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[ladycapuletwrites]

El Rio

The toilet doesn’t flush properly and I’ve had two lines of cocaine.  

 We have just walked through the dark, stumbling over the rocks on the winding path to the hostel, using our phone flashlights instead to illuminate the baggie of Charlie Whit is digging the tiny spoon into. 

I wonder how she does it: be so effortlessly cool. Everything she wears looks just right even though she’s not stick thin. She seems to have an intelligent answer for absolutely everything, delivered in a well preserved sense of self, calm tone, like wrapping paper. One of those superlative queen bees that has everyone at the table nodding their heads in agreement like sock puppets even if they have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. A sentence is a statement, wrapped in a bow. I feel wildly inadequate. 

We all have a line, and that’s what’s put me in this mess. Only this one, not the rest. Brand new hostel; my insides have just evacuated in a one dump suicide mission. Only, I can’t get rid of it.

 “Just tell the manager Sare, he’ll be okay about it” Allan says. They apparently met these guys in the build of the hostel, and it’s the opening night.

 How do you tell the manager you’ve ruined the toilet on the night of its opening? I scramble for ideas, wondering if I should guard the door like a warden for the rest of the night. Thou shalt not pass, shit abounds. How do you admit that your entrance party trick was to clog the pipes of a brand new toilet block?

 I want to crawl into a hole and die when they go inside to inspect it and confirm that it won’t flush all at once, that I have to keep going back in there, the walk of shame up the cobbled path to the block to flush the toilet until everything finally goes down. 

So naturally, like an embarrassed, uncomfortable weary but jacked-up-on-cocaine person does, I order three gin and tonics in quick succession. They are doubles, because South America doesn’t understand alcohol control. Queue blackout number 347.

 It’s as if now that I’ve started talking about it, I can’t stop talking about it. Every one of my stories rolls back to the dirty feeling of a mans fingers inside me, pushing little plastic baggies where they never belonged. The others have gotten to the point where they have stopped listening to me, I’ve become so narcissistic in this newfound grief that I am ruining the party.

 Allan puts me to bed at some point, where I’m staying with the Swedes, on some balcony. 

 The next time I wake up I’m somehow downstairs again, wasted, and Allan is once again leading me up to the treehouse and telling me to go to bed.

 I wake up the next morning with a headache and a blanket of shame underneath the mildew of the oncoming humid heat. The boys are passed out next to me. I tiptoe downstairs to the bar. “You won the most drinks consumed award last night young lady!” The manager laughs, but all I remember is the jagged edge of rejection, and that fucking cake. Bel had bought Ben a cake for his birthday. I sit at the bar and replay over and over, insisting on carrying it, even though she had bought it for him, because I was wasted. I remember acutely the feeling that compiles in my stomach, the memory of the cake dropping to the ground. In slow motion, I look at myself from the outside, the cake toppling through my fingers. 

 We are going tubing today, and I ask the manager if I can have a shot of vodka. He looks at me strangely and pours it, adds it to my bill. Anything to make the shame dissipate. I am screaming at Oscar to give me the bottle of whisky. We’re floating downstream and I am plastered. I wake up, on the mouldy mattress again. I start to cry.

Allan and I have organised to have a day together, just the two of us, but I instead opt to drink beer and bleach my hair with a new friend that I’ve found. I don’t remember her name as soon as she tells me, but it doesn’t matter because inebriation helps me ignore what happened in the last couple of days. Whit and Bel and Ben have kind of just stopped acknowledging me, in the nicest way possible. I am ruining their party, and every time someone gets a chance to speak with me I talk about my problems as if I am the only person that exists in the world.

Allan tries to take my beer away from me at about 4pm, but I aggressively defend my position, and he ends up shrugging his shoulders and saying, “Whatever man, we were supposed to hang out, but like, I guess it doesn’t matter”. The message doesn’t event touch the sides, and I drink until I pass out on the mattress again. By now, when I wake up at 6am, my entire collection of clothes smell like mould and ashtrays. I pay my bill and wake Allan and Lucy up for a hug.

I stand out on the highway waiting for a bus to come in the scorching heat. Everything will be okay when I get to Canada. I’ll just start again there. I calculate the bus rides in my head. One to Santa Marta, and one to Cartagena. Then the flights. One to Bogota, and one to Canada. There, I think. There, I’ll start again.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Speaking

Santa Marta is fucking boiling.

I should have expected this, of course, from Cartagena, but I somehow believed it would be cooler out here. Which if it was, I can’t tell.

I’m on a bus to the town centre where Allan and Lucy are staying after meeting briefly back up with Angel and Shay. Izzy is there too, she says hello and launches into a conversation about a secret city trek that she’s just finished, but I’m so tired I take myself to bed. After Shay and Angel take off to the coast, I lock myself in my room for two days reading.

I’ve started to worry about meeting up with Allan again. I can feel that there is a lot of things I want to tell him. The places I’ve been and the things that I’ve done. About how I’m not sure I believe in syncronicity anymore but if I do maybe I’m just not following the right path or maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere. I guess I want to tell him that I feel lost and that I’m angry about it but that all it makes me want to do is escape.

When the bus stops nearby and I have to navigate my way to their hostel, I notice the way people look at me. Men aggressively whistle at me and make loud mention of my blonde hair, calling me “Barbie”, but I clench my fist and keep moving until I fin d the purple door that leads to their hostel.

Seeing Allan’s face gives me a rush of euphoria, and then, relief. We sit on small rugs at the hostel and talk about the weather, and I ask them what their itinerary is moving forward.

Lucy has found a friend, Whit, at the hostel they were working at in Minka. Whit has gotten together with Oscar, and they’re sharing a room just down the hall. They have been working at Casa Elemento, a hostel at the top of a mountain in Minka for the last month, and are going back to visit. They invite me to come, and I agree.

I meet Whit and Oscar in their room, which is covered in the haze of joint smoke, and we get high and watch movies before falling asleep. The next day we meet up with Bel and Ben, Whit and Oscar’s best friends, who have also coupled up.

We take a sweaty bus with the windows wound down all the way up the coast to Minka. At the bottom of the mountain we hail motor taxis, or more accurately, Whit and Lucy do, as they are both fluent in Spanish. We make our way up the mountain, through the winding roads and muddy patches where it intermittently rains in the tropical heat. It’s like biking up a soggy hill in a rainforest, and I don’t feel very safe. We’ve left all but our day packs back in Santa Marta because out here, less is more.

Casa Elemento is famous for having the worlds largest hammock, which is really just a huge piece of netting stretched across some wooden poles, where people gather to drink and look out over the mountain scenery.

At the top, we meet up with Sven and Seb, another duo, two boys from Sweden. It’s at this point that I start to feel a little like an extra appendage that no one needs. I still haven’t spoken to Allan, I don’t know what to say really. Every time I think I want to talk about it, I drink about it instead.

We kick off the night with some beers, and Whit produces a bag of coke for each of us. Allan and I end up on the hammock at some point, and it’s there that I tell him about what happened in Mancora. He seems confused by the tale, and I guess maybe I sense a suspiciousness that I don’t like about the way he listens to me. I put it down to the fact that I feel so much confusion and sham surrounding the incident that I don’t really know what is the truth.

When things happen to you that you don’t understand or you can’t comprehend, it’s easy to minimise the experience. I guess what I’m saying is, as I tell Allan, I take full responsibility for it. I know for a fact that it wouldn’t have happened to me if I hadn’t been such a drunk train wreck walking outside on my own in a foreign city in the middle of the night. There is the way that things should be and the way that things are, and I explain to him that I know it’s my fault that this happened to me. I know it, in my heart of hearts, that I shouldn’t have taken that risk. I drink some more and I don’t tell him about the time that I walked around Medellin in the middle of the night next to a freeway or that time I smuggled cocaine over the border or that time I wandered around looking for my hostel for three hours when I was so high I couldn’t understand where anything was. I just tell him that it’s my fault, and I don’t listen for what he responds.

That night I tell Lucy in the toilets as we’re both ramming coke up our noses about what happened, and I smoke cigarettes until I remember how to breathe again.

I wake up in a hammock, covered in blankets, strangely more comfortable than that sounds. Allan and Lucy are at the bar with all the other couples, and I take a seat at the side, asking what the next plan is. Apparently we’re going to stay in a hostel further down the mountain, in tiny tents, as a birthday celebration for Oscar, who has been doing some trade work there.

We make our way down the hill and are shown to our tents. We are staying in camper tents, and I am the only one who has to stay by myself, as everyone else is in a couple. The tents are comfortable and the barman is hilarious. We are all sitting around laughing and joking but I feel the loneliness, like a disease, thrusting itself into me again. I feel like I’ve stumbled into this already curated group of friends, and that I don’t belong. Everybody is drinking and laughing and I take myself back to my tent, feigning a stomach ache.

I fall asleep, and I wake up to Whit opening my tent to check if I’m okay. I say I’m just going to stay in there and she says, “Okay, but just know that you are loed, and you are important, and we’ll see you tomorrow”. It is a sweet sentiment and I appreciate the effort she’s made, but for some strange reason, I feel like a flood gate has been opened, and I don’t know if what she says is true.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Can I get an edit

Some corrupt cops are sitting at the table next to us, I’m stoned and eating pizza.

We had a big night on the bags last night; me and receptionists and some dorm mates.

Natasha is sitting next to me, we’re trying to concentrate on this weird movie we’re watching, but I keep phasing out, and I feel like there’s things I need to do but I can’t remember them. Virgo is at the reception desk. He looks tired. I’m not surprised. A lady came into my dorm room at 10am when he was supposed to start work to tell him he was running late. She stood in the doorway as he awkwardly tried to put his clothes back on without her hawk eyeing his dick.

