthfully, I don’t know how to handle it. As a millennial, I’ve been adequately educated in the ways my privilege has helped me advance, but I didn’t know the emotional toll it takes on you to be the one they’re looking at, the one who is different.
With the kids in the school it’s easy and fun. They ask, do I paint my hair yellow? Then check my roots to see if I’ve lied. They run their fingers over my tattoo and the hair on my arms and ask why I am so white. They hold my face still between their hands to see if it is true that my eyes are the color of the sky. In them and their curiosity, I find my reason to smile.
My grandpa says famously, “It’ll quit hurtin’ when it feels better.” He’s right. Hurt doesn’t have an expiration date. I’m waiting slowly, watching slowly, learning slowly, a way of life I’m not used to. The people who surround me tell me to slow down, to appreciate this time because this is the point: to build a relationship. And that takes time. And grace. And an open heart. One of my best friends sent me a song not long after I got here and it has come to capture, entirely, my experience thus far.
If it all just happened overnight,
You wouldn’t know how much it means
Yeah
If it all just happened overnight,
You would never learn to believe
In what you cannot see
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