I want to write about Mexico.

About what it was like to return somewhere after 22 years and feel like you’d always been there.

I want to write about Mexico, but my thoughts are scattered among mountains, and cactus. They are running rampant with stray dogs along winding roads lined with palm trees and pop up food stands.

How do I make sense of everything that happened in the two weeks that stretched out like an eternity.

Things run slower in the motherland. There is an urgency, and need for immediate gratification that doesn’t exist there. Time has slowed down. Or maybe it’s that time is just running along at the right pace and we’re running too fast in the States?
Either way I came home tired.

And that title is misleading.

My thoughts have always been a jumble that predominantly exists in English. A place where Spanish shows up like a fond friend who’s mostly traveling and cannot be tied down.

No pos guau.

When I close my eyes and think of Mexico all I see is color.

Mexico is the brightest blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds.

It is dark green mountains rising up towards it.

Red dusty earth.

The golden tan skin of people who rarely have the sun hidden from them.

When I close my eyes and think of Mexico, all I can think of are ghost stories, bygone times, and memories that don’t belong to me.
I think of blood that is a stranger to me and a longing to know who they were.

The family gathered, their aunt had come home. The baby of the family, who’d been away for so long had come back for a visit.

Naturally a pig was slaughtered and there was feasting and drinking and singing.

I watched my cousins clasp her hands and ask her one by one if she remembered them, if she knew their names. She nodded until she was overwhelmed by the amount of people, and questions.

I watched a cousin break down and cry as he tried to reconcile his memory of my mother– strong, vibrant, full of life, with the fragile, quiet, woman that stood in front of him.

I sat with her, holding her hand as the tears slid down her cheeks, for reasons I don’t think she understood.

When I think of this trip, I think of a loved one saying, “goodbye.”