I remember the hazy details of the night before. He’s one of those tall, art nerd types that I’m so attracted to. Long blonde hair like Legolas. I helped him edit his application letter for a job, and we celebrate him getting offered the position by buying a few grams of coke each and getting so high we can’t decide what’s real and what’s an echo of our thoughts. I mean, it all is really, isn’t it?

He suffers from coke dick in this situation just like many who came before him. Or more accurately, didn’t.

We end up falling into a kind of distracted and uncomfortable buzzed slumber together, after stealing some warm beers and sculling them.

I don’t remember what happened to everyone else, but here are the remainder of us, sitting on this long couch, forcing ourselves to eat pizza and watching a movie that none of us can comprehend.

 We’ve ordered it from the Colombian version of Dominos, which is a thing in Medellin. It was only down the street, so it was the ultimate choice.

It occurs to me that I’m leaving tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

I’m headed to Cartagena to find Allan and Lucy for the first time since the beginning of the trip. I feel like a different person. I feel detached, in a way. What happened in Mancora has burrowed its way into me, and the anger and resentment that I hold towards myself spews out onto other people. I am disappointed that Allan wasn’t there for me, though I never asked him to be.

  I look at the television. “Does anyone actually know what’s going on in this thing?”

Natasha looks up, piece of pizza rotating slowly.

“Ah, yeah yeah. His mate is a werewolf and he has sex with his mum. Also there’s this weird girl with a droopy eye whose face turns blue when you touch it... Oh yeah, and this guy saw a dragon as well.”

I look at her, quizzically.

“No but seriously, what is happening?” I ask, pushing the pizza box away, laughing.

She starts to giggle. “Look, the moon is in the alley, okay?” We erupt into laughter and the next thing I know, I’m furiously inhaling my last bump of cocaine before I jump in a car on the way to the airport.

 Drake gives me a wide hug and I hop into the cab, trying to speak Spanish, but I’m talking too fast, and he’s shaking his head. Eventually, I ask him, sweatily, if we’re going in the right direction. It feels like we’ve turned around. My palms are sweaty, and my I can hear my heart in my ears.

“We go back.” Is all he can say in English, and I don’t understand his Spanish for about three explanations until I realise he’s telling me that I left my passport and wallet back at the hostel and Drake has told him to come back and get them.

By the time he shoves my stuff at me through the window of the cab, I’m already late. “Go quickly! Otherwise they’ll know how fucked you are!” he laughs, but it freaks me out, and I have visions of that one time I smuggled cocaine into Ecuador not long ago and if I get caught in Colombia I am well and truly fucked.

 Somehow, I pass through the gates. A few people in the line for the check in look at me sideways, or so I think, I’m so high I can’t tell the difference between paranoia and general instinct. I manage to smuggle my huge second bag onto the plane, much to the discord of the other passengers, I got it through all gates though, all five of them. Swapping the bag from one side to the other, each time I move through a gate.

I’m sure my pupils are the size of dinner plates. I get into my seat without looking at any of the stewardesses.

 I'm about three sheets to the wind, maybe four, but I've managed to ask in Spanish, appropriately, whether I can have a beer.

I mean it is six in the morning so there was every chance that she would say 'no', but she didn't.

She says 'in five minutes', which is basically the magic words, but five minutes too late.

I have realised that I'm going to rock up at Angel and Shaina’s pretty drunk, but that's not really a problem, I guess.

That being said I've literally written a bunch inane drivel that doesn't make any sense at all in my last note piece so I can only hope for the best, and for beer, obviously.

“Sinco minut” turns to “diez minut” and I'm still wondering where my fucking beer is. Thinking about calling the air hostess, but worried about seeming so keen that they say no to my beer request. Within a minute they're rolling their trolley down the isle. Bringing mercilessly slowly, my beer. Every second seems to etch itself across my soul and the cocaine pumping through me exceeds time and space. Wow, I have had a lot of cocaine. I think we got into about five bags, and I can’t remember how or why because the last thing I can think of is the girl with the blue face and the moon in the alley and the size of my hangover.

I can see they have a beer perched on the top of the tray. I'm pretty sure it's for me; the one I asked for. They are rapidly approaching and I think about the state I want to arrive in.

Maybe I want to be drunk today.

Some other people have ordered beers.

They have had to get more from the cold fridge at the back of the plane.

They hand me my beer. I think "I've made it", I successfully caught a plane when I'm a million miles from sober. I also am pretty happy that by the time I finish my (second) beer we will have landed.

Just at the time they talk about landing I ask for another beer. The lady doesn't even bother asking me to finish it quickly because I've just suckled a cerveza in seven minutes. I've been counting, had she? Well, yes.

But she's also got the most ridiculous face paint on, for Halloween, so she looks at me disparately from her tiger painted, somewhat pitiful face.

She must either think I'm terrified of flying, or correctly, that I am high as a fucking kite trying to fight off the oncoming existential I may have once whatever the coke was mixed with wears off.

It's an hour flight. You're in the air, and then you're not.

I’ve never landed with a beer in my hand, and even as people around me are unbuckling themselves, I’m still cradling it like a newborn.

This has been the easiest flight I’ve ever had, and I have a moment of terror that the plane might blow up at any point because things can’t be this easy.

 I shuffle off the plane and am blindsided by the incomprehensible heat. It is so thick I am gulping at air, feeling like it is never going to go in.

 I wait for my bag to come off the belt, and drag all three of my bags and all the layers of the clothing I’ve removed in the onslaught of heat out to the taxi rank.

I push all of my things into the back seat, but something is missing. My rainbow jacket. I had it just a second ago.

I pull my things out of the car and head back inside, frantically checking every step that I had taken before the conveyor belt.

 There is no sign of it, but I spent the next hour in confusion wandering around the airport asking confused vendors if they’ve seen it. I’ve never been so attached to an item of clothing before, and it feels as if someone has abducted my child.

It’s a small airport, so after three rounds of looking I am forced to confront the fact that someone has in fact, stolen it. The thought punctures an artery of emotion in me and if I wasn’t still balls deep in whatever it is that is keeping me high I would start to cry huge, sweaty tears. Why the fuck does a person in Cartagena, the hottest place on Earth, have need for a jacket?

 As I fold myself into the air conditioning of a taxi after an exhausted search, I start to feel the dread of what I have lost settle over me. All the pieces of new baggage I now carry with me, because every action takes up a little piece of your psychic space, and right now, I am carrying a heavy cargo.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Tidbits

I leave when the conversation starts to make me feel like a ragdoll, or a prop. Some little puppet to make the same faces as everyone else at the table. Imitation, but no understanding. There is conflict here and I lack the skills to understand it, an impotent soldier on the frontier of a language barrier too wide to cross on foot, without a horse or translator to wade the divide. I haven’t seen Mari in years and she has invited me to her fiance’s birthday party. His name is Louis, and he’s French, but also speaks Spanish. This means that the entire night I am staring into the void of conversation as they switch quickly between two vernaculars too quickly for me to understand. Usually I get along okay watching facial expressions, but everyone has been drinking for the better part of the day. At one point I think Mari is asking me to come into the bathroom with her, I’m hoping it’s to give me cocaine, but it’s just a misinterpretation and she ends up turning around and looking at me in surprise. I make up a lie that I thought she was showing me another part of the restaurant that we’re at. Louis’ boss owns this and another one, he is French also. His wife and he are some of the most well-dressed people I’ve ever seen, and they are also completely sozzled. Mari and Louis get into an argument that I don’t understand, and I head home. Anxiety cripples me, I think about how they must have thought I was so weird, or that I stayed too long. Or maybe they thought, correctly, that I was just there for the free margaritas. At one point Mari told me she was a deeply sexual person and that she had urges but that she could never cheat on Louis and that’s how she knew he was the one. He was sitting across the table yelling in French with his boss but it seemed a strange conversation to be having at the time. I walk home with a distinct stabbing of loneliness. It’s as if, loneliness tricks you into thinking you’re the only one. But it’s paradoxical because, as Janet Fitch would say, “loneliness is the human condition”. Everybody feels this, and I wonder why we have to live in this strange juxtaposition.

I’m meeting up with Ricky in Medellin city. So far I’ve been hanging out in the tourist bubble and this is my first time down town. I take a short walking tour around the city while I wait and notice the intense differences in how safe I feel. As I’m wandering around the labyrinth of shops to find the vegan restaurant we’re meeting up at, every single man I pass whistles at me. It makes me super uncomfortable, and I feel like I’m walking around in a pack of hyenas.

We go to this strange place that serves us via robots. There are no wait staff, just robots roving around on skates, recording what we eat. It bizarre.

Ricky is a writer as well, and has been dating a woman in Colombia for a few months. He is originally from England, but he’d be the first person I would call a “citizen of the world”, as I think of him as the ultimate nomad. He has travelled extensively all over the world, and every time I talk to him he’s in a different place.

We take a metro cable to the top of the city to see a look out point. We wander around looking for a bar, but there are none open and the people around us are most unwelcoming. We don’t feel very safe so we go back toward the look out point, passing by a supermarket on the way to buy two cartons of Aguardiente, the national liquor. It looks harmless in it’s juice box but most definitely is not.

The afternoon is waning, so we jump back on the metro cable and make our way back towards my neck of the woods. He doesn’t feel as unsafe as I do, but he sees the way men look at me and wants to make sure that when it’s dark, I am back near where I need to be.

We sit in a square in Poblado and drink the rest of the Aguardiente whilst talking about life and philosophy and writing.

I’m pretty shitfaced by the time I run back into Fat, who has just been searched on the street by a pair of cops and has narrowly avoided jail by swapping the bag from one hand to another. He tells the story avidly, over a few beers. The cops stop him in the street and ask him to ut his hands up. He reaches into his pocket just as they ask and folds the baggie between his fingers so that from the front, you can’t see. He does the same as they ask him to turn around, and pat him down, they take his wallet and rifle through it, and hand it back. He folds the bag underneath the wallet as they hand it back to him. “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THAT WAS THE BIGGEST RUSH OF MY LIFE, I ALMOST SHIT MY PANTS.”

Sam is cowering and laughing in the corner as we all take a collective breath of relief. Holy shit. Sam goes to bed and Andy and I head back to Stripes where I’m staying to get some more coke from Drake. We end up sitting around in a circle with the other guests, each with a bag of coke, so high that Fat has to check himself in to Stripes because he doesn’t want to walk back to his hostel. It’s one of those strange, sweaty sleeps where I start to question what my reason for staying here was. I feel guilt pummel itself through me, underneath the cocaine.

I pull my phone out, and message Allan.

“Hey, where are you?”

[ladycapuletwrites]

Safety First

Fat is apparently staying at The Purple Buddha, and I make my way there from the bus station. I take a cab, and get stuck in traffic for hours on the way, and swerve my way through peak hour. Medellin is not what I expected. I mean, I’m not sure what I expected, really.

Once, one of the most dangerous places in the world, now, a bustling metropolis that stretches across in all directions. I’m headed in the direction of the Poblado area in a cluster of tourist spots that are relatively safe.

I am dropped in the middle of a gorgeous, upscale neighbourhood. There appear to be café’s, bars and nightclubs, nestled into lush greenery. Buildings have incredible artwork graffiti and scaling flora. Medellin is called “The Land of the Endless Spring”, and I can tell why. It’s beautiful.

I set myself up in a hostel and wait for Fat and his friend to arrive. He texts me at some point saying he’s going to be late, so I wander down to where Rico, Kahn, Lizzy and his brother Sam are staying. They are all packed into a tiny rooftop at their hostel, Stripes. I buy some coke from the local dealer, Drake. We drink a few glasses of shitty rose and the guys make some dinner in the communal kitchen.

I meet Fat later in the night, but he’s blown out from the trip over and his friend won’t get off the phone with his new girlfriend. They’re in that sweet, unrelenting honeymoon phase where they can’t stop thinking about or talking to each other. Fat’s continual jibes and digs at him have no effect, he is whipped.

We end up having an early night as we are up early the next day to go to Guatape. It has some weird Penis shaped rock that people like to climb, and we want to check out the home of Pablo Escobar; the one that got blown up. I’m always just down for the ride with these things. Rarely do I rock up to a city knowing what I want to do. O follow people, not experience, but somehow the two are intertwined.

We head out the next morning on a bus that drops us off first at El Penon de Guatape. It turns out that it’s an inselberg, rising abruptly from the ground like a giant great dick, and someone has had the great idea to put extremely steep staircases up the side of it, so that you can get to the top. I’m not complaining about the fact that you can get to the top, the view was spectacular when we got up there, but the walk up the steps was insanely difficult. We counted each step as we went, fast approaching death as we reached the top and drank some strange beer margarita things.

When we got back to the town, which was filled with obscenely colourful houses that made for excellent photos, I espied an old man on the street, looking down into the valley of cobbled and colour. I snapped a photo. An old man, in an archway, with his hat propped next to his stoop. I wondered what he was thinking. I imagined that he was completely present, caught in a moment of wonder. Probably needing a good poo.

We took a boat out to see the remains of Pablo Escobar’s estate. It was one of his many houses, and he vacationed there. We sail through the beautiful landscape of dotted islands and holiday mansions, and I can see the appeal of the location. The house itself is called La Manuela Hacienda, named after his daughter. When it was blown up by a rival gang in 1993, it revealed a shit load of drugs and cash that were hidden inside, which were promptly seized by authorities.

When we get there, policemen are all over the property, making sure it’s secured from an outpost near the dock. We wander into the derelict mansion; the swimming pool now a swamp, tiny glimpses into the man’s taste by the exotic types of trees co existing together on the property from all over the world. Apparently there were hippos too. A man on the tour shows us the balcony over the swimming pool, and tells us that Pablo liked to mutilate prostitutes and throw the pieces of their bodies into the pool. The tour guide, who speaks little to no English, says that Narcos is a piece of shit television show and that he wishes no one would watch it because it glorifies a man who was a total monster.

It the basement of the multi levelled mansion, there are rooms with meat hooks and strange raised bits of cement, where he kept drugs and cash and also where people were tortured. The whole place still feels to me like a place of pain. Of that strange cackle of evil you feel on the wind when you’re in a place that cruelty has taken place.

When we get back to the town, we attempt to get stoned but the wind is too heavy for my pipe to work, and it starts to rain. We run back to the bus stop where a trove of tourists are already waiting, and purchase our tickets. We have to take separate buses because there isn’t three seats, so I end up getting on a bus on my own.

I fall asleep for a bit on the bus and wake up to someone shouting that this is my stop. I murmur “poblado?” and a lady nods so I get off the bus and walk a few steps forward. As the bus arcs around the corner I realise I am on the slant of a huge hill, and I have no idea where I am. I ask in my best Spanish to a passerby if I’m near Poblado and they solemnly shake their head. Fuck.

It’s already dark at this point, so I begin to walk down the side of the highway, hoping for some sign as to where I am. I walk for about half an hour before I get paranoid that maybe I’m in walking in the wrong direction. Ten minutes away there’s an apartment building, I ask them if they know where my hostel is and they have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s pitch black and pouring with rain and a skinny guy has been trailing me for a little while so I stay inside the concierge until I feel a bit safer and then keep walking down the hill. It takes forever, but finally I’m at a strange junction at the bottom pf the freeway. Nearby, there is an overpass, and I head towards it until I realise that there are a lot of unsavoury people staring at me from underneath, and I run towards the junction again. Right as one starts to yell at me I manage to hail a taxi and jump inside.

I explain that I need to get to where my hostel is, and he tells me I am very far away from that destination. A light in my peripheral vision sparks up and I realise that one of the group under the overpass has started a fire in a trash can with some sort of oil rag. My heart starts beating faster. The driver turns to me and says “It’s okay, I will take you home”, and I’m not sure whether to trust him or not. He locks the door on the cab and I wonder if I’ve made a bad choice. Looking back at the dumpster fire and the skinny men dancing around in the rain, I guess it doesn’t really matter now.

After about ten minutes of manouvering the car around in the rain and traffic, the taxi driver opens up. It turns out he doesn’t speak terrible English after all, and wants to practise with me. He tells me about his wife and kid as he takes me back toward my district. It is a long way back home, but I feel my body relax and am happy to pay him whatever he wants at the end of our journey.

At the hostel, Fat and his friend Joe and I get high on the coke I bought. I leave them to get the others to come out from Stripes Hostel, and head there amongst the many whispers on the street. “Cocaina, Cocaina” is the constant barrage of voices on the street, men leering at you from underneath their baseball caps. “Marijuana, cocaina”, and the general uncomfortable feeling of always being stared at. I get to Stripes and the guys are all drinking on the rooftop again.

Somehow, I am the highest person on Earth by the time everyone wants to go to bed. I’ve stayed at Stripes, and continually banged powder up my nose, and now I’m running around Rico’s dorm room getting kicked out of everyone’s bed. Drake, the dealer comes in and takes me to the front door. “You can’t stay here tonight sweetie, maybe tomorrow” he says, and I am turfed out onto the front patio. My hostel is only a ten minute walk, but I am so high that it takes me three hours to get home, an endless maze that I can’t  figure out, it’s is broad daylight and I’m sweating profusely  and wandering around. I am at the mercy of my rising panic, I start to cry because iit feels like I will never make it home and I’m too paranoid to ask for directions because I’ve forgotten how to speak Spanish.

When I do finally get home, I sit in the shower and cry. You would think that after a bunch of taxi drivers trapped me in a tuk tuk, robbed me and shoved cocaine inside me that I would have learned how to take a little more care of myself. I feel empty of every emotion except shame. In the past 24 hours I’ve put myself in extreme danger twice, in fucking Colombia, and though I’ve escaped unscathed, I wonder if I’m ever going to grow the fuck up. The shower water is getting cold, and I can hear my roommates becoming impatient.

I pack my backpack and check out. I take the ten minute journey to Stripes hotel, where Drake meets me at the counter.

“Can I please check in?”

He laughs and says “Of course sweetie, you are always welcome here.”

[ladycapuletwrites]

Salento

The omelette arrives with ham in it.

It’s been an intense few days of travel and all I want is a fucking vegetarian omelette, but no one in this town knows what vegetarian means. I’ve left Shay and Angel at the hotel room whilst I go out looking for food on the busy streets of Cali. It takes me about seven years to get them to understand that no, I do not want any meat at all. It doesn’t matter so much what I say, or if it is accurate Spanish, as it is, it’s because the lady simply refuses to believe that I do not want meat. She calls two more waitresses over to help her decipher my request before she fulfils it.

 I look down at my blue flipflops, given to me selflessly by a wonderful girl named Erica, at hostel in Quito when I lost mine.

 We are about to embark on my second bus of the last 12 hours, to Salento. I am equipped with a box of cask red wine, and an oversized avocado, when I arrive back at the hostel, and Angel looks at me quizzically before shaking his head and guiding us to the bus station.

 Shay and I get pretty drunk on the bus to Salento. It takes much longer than the allotted time, which is not at all surprising.

We find Rico’s hotel as the sun is setting over this mountain town. Salento is renowned for its coffee plantations, and trees that look like something out of Doctor Suess that you have to hike to get to.

 The reunion is hysterical. Rico has been traveling with the couple from the hostel in Montanita, Kahn and Lizzy. His brother has met them in Salento as well, and is planning on traveling further along with him. They are all staying in a little inn right near the main square of the town. We get stoned and a little drunk; Rico and his brother teach us what they’ve learned about Salsa dancing after a meal that we cook in an actual kitchen like a makeshift family. Kahn carries spices with him wherever he goes, and Rico has been on an admirable health kick since the days of Mancora Madness. He hasn’t even been snorting coke in three weeks.

 I go hiking by myself to see the Doctor Seuss trees the next day. Rico and his crew had other travel plans, and I was meeting Fat in Medellin the next day, not having the funds to stand on ceremony in lovely Salento.

 I catch a truck out to the hiking trail, and make my way upwards, listening to my music, crossing small waterfalls in wellingtons. The trail is muddy at times but I keep hiking in virtuous ascension, grooving to my music and sometimes running up hills. It’s so freeing to hike by yourself. There is no one to ask questions or consult maps or slow down the team, just you and your own mind, pulsing in music and nature. Of course, four hours in,  realise I have become well and truly lost, and that the trees have not come up along the horizon. I haven’t brought any food with me as the hike is supposed to be three hours the whole way round, but I continue on in dwindling hope that I’ll find the route.

Well into the mountains, I become dizzy with hunger. I can feel my blood sugar crashing as my eyes keep drifting out of focus. I had a delicious coffee for breakfast but I haven’t had anything since, and I can feel it.

 I stop for a moment, bent over a tree to try to regain some momentum.

“Are you okay?” the voice of an old man feels like a mirage. I look up to find a sprightly old South African and  his newfound German friend, who have both befallen the same fate as I have.

 They give me dulce de leche, a kind of gooey caramel that is used for breakfast items. The sugar immediately lifts my mood and I’m propelled forward by their kindness. They have found themselves happily lost, in great conversation with each other, and amble along at a pace I don’t enjoy. I join them for an hour, and then say my goodbyes, feeling my urge for hunger bouncing angrily back. I run the last bit downhill and into the town. I don’t find the trees, and I narrowly miss the van leaving for Salento square, meaning I have to wait for an hour until the next one comes. This means that the old man and his friend meet me again and I embarrassedly sit with them and wait for the next truck, having made no progress at all by running.

 Dogs surround me in the town square on our last night together. I wonder if this is just the shortened version of life,  this type of travel. People moving briefly in and out of your life, some of them walk with you for a while, with great affection.

Affection comes from the latin word “afficere”, which means, to influence. To influence meaning, the capacity to have an effect on the character, behaviour or development of something. It’s interesting to think that each person who touches us, when we say hello or goodbye, and we let go willingly, or even unwillingly, has an affect on our future. The person that become is a testament to the hands that have held us, and the hands that have rejected us. I think about human connection when I look over at Shay and Angel and Rico, who have been here on this journey with me more frequently than anyone else, and I wonder. What person would I have become had I not run into them? How would my future self have developed if their laughs and their stories had not overlapped with mine?

[ladycapuletwrites]

End of the Road (need to edit)

We arrive at Latacunga late at night and check into a hostel where we are ushered into a strange cavity of a room with two beds on the top floor and two beds on the bottom. It’s cold, and there’s no wifi. The purpose of stopping here is to leave our bags so on our trek we are only taking our tiny backpacks. We have a five day hike ahead of us, and though I’m tired and have my period, Ryan wants to spend one more time going over the route that we’ve chosen to self orchestrate. My patience is thin and I speak in small barks, I have no input except negativity. We are about to enter the top of a crater lake tomorrow, and trek to the bottom before strutting right back up to the top, and around the it’s lip.

After we go through one more run through of the plan, we all pack only our essentials into our day packs, and lay our backpacks against the door in a solemn line, waiting to be stored in the morning.

Something has bitten Ryan on the face when we wake up, and half his eye is so swollen that it looks like he’s suffering from sort of deformity. He can’t eat breakfast, and we drag ourselves to the bus in a haze, trying to get him to put some spray and sunscreen on, both of which he refuses.

The bus drops us at a scorching hot stretch of land dotted with tourist shops and banana grilling vendors.

We set off, down into the canyon, toward the blue of the lake. Blue isn’t technically correct, it’s more aquamarine, still and mercilessly still. We stop on the way down to take approximately eight hundred photos, and I reapply sunscreen in the uncomfortable heat. It feels like we are trekking The Colca Canyon again.

The way up is brutal, and from there we still have six more hours to hike to get to the nearest town. It is about then, that I realise the magnitude of the few days we are about to take on. We continue to stumble along the craggy lip of the crater, around its blue rim, and I feel like we’re in a Latin American version of the sound of music. That scene at the end when the nun is dubbed over singing, “climb every mountain”.

We stop to take topless photos. We are off the common tourist track, and there are only a couple of Quechuan ladies navigating the crater like adept mountain goats.

We descend the crater into the Andean hills.

It’s a couple of hours before we find a small town where the only shop is next to a basketball court and it has only a couple of items available. We get warm beers and lie down to watch the townsfolk playing basketball and eyeing us surreptitiously as we fall asleep on the grass. An alarm bings and we begin to walk again, up and down hills, before we wander into the mountain town we are staying at.

I am so exhausted that I fall asleep until dinner time, and go straight back to bed afterward.

We set off in the morning for more of the same, through the beautiful scenery. There are grassy hills and wild nature, cows and horses and dirt and crags. At some point I realise that the only way to get through it for me is to blast all my favourite music from my speaker, which I attach to the top of my bag, blasting through nature obnoxiously as I skip and run pant my way through.

On the second day, I realise that I only have about one more day in me. I am feeling particularly antisocial and I am not bringing good vibes to the group.

By the third day, I’ve decided to cut off from the others, who are headed to a volcano after Latacunga. I reach out over the weak wifi signal in the middle of the mountain to find out where Ángel and Shay are.

They are a couple of towns over, in Colombia, about to meet up with Rico in Salento.

A few buses and another border crossing, and I’ll be out of Ecuador.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Goodbyes and  a Bridge

I’ve never been white water rafting before. We are in a bus, very early in the morning. Quite a large crew from our hostel has joined- enough to fill up two rafts. There is an American couple from Wyoming, and the guy is a rafting instructor, so he hires one out at a cheaper rate in conjunction to ours. James is in a great mood, having already been rafting many times before.

This was Shays birthday request, so we’ve all accompanied her in the wee hours, and are suited up and ready to row.

Despite my initial reservations and lack of coordination, james makes the morning incredibly fun. He is cracking jokes and we are yelling at the top of our voices. I misunderstand the instructor at one point and push Shay out of the boat. James immediately pushes me out of the boat after her, and then jumps in after me to save us both. We end up winning out of the four rafts, and we arrive at the end, drenched and happy, like a gang of golden retrievers.

Our bus stops by a sugar cane mill, which makes a very strange type of liquor. I think it’s strange before I take a shot of it, and then spend the next twenty minutes trying not to vomit up the insanely strong moonshine.

Back at james’ hostel, we fuck for the rest of the night, as it’s the last time we’re likely to see each other for a while. I am considering coming back to Montanita, but that would be going backwards.

In the morning there are no sweet nothings, I just wake up and he’s watching me sleep. He smiles. I bask in the sweetness of the moment. And we part with a better embrace than our last, and I’m filled with a kind of gratitude that he came back to visit.

I jump on Ryan before he has a chance to torn around, screaming into his hair. Ewelina can see me, and she begins to laugh. It’s late morning and I’ve just started walking back from james’ room. I’ve spotted them traipsing with their backpacks towards The Great. We barrel into the common room and meet Shay and the rest of the amassed crew.

We get wasted and climb on top of a vending stall that night. I vaguely remember screaming at the top of my lungs and wake up with a throat that feels like razor blades. Luckily there is a video of me leading the pack in screaming the Myrmidons speech from Troy.

Ryan and I head to the swing again, as he’s never been, and it was foggy last time. We become so obsessed with emulating the photo that we get a dead ringer. The photo we take of me and the painting on my wall are now essentially the same. In years to come, my mother will say this is one of the proudest things she knows about me, but can never pinpoint exactly why.

It’s wrapping up in Banos, and everyone is leaving. I have to make a choice about where I’m headed next. I don’t have a lot of money. Shay is moving on with her two friends, and Izzy. I still haven’t seen Mateo yet, and he’s leaving tomorrow, so I visit him at his hostel. We share a joint, and laugh about Mancora, and that time he took acid and worked the bar all night. I remember being midway through a conversation with someone that night and realising halfway through that I was too high to talk properly.

In the afternoon, Ryan, Ewelina and I go to jump off a bridge. The San Francisco Bridge stands imposingly in front of us, and Ryan and I get a quick run through of how to not break our backs falling with a rope attached around our middle.

I go first, as I am scared, but Ryan is terrified. There is wind blowing towards us, and we’re ushered to a platform that is only big enough for our feet to fit on and no farther.

Someone grips my ankles.

There is a count to three.

At three, I dive forward, or am pushed, I’m not sure. The hands on my ankles flip my shins so that as the wind hits me in my face, I topple forward in a somersault position.

 They say that adrenalin seeking behaviours are largely hereditary. It’s the same kind of internal seeking that exposes one to a higher risk of drug seeking behaviors and addiction.

In early humans, adrenalin seeking would have been incredibly useful. It’s the impetus for discovery. The welcoming of the fight or flight. The oncoming rush.

I think about a lot of my personality as an ongoing instinct for knowledge, both external and internal. We do not discover, if we don’t take risks, if we don’t explore.

I think it says a lot more than a thirty second rush as to why as soon as I had fallen over that bridge, spun up the other side like a rag doll, was lowered and hooked like a piece of wool with a croquet needle to the ground, as to why I went straight back up there and wanted to do it again.

The wind has picked up by the time Ryan has done his first terrifying jump over the rapids, experiencing the sensation of freefall and the vision of the rapids and rocks coming towards you as your waste braces and you swing upward.

“I’ll give you cheaper price, if you go backwards” says the man holding the harness, as I look over into the steep cravass of natural death traps.

“You mean, backflip?”

He nods, solemnly, and then smiles.

I let him strap me in backwards and I ask a fellow who’s been watching to film a video.

There is something even more terrifying then jumping toward your death face forwards. As I backflip, he pulls my calves forward so I swing against the wind. As a natural response, my eyes snap open, and I witness everything in slow motion. I hadn’t even noticed I was closing my eyes for most of the last jump: just a picture of the bottom in my minds’ eye, not a rolling, terrifying descent. I’m silent and in awe watching the fall from outside of myself, until I feel the rope snap in tension around my middle. I let out a small cry for joy, and then as I swing up like some glorious angel, I let out a long wail of pure happiness. Even as I am walking back up the hill to the bridge, I think about how this will stay with me, and how lucky I am to risk my life regularly just to remind myself that I’m alive.

 Ryan and Ewelina tell me their plan on the way home. They are going with Sophie, a German girl, to do something called “The Quilotoa Loop”, that I’ve never heard of before. Apparently it’s a five day hike through the Andean hills, a volcano and crater lake. Along the way there are tiny towns and communities. Ryan is running low on money too, so his plan is to hike it without a guide ourselves, and make our way forward to Colombia from there.

We are back at the hostel when I make up my mind. I pack my things into my bag and buy a glass of wine. I sit down at the table with all my wandering friends.

I look over at Ryan and Ewelina, who are moving down the bench for Sophie.

“I’m in.” I say, to no one in particular. Ryan raises his glass, and pulls out a map from his pocket.

“So, the Pirates of Mancora depart for their next adventure. Let’s go find some treasure!”

[ladycapuletwrites]

Swing

“Excuse me?”.

I turn to see a small blonde English girl wandering up the street towards me. Her backpack looks like it’s about to topple her.

“Uh.. this might sound strange, but I’m just wondering if you know of any good hostels around here? It’s just, I.. I’ve never traveled by myself before and I’ve just been working in this little village where I’ve been teaching and I haven’t really been alone and I just got off the bus and I don’t know what I’m doing”. She says all this in rapid fire quick succession, and I can see that she’s terribly embarrassed.

“I’m Sarah, you’ve come to the right place” I smile broadly, and hold my hand out to her. Her name is Izzy.

I take her back to the hostel I’m staying at and buy a glass of red wine. We check her into a room and I tell her about all the impending mates that are traveling here to meet me.

She’s worried about making friends, so I invite her out to Shays birthday celebrations and our white water rafting the next day.

Shay arrives with her best friend Maya and a guy called Jude, who makes fast friends with Izzy. He wants to shave for tonight so I lend him my lady clipper. He accepts graciously after I clean it extensively.

James arrives in the afternoon, and I go to meet him at his hotel room. I’m a little drunk at this point and let him film a slo-mo of me in a very compromising position. It feels good to have his hands on me again. We fuck a couple of times and then decide to head back to the Great, where I do Shays make up and Angel appears right as I finish her lipstick.

He stares at her. “What have you done to your face?” Later, he tells me he thinks she looks like a hooker. He doesn’t like make up on women. I ask him what he thinks when I wear it. He says the same thing: “you look stupid, it’s weird. Why you are putting all these colours on your face. It’s weird man, so weird” and then he laughs that same stoned laugh I missed so much. I give him a hug.

“How was Galapagos?”

“Oh man, it was so cool. I went diving every day and I saw sharks and turtles and all sorts of epic shit! I spent like a grand getting there but it was worth it man! Yeah!” He goes on to show me photos and videos of murky wildlife.

We head to a karaoke bar and get absolutely shit faced and sing songs. Drinking weird blue overpriced cocktails, sitting around smoking cigarettes. We yell at each other over the music until somehow James and I end up on the street arguing. Angel is looking over at me, I head back to the alley of bars we switched to. I suddenly realise I don’t have my phone. I’m so drunk i have no idea where we’ve been, and James goes on a mission with me to find it, although by this point I’m being a total drunk bitch to him.

I wake up in bed next to him and immediately start apologising, starting with my mouth moving slowly down to his cock.

After he finishes and I offer to run down and grab coffee, he stops me and asks, “are you a little bit bipolar or something?”. The question smacks me in the face.

“No, I’m not, I just realise that I was a total cunt to you last night and I’m trying to apologise for it”

“Oh, so you remember insulting me and storming off into a dangerous street where I followed you because I couldn’t leave you to possibly get hurt and then you said that I wouldn’t understand anything because I wasn’t as smart as you?”

My insides clench.

“Something like that”, I say, shame rising up to meet me as I swing my feet over the bed.

“Nah, I’m good. But thanks”, he says, and we lie in silence for a while until I get up to leave.

“I’m going to go back to my room for a bit, have a shower and maybe a nap. Then I’m going to look for my phone.”, I say, and kiss him quickly before I slink out. At this point I’m enveloped in a cold sweat and feeling completely shit about myself.

I head back to The Great, and have a huge argument with the girl at the front counter. I forget immediately what it was about, and go to have a nap.

On the way, Angel sees me. “Hey man, you were such a fucking bitch to James last night man, wow. I’ve never seen you like that. I can’t believe he followed you to make sure you were okay. I would have left you to get fucked over” he says.

“You totally wouldn’t.”

“No, of course I wouldn’t. But you should say sorry. He was a good dude last night.”

I think about James in a different light on the way up the stairs. I think the arrogance I saw in him when we first met was merely a mirror of my own shortcomings.

When I wake up later, I feel terrible about what I said to the girl at the counter, and go down to apologise to her. She isn’t working, but I write a note and the guy at the counter cheekily tells me that she thought I was a massive bitch and he’d pass the message on.

I deserved that, to be fair. I look out the window and James is wandering down the lane. “Let’s get your phone then?”

As we walk out, he hops into a little 4x4 roadster that he’s hired.

“Surprise”, he says. I am Jacks roiling unworthiness.

We get in and scale all the bars from the night before, and then James realises that we stopped at a chicken shop when we were fuck eyed, and were too drunk to eat properly.

In a strange twist of fate, the owner has hidden the phone so that no one else on the staff can steal it, and I gladly give him all the money in my wallet upon its return. The fact that I found my phone after losing in Ecuador is astronomically rare. So rare in fact, that I’ve never heard a story like it since.

I kiss James and thank him, apologising profusely about my shitty behaviour, and we hop in the car to drive into the Jurassic mountains.

The car has no top, other than some black bars, so I feel a rush when he puts his hand down the front of my pants. I have again worn tights, so he works his way down with one hand on the wheel, and the scenery of the mountains rushing by us. The sun is just in the right spot in the sky; behind us, illuminating the ashphalt. I’m just about to cum when we swerve left to miss a truck. I busy myself with the cords and Velcro on the shorts he’s wearing, but I’m in the wrong position to do anything once I get them undone except limply jerk him off.

We head into the mist, higher and higher, until we reach the place where The Swing at the Edge of the World is. The inspiration, I realise, for the entire trip. I pull my hand out of james’ pants as another car drives by. Look up towards the sign saying to turn left for La Casa Del Arbor.

Oisin.

As the clouds start to make the car cold and we head farther into foggy territory, I think back on what lead me to this place, to this continent.

I think of his hands and his insatiable mouth. I think of the way he would disappear, even when we were in the same room. The way he changed the colour of the lights in his room for a month to see what hue made him feel different things. He wouldn’t call me for three days and I’d worry, uber to his house and find him painting a sculpture he’d made, completely manic. “Look, I’m painting the monkey from Monkey Magic. I sculpted him first out of wood I found at a scrap yard”, he would say. Time didn’t really have a meaning to him. I was dangerously in love with him from about two weeks in.

Red wine soaked mouth, I was just back from a festival. He came to my house, an apartment in the city. Showed me a ted talk by Esther Perel, a Belgian psychotherapist exploring the relationship between desire and comfort.

I got pretty drunk and in the morning I took a photo of him through the vacant space in my bookshelf. It shot in black and white, and when I looked at it, I think that was when I started falling in love with him, but I had no idea until months later. I hadn’t listened when he said that another woman had been the love of his life, that he wasn’t ready for someone else, that he could never be in love with me. I didn’t listen to any of it. I just stared at him whilst he was sleeping and I was drunk on tequila and little bit stoned and wondered how I got so lucky to be next to him.

He was my first foray into polyamory. It didn’t go well. Not for the reasons you might think. He was a very bad communicator. He would forget to text for a week when he got caught up in an experimental project or disappeared on a road trip with some person he’d met at a bar. I never knew what security in that relationship was. Esther Perel says that desire happens from a distance, and I know exactly what she means. I projected all my love onto him and he wasn’t there to reject it so it stayed and deluded me until I opened my laptop, a couple of weeks after he’d called it off and I’d arrived at his house wasted while his friends were over. He sent me home in the morning and told me not to call him again. He’d left his email open on my computer, I couldn’t help myself. The first one was from a girl who had recorded them fucking, and sent it to him as a sound bite. I won’t go into the rest.

I think about how fascinated I was by him and how many pieces of writing I’d written about him so far. How many times I’d drank at him, about him, to him.

I’d stared at the painting he’d given me for my birthday. He strapped it to the back of his motorbike with me on it, and we’d ambled back to my house.

It had a piece of paper attached to the back, explaining that it was. “The Swing at the Edge of the World”, in Ecuador. I looked at the painting for a year and had many more relationships and fuck buddies and pretty girls and pretty boys in my bed. I still thought of him every time I looked at it before I got sick of myself. And one day, when I was stoned, Allan called me.

“I’m going to South America with Lucy”.

He explained further that he was leaving in a few months to join her there.

I had been reading The Celestine Prophecy, based in Peru. It had been given to me by a work mate named Darko. I’d bought it in Thailand after I had experienced such intense synchronicity that a new friend had told me to buy it, and I’d promptly walked into a second hand bookstore in Khao San and declared that I would find it within five minutes. I did, but I discovered that when I got home, it was the complimentary edition, to the original. Darko had given me the correct copy a year later, after I’d forgotten about it. Inscribed on the first page, was a simple note. “Follow the signs.” It said.

It was lying on my bed, and I opened the book, reading the words.

I looked up at the painting on the wall.

“Are you going to Ecuador by any chance? Or Peru?” I asked.

“Yeah, both.” Allan replied.

“What month?”

“August”

“Do you mind if I meet you there?”

And that’s how it had started, with a book and a painting and an exhaustion borne from the unhealed parts of my heart. I had dreamed about this moment and then forgotten about it in the last couple of months, my heart had mended and broken in many different ways by now, it was another piece in the puzzle. A finality of sorts.

It makes sense that it’s foggy on the way up, the chills up my spine seem like they have a place, regardless of the weather.

James puts his hand on my knee.

“Let’s get this fucking photo then, hey?” He says.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Getting There

Banos looks like Jurassic Park.

We have rented bikes for the day, having trekked down to one of the many bicycle loan shops. I meet a Chilean man and a Russian woman in the breakfast hall of Great Hostel, over the obligatory free toast with jam and bananas that seems to be the standard additional item on your room charge all over Latin America.

We are basking in the scenery and ambling downhill towards the waterfall we’re visiting today; Pailon del Diablo- “The Devil’s Cauldron”.

The cobbled stones give way to huge freeways and trucks that you swerve into side alleys to avoid, and over the low barrier, a sheer drop, stretching into green mountains that look close and far away at the same time. I busy myself on the bike by following the others at a slight distance, loudly singing the bars from the Jurassic Park theme song.

The waterfall is packed with tourists, lined up and squeezed into the jutted crevices of the waterfall. At the viewing platform, a family asks me to be in their photo. They appear to think I’m some sort of celebrity, and the only thing I notice is that they all seem to have a case of dandruff that I originally think is just water spray, that definitely isn’t.

Anna, the Russian girl, points into the foamy rocks at the bottom of the raging waterfall. Bobbing up and down in the spit, is the bloated body of a dead piglet. It looks like it’s been there for a little while, it’s skin a bluish colour, limp and swollen like a balloon. I wonder how the fuck it got down there, tens of metres below, and wonder if it was some sort of deranged sacrifice. I mean, it is called the Devils Cauldron. Maybe there’s more nefarious connotations.

Disgusted, I grab a lollipop at the small deli that seems wedged into the wall, and start to wander to the steps towards the route home. We are meant to visit another waterfall, but I am gearing up to go back to the hostel and get blotto on red wine, and James has mentioned a coffee shop in Banos that the makes wanky Starbucks style coffee that I’m fond of.

After a small negotiation, Anna and Juan end up agreeing to ride back with me, and we begin our ride back. We get stopped on the side of the road by a few trucks asking if we need a lift, but we choose to continue on, despite their insistence that we don’t want to ride back.

In a cruel twist of fate, it appears that we really don’t actually want to ride back home, and it takes us nearly two hours riding uphill on our pushbikes, extremely slowly, to get back to the hostel. We hadn’t realised that the entire road here was downhill.

On the way through our gruelling trek back, we see what looks like an abandoned Ferris wheel, only it’s still moving, so we dump our bikes nearby and jump on it, spinning around on this ridiculous anomaly in the middle of the lush greenery surrounding us. It is bizarre, feeling the air through the carnival ride, the flashing of paint as we dip and ride around in circles, in a wilderness of winding roads and foliage. In the distance, we notice a man running towards us, with his pants slightly undone, wiping his face. We take it as our cue to leave.

I haven’t eaten anything since the bananas at breakfast. The others stop to get pig on a spit but after the carnage in the waterfall I don’t feel like eating meat products for the next seventeen years, so I just sit idly while I pretend to understand the rapid fire Spanish Juan and the barbecue lady are talking. I nod like one of those money cats every time they laugh at something.

This proves to be a rather large error in judgement when, after riding for an hour and a half, I’m so hungry I want to vomit up my stomach lining, and I’m dehydrated to the point of dizziness. Juan speeds on ahead of us, as we are a few kilometres out from the hostel, whilst Anna sits patiently with me out the front of a little shop. All I can find is corn chips, but I sit on the sidewalk with an economy sized bag, and my bike leaning on my legs, and eat half a bag in about thirteen seconds. We traverse further on, return our bikes, and walk our exhausted selves home.

My plans for a wild night dissipate as I spot my bed in my dorm, and while I promise to only have a nap, I wake up at 7am the next day with a throbbing headache, and a sore throat from sleeping exactly as I had fallen.

My phone has been popular in my sleep.

The first message, from Shay. “Yay! I’ll be there today, where are you staying?” I respond that I’m staying at Great Hostel. Mateo is also coming today, staying with a friend a little outside of town. Ryan and Ewelina are one town away. And Angel, who has secretly messaged me, asking me to keep it quiet that he’s coming to surprise Shay on her birthday tomorrow.

I scroll to the last message, it’s from James.

“Hey, you still in Banos? I changed my mind. Holiday would do me good”.

I roll out of bed to find that coffee shop, my thighs suddenly feel very hot at the thought of James between them.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Buses

I’ve never given a blow job on a bus before. There are two sleeping children in the isle and an unsuspecting family of five sitting in close proximity, who definitely might have seen my head swaddled in my favourite cardigan. This has doubled as a security blanket, keeping prying eyes from my bobbing head. He warns me when he’s about to come, and I take my face away, realising, as he repeats himself, that there is nowhere for it to go. We are on a public bus driving through regional Ecuador, I’m hung over enough to think that this was a good idea, and James has wrested with my tights for long enough that he knows they are very hard to get into, and has successfully navigated my orgasm anyway.

After he zips up, I can see he’s already having second thoughts about his decision. It’s as if the release has brought him a raft of clarity not present before.

“I can’t just leave my business and go on a holiday without telling her though, can I?” He says, in answer to a question I didn’t ask.

When he said he was coming with me this morning I was as entirely surprised as he seems now. I’m headed to Banos, to chase down Shay, and I’ve heard that Mateo is already there, too.

That and, my swing is there. But I’ll tell that story another time.

James grabbed his bag when we finally found each other at the bar, and said he’d come along, because he needed to think about what he wanted to do next. I was happy for him to join me, but also feeling the effects of the seemingly excessive amount of red wine he, Anna and I had plowed through before.

She has so far denied any memory of the night before, and I have no idea if he’s telling the truth about their relationship, so it’s my cue to move on up to my mission in this fertile part of the world.

His hand rests on my inner thigh and the warmth of it keeps sending rushes of abject desire through my sacrum. I am in the kind of hangover where I am insatiable; food, water, sleep, and sex, all seem like things I could make myself sick on, and I am going to attempt to gorge myself on all of them.

James on the other hand, has started to question his decision, and in the last two hours, has begun to fervently back peddle, even though I tell him he’s more than welcome to go back when we get back to Guayaquil.

He says he might have to turn back when he gets there, as he needs to “sort out what happened”, and I try to be encouraging with his dilemma.

“I feel like I’m going to puke, so I think I’m going to stay here too.” I agree, as James has just realised he can’t logistically get back to Montanita tonight, and I can’t be bothered travelling another length as long as the last bus, which for the reason we’ll have to file under “South America”, has taken us an exceedingly long time to get to Guayaquil.

He doesn’t seem particularly sure about me staying with him but he books us a room in a hotel anyway, and when we get there I am the most satisfied person in the world to have air conditioning for the first time that I can remember. The shower feels like I’ve been blessed by the hygiene goddess, and after ward, I drape myself lazily over the bed, feeling much better than I have all day.

James comes out of the bathroom dripping slightly, and arches over me on the bed, grabbing the back of my leg playfully, and then not so playfully. It’s been a long time since I had sex sober and the shock coursing through every nerve ending makes my breath ragged.

I like how he takes control of me and my fingers arch around his shoulders. A woman explained types of sex to me once as elements; it was a chakral tantric class I once took with an ex I’m still not over.

I remember her talking about the Root chakra, Muladhara. She described the sexual style as primal, animalistic needs. His hand grips hard at my chest. I can feel his fingers creating bruises on my collarbone as he archs my legs upwards, spits on his fingers, digs his nails into me.

My headache is dissipated by the confusion of pleasure mixed with pain, and at the end, we lay panting beside each other, the cool of the air con leaving a tingling sensation.

“I’m fucking starving.” I say, the lights are those super bright ceiling lights that remind me that I’m hung over. I didn’t notice them five minutes ago.

We head to a strange Chinese restaurant down a few streets from the hotel. The suburbs we’re in don’t look particularly wealthy, so it’s bizarre that this big neon building exists. It sticks out at us as we walk toward it.

We order too much food and too many diet cokes and head back to the hotel, exhausted.

In the morning, back at the bus stop, he gives me a quick peck on the cheek as we both walk in opposite directions to our bus station.

“thanks for the hotel”, I say, and I lug my bags with me toward the big yellow barrier. It’s only then, with my bags, that I realise I’m in the same bus station I was in coming to Montanita. The same overwhelming heaviness of having so many bags reminds me.

I am glad that I’m not feeling like I was the last time I was here. I purchase a bag of weird crisp things and squeeze myself on the next bus onward. Banos, a picture of a swing I had on my wall for two years, given to me by that ex. ‘I’m going to make that memory mine now’, I think, and I rest my head on the window pane, preparing for the next adventure.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Kamala

I walk along the shore line, singing to the waves. I have an echo of John Mayer and missy Higgins floating around my head, ready to be belted out.

The beach is nearly empty. It appears that after five pm, everyone in montanita goes back to their homes and hostels to prepare for the night and festivities.

Five pm seems the time when things feel empty, but apprehensive. There is a waiting.

James is back at the hostel, we have barely spoken, but he’s invited me to the nearby restaurant and home of his friend, who besides being an incredibly rich man, is an absolute darling. Anna, his business partner, is to join us.

She approached me in the morning, and we’d had a very enlightened conversation about alcohol and how we really needed to stop drinking, but we couldn’t. It seemed like a merry go round for her, and I understood, because it was an endless cycle of indulgence and self hatred for me too.

It was past five pm though, and the discussions of the morning had faded away with the tide I was singing to. I was ready for a wine.

We started on the red, and a few glasses in I was ready to go. I didn’t know what I was ready for, but I knew I was ready. This is the way it always was with alcohol for me. For a lot of people.

James took Anna and I on the back of his motorbike to his friends’ house. We sat, drinking very expensive wine that was almost definitely wasted on me. I was already drunk, and all I could think about was getting more. When I look back, I can’t remember the conversation at all. The only frequency I was tuned into was how much more I could drink without being obvious. Before long, I was blackout. I vaguely remember driving home, three of us on the motorbike, swaying in the wind. I remember stopping on the street to pose for some photos, and then my memory jumps to the distinct taste of Anna between her legs, threesome most likely suggested by myself, and James riding me from behind. It all had happened so fast, or maybe it didn’t, but I didn’t remember it, I was just there, being fucked from behind whilst going down on a girl I’d only earlier in the day been discussing favourite novels and alcohol addiction with.

Somewhere along the interim, Anna got up suddenly. I think she was coming to, out of blackout I mean.

She got out of the bed suddenly and put on her clothes. “What the fuck, James, what the fuck?!” She howled, both of us were pushed up against the headboard, her anger baring down on us. “For fucks sake James, can’t you see that I’m in love with you?! I’ve been in love with you for a year! You can’t even, you can’t even, you don’t even fucking care!” Her tone was striking into the moody darkness of the night. She was leaning into the door frame, crying.

“Jesus Anna what the hell are you talking about?” James said, getting off the bed, his cock waving around half bar, grabbing a nearby towel to cover it.

“No! Fuck you! Fuck you both” and Anna stumbled out of the door, slamming it behind her. James locked it behind her.

He sat down on the bed. “What the fuck?” he muttered. “Sorry about that.”

“Had you guys been sleeping together or something?” I asked.

“No! Well I mean, yeah I slept with her twice, I think, maybe three times. Like four months ago. She’s never mentioned it”

I know that people can be wilfully ignorant when they don’t want to think about the consequences of their actions.

“Huh. Should you go follow her?” I suggested.

“Nah, she’s got her own room, she’ll just go to sleep and probably not remember it in the morning.”

“Has this happened before, then?” I asked.

“No, as I said she never said anything.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him, but in the spirit of ignorance, I said, “wanna fuck?”.

“Hell yeah, I do” James said, moving closer to me and gripping my thigh.

“I most certainly do”.

It had been ten minutes of some of the best intoxicated sex I’d had on that trip. We were vibing, he was strong, and big, and just rough enough to surrender to.

We heard a thudding on the veranda, and then a banging on the door. Anna started screaming as she turned the door handle and it wouldn’t move. “WHAT THE FUCK JAMES YOU FUCKING BASTARD! I JUST TOLD YOU I LOVED YOU AND YOU LOCK ME OUT YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE WHAT THE FUCK?!”

She was slur-yelling, and bashing on the door loud enough to wake up the whole hostel. The whole hostel that they both owned. It was almost comical.

“Anna, fucking go to bed okay?!” James yelled over his shoulder, still inside me. But she kept banging and he got up, and opened the door. She immediately tried to barge inside, and he caught her and pushed her outside.

“Anna, go to bed”

“But I love you” she whined.

“Go to bed Anna we’ll talk in the morning”

“James why won’t you talk to me?”

I was ready to leave but there was only one door and they were standing in it.

A few more ushers of Anna to bed and James had managed to get her to leave.

He locked the door again, and got back into bed.

“Uh, that was intense” I said.

“Yeah”

We lay in silence next to each other for a few minutes.

He lent over and felt my breast. There was a bone deep exhilaration that began and all the sudden we were starting again. I was on top of him, and -

The thumping resumed. Anna was back, crying and whinnying like a horse this time, at the door, drunker than before, she must have gone to the hostel bar and poured herself a shot, and she was banging intermittently between crying so hard she was giving herself the hiccups.

I rolled off James.

“Oh my god, what is happening?” I said.

James laughed. “I don’t fucking know” it was so strange that it was funny, but funny in the way that it was traumatising for everyone involved and you couldn’t do anything but laugh in shock.

James put some pants on, and went out the front, to talk to Anna. I heard him calming her in whispers, presumably coaxing her back to her room. I put my clothes on, and rolled over to sleep.

He came back sometime later, and slid into bed, but he knew better than to try again. We were ready for bed.

Both of us drifted off to sleep. A little while later, the banging resumed. No noise, just a loud crack at the window.

“Anna, WHAT THE FUCK” shouted James, running to the window.

Although it wasn’t Anna. It was the weirdest shit I’ve ever seen in my life. A black stray cat, hungry as anything, was trying to get into james’ room. It had taken a run at the window, and was spread out like a starfish across the window. As he lifted the curtain in the room it let out a low meow, like a groan.

I was sitting up in bed at this point.

“What the fuck is going on?” I said, and we both burst into laughter. We were so shocked by this cat that looked practically high hanging off the window frame that we laughed until our stomachs hurt. We laughed until we cried, and eventually, we fell asleep.

When I finally left, in the first light of day, to go back to my room, I creep out the front door. Anna is nowhere to be seen. And on the veranda, the tiny black cat, curled into a ball, asleep.

A strange omen; the only proof of the night before.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Exodus

“Haha, you can’t remember, can you?” Angel says, after I ask what happened last night.

I’ve woken up surprisingly, in my own bed.

Bruno turns over in bed. “Hello beautiful drunk princess”.

He’s in bed with the Canadian girl again, who, upon realising she’s in bed with him, puts her too back on and leaves the cabin.

“She’s weird man. She thinks that anal sex isn’t cheating on her boyfriend”.

Angel and I start to chuckle.

“I mean, I did it still, cos I’m polite”, he says, pulling out a his crumpled packet of cigarettes.

I remember that we’re making ceviche today, and groan. Louis has been trying to make me work at the hostel. The problem is that he wants me to make beds and try to spruik guests and all I want to do is relax. I don’t know how to say no to him though, he’s very insistent. He’s picked my brain about cheap cocktails he can make for cocktail hour, and my bar knowledge has provided me a couple of nights on the house. Or should I say, hostel.

He’s an ex chef, and as we’ve woken up late, we wander out of our quarters into a military barracks, with a poncho clad and perennially stoned Louis barking marching orders to the general assembly. We take our places in the line of lime cutters.

“Sarah, can you make the beds in 204 today? He asks, and I agree, even though I don’t want to, and feel like throwing up. I walk into the building he’s directed me to, and start to disassemble the pillow cases. After hurting myself approximately eight hundred times attempting to smooth the beds over, I exhaustedly step out of the door, only to be ordered into the next room. I am starting to regret my lack of assertiveness when he asked me to work for my board.

When I step out of the third bedroom, I see Louis through the kitchen window, barking at a couple I stayed in Cusco with, Kann and Lizzy. Kann is possibly the most attractive person I’ve seen all trip, so I remember him. Louis yells at the ceiling, and then turns to me and mutters through the window, “I’m really not cut out for this hostel management business”, and he pulls a pipe out of his pocket to take a toke.

Rico wanders in just as the large trays of ceviche have been assembled, as if he’s sensed that dinner is served.

“So you’re staying with James tomorrow are ya?” He asks. “What?” I say, murkily sinking into the depths of my memory.

“You asked him last night if you could stay after we all leave”.

I realise that the boys are leaving tomorrow. Bruno is continuing his travels and catching a plane tomorrow, Angel is going to the Galapagos, and Sean is continuing up through Ecuador. They’ve been here longer than I have, and I should have remembered, but it hits me like a tonne of bricks that our party is breaking up for good tomorrow.

I stuff down some ceviche and chase it with a beer. No big parties tonight then, because they’re leaving at 6am. I sink back into my hammock, unsure of what the future holds. I feel like my security blanket has been ripped off me. So I drink another beer. And another, and another.

In the middle of the night, after my third blackout, I suddenly feel my insides churning. I make it just in time to sweat and pour my insides into the toilet. I have a waste bin at my chin, puking furiously, and my eyes cloud over from the endless stream of salt water exiting my pores. I stay in there for an hour, and when I come out, morning is beginning, and Louis is standing outside the toilet, holding a packet of gastro medication.

“You do not sound good, man”. He tells me he’s glad he has his own bathroom, and I try shakily to clean up my mess, using the detachable shower head to spray down the surfaces in the bathroom.

I finally make it back into my bed, and as I retreat into darkness, I feel a light touch on my face. Some murmured words. And then they’re gone.

All my Mancora madness, swallowed up in sick infinity, and when I wake, there is an emptiness that stays with me a long time.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Just a Filler

“It’s a weeeeeeeed brownie” says Angel, breaking off a bit of it into his hand and chewing it solemnly.

It’s mid afternoon and this is apparently what you do in Montanita. I spent the morning crawling into the boys beds and walking around the township. Surf town, off season. Everything costs a dollar. I was told that Ecuador wasn’t cheap but my brain hasn’t processed anything til now. I mean, it hasn’t processed anything in a while, truthfully.

Rico gingerly stepped into the hostel at around ten am. “I’m glad you’re okay”, he said with relief to my smiling face. He seemed to have been worried I’d kill the buzz. I’m determined not to.

He’s gone back to kamala to hang out with James, who part owns it. It’s a fair walk up the beach but we promise to visit it soon, and are going to catch up for a party later.

I roll the piece of brownie into a glutinous little ball. I attempt to offload it into my mouth, but part of it sticks to my hands. I lick my fingers clean, under Angels bemused gaze.

I relax in a hammock, which is the standard modus operandi in Ecuador, waiting for the bar to open. The beach is just visible over the hostel fence, grey and overcast. When the bar opens, I grab two large beers and choke them down, even though they’re slightly warm. Louis is wearing a large technicolor poncho, taking about the owner of the hostel, who appears to be a bit of a nutcase, but he’s on holiday, leaving the place to Louis after only a week of him staying there. The brownie starts to kick in so I attempt to offload some of the high by drinking two cocktails in quick succession.

“This is the second time we’ve been here, Sarah” I hear Angel over the music yelling, pointing at the burger vendor. “It’s FUCKING DELICIOUS” I shout, having sampled all the cocktails on the thriving beachside port. The vendors are squashed between droves of drunken humans, all here for the street party. There is loud music everywhere, and Angel has a protective arm around me, because I keep falling over. I buy another burger.

I come to and I’m naked except for my scarf, screeching around the hostel hammocks. What?

Angel is taking a photo of me.

“Sarah, go to fucking bed”.

“Thank you so, so much for looking after me!” I slur, falling into a wall.

“Sarah, lets get you into bed. You’re going to hurt yourself” Angel says, steering me toward the cabin.

I mutter something inaudible.

“You’re a mess”

“That’s why you take cocaine my friend, to stop you from being a big ol’ mess” I mutter, falling through the door. I can taste burger on the side of my mouth.

“Thanks for telling me what happened though” Angel says, hoisting me up into his bunk.

“Telling you what?”

The men and the tuk tuk flash through my mind. Although I don’t remember saying anything.

“Go to bed, Sarah”. Angel says, tucking me in and retreating across the room. I hang my head down in mock defeat.

“Where is Bruno?” I ask, or at least I think I ask but it appears that I’m yelling.

“Shut up, he’s just there” Angel says, pointing at the bottom bunk and the two blanket mountains formed in the middle.

I didn’t even remember Bruno being out with us let alone bringing a girl back.

“Bed.”

And I slump back into my bunk.

I wake in the morning and my head is a drum kit. I haven’t had a hangover without cocaine in so long I forgot what it feels like and I don’t like remembering.

“Oh man, you were so drunk last night!” I wanna say that one person said this but it was pretty much the only thing I heard all morning. I don’t remember getting to that point though. “I feel like shit. Anybody got painkillers? Xanax?”

“Hah, they don’t sell painkillers over the counter here.” Says Jesse, an American who is staying here in Montanita for a month.

“Fuck off” I hear myself say, but all I can feel is the throbbing in my temples and its perfectly kept rhythm pounding into my scull.

“We do have brownies though. Perfect for a day like today”. Rico has arrived and we are sitting around in a circle drinking louis’ coffee. I want to vomit.

“Brownies hey? Yeah, whatever. I’m in.” Anything to stop the freight train.

Louis gives me more coffee, and I make a fry up for the boys. I thank Angel for looking after me, smile sitting ever so slightly above the shame I feel. Rico arrives from Kamala, having walked from there, three kilometres up the beach.

“Good morning drunkie”, he says, smiling, and I start to feel my vertigo go. I look over at Angel, who is stupidly grinning, looking off in the opposite direction.

“S... strong” manage, as my mouth starts to dry up. Bruno saunters over, stoned as well, puts his headphones on, and sits there on a hammock chair with his sunglasses on and his head back. Rico tells us he ate his brownie half an hour ago.

We all slump back into the various chairs around the hostel. In the hours following, each one of us is nominated once to go to the bakery on the corner and purchase food for everyone. We come back with mini pizzas, and baked goods, and empanadas for everyone who needs it, which ultimately turns out to be the whole hostel, as we all munch down brownies, and get more delivered in the afternoon. A small man with a basket of “happy things” comes by in the afternoon, and we chow down more before all drifting intermittently off to sleep on random bits of furniture.

When I wake up, Rico is preparing to go back to his hostel, and it’s getting dark.

“Oh yeah, we’re going to James’ to watch a football game at 1am”, he says.

I have a flashback of the night the boys left, I was working at the bar, and James brought me back sushi from the restaurant they went to because I couldn’t come. I never really thanked him for it. I think I might have been high. I also thought he was a bit of a dick. Then again, he bought me food. And I didn’t say thank you, so I’m not sure I got the right person in that equation.

“I’ll be back later”, Rico says, as he wanders off. We all start drinking beers at 5pm, international happy hour.

Louis arrives in a cape and tells everyone that we are going to party hard tomorrow night, and in the afternoon we’ll make fresh ceviche.

Rico comes back in the afternoon, and I can tell he’s high. I go into our room and Bruno is racking himself up a line on a case inside the cabin with a blonde guy who I’ve never seen before. I turn down a line and sip my beer, feeling the alcohol washing over me like a tide. I realise I haven’t left the hostel all day.

“Let’s go to the beach!” I say, and the boys nod emphatically, eyes like dishpans.

It’s dark and the sound of all the beach parties are merging into one long baseline.

We sit on a small hill of sand and watch the waves.

Rico pulls out a tiny bag of coke and a flip mirror and racks himself a line. I look back at him, shading the mirror from the wind. I’ve got a problem man, I know it. I gotta stop this shit. I can’t just yet though. Viva la whatever, you know?

And I nod, because I know. And I take a sip of the beer I’ve smuggled onto the beach with me. I have a moment where I am just so glad I am back with these boys. I look over at Angel and Bruno, who are discussing something both of them find very amusing that they will inevitably forget midway through. I and grateful for their friendship.

We head to James’ at about 12, taking a cab and winding around a bunch of roads that make the beach walk seem like the better option. We arrive at Kamala, and are greeted by dogs. A puppy and her dad, cautiously wiggling. We enter into the dark bar and see the silhouette of James, trying to get the wifi to work well enough to stream the game. I ask for a drink. He tells me to pour myself one, so I pour five shots from the first bottle I see and hand them around.

There is a photo of all of us, standing at the bar, I suck back two more drinks, which are strong. I wander around the dark in the hostel, spotting a pool lit with moonlight, and the pathway to the beach. It looks like the perfect surf hostel, and for a moment, a new respect for James emerges. And then, I go blank.

[ladycapuletwrites]

The Road to Ecuador is Paved with Narcolepsy

I shuffle through the bus station and immigration in a haze. I’ve still not discovered the location of the Xanax, if there was any, and because I spent the whole day hibernating in the hammock or tripping out thinking the fan was talking to me, I forgot to think of any supplies I might need crossing the border.

I talk about this fan a lot. Let’s call him Jeff the fan. Now, a lot of you might be asking why, if the fan was always singing reggaeton to me, and sometimes even uttering full sentences, striking fear into the greatest depths of my heart, why I didn’t just, switch it off?

Firstly, Mancora is fucking hot and also most of the humans in the vicinity of the hotel are coming down or up from some sort of drug, so a fan is a nice addition to the oppressive depth of self loathing and warmth. Also, have you ever been stranded on an island? No, me neither, but I’m willing to bet that I would rather have a fucking fan called Jeff talking to me than the silence of my own, rapidly insane mind.

Given that leaving the safety of the hostel was a black line on a piece of paper, there probably wasn’t any point worrying about acquiring the Xanax, but as I was committed to my current psychosis, I kept going back to it like a recurring dream. Oh? Did I have some? Should I look? Shuffle through the bag another forty times. Repeat.

On the other side of the stamp desk I buy a bottle of water and a red jelly cup that has probably been sitting on the counter for the last 48 hours and scare whatever tiny whisp of spirit left out of myself when I drop the bottle of water outside the station. It hits a bin, making a loud clang, every eye on the platform in my direction, hair on my neck standing up, palms so slippery my jelly cup wobbles, which seems a paradox. The jelly, or the cup?

I ruminate through every possible situation, paranoid. An arrest. Maybe there is still a bag of coke in my backpack, maybe there’s a luggage checker, a sniffer dog come howling in the middle of the crowded platform, my hands roughly smacked behind my back, face toward the brick wall.

I console myself with checking again where I’m going and how I’m getting there.

I look at the details Angel has written on my phone. Get to Guayaquil, then get on a bus to Montanita. It’s two straight buses, but you buy the both tickets at once. It’s probably one of the easier routes through South America but my mind is a shuffling geriatric in a casino with no chips, thinking it’s in an ice cream parlour. I’m literally “cooked” as Rico would say.

As I hop back into my seat I hear the familiar bus music hitting the back of my eardrums, hoping it won’t last all night. It’s not reggaeton, which of course dominates ninety percent of South American radio, and really just sounds like three tracks stuck on a repeat loop. It’s some strange Antiquarian country yodeling.

My hope for a quiet night on bus is misplaced, not because of the all night shuffle of music and clanging and people and noise, but because I wake up in Guayaquil.

I get loudly shaken off the bus and handed both my bags in a caustic daze. The sun is making things so fucking bright, what the fuck. And my bags, oh my god these piece of shit bags how have I been carrying them around? I lug them into the interior of the bus station. It is huge. This, I did not expect. Also, I’m fucking starving. Where is my bus going to?

I look at all the vendors and escalators and people milling around with luggage on wheels and am overwhelmed by the culture shock of simply being alive after a twelve hour comedown sleep and I still feel like someone is holding my hair up like a marionette.

I opt to tempt my Spanish to my pallet, and ask a lady behind a counter. But the Spanish won’t come out, it’s like a mix between the Indonesian I learned when I was twelve and a Christian talking in tongues. I’m pulling out my ticket and pointing at it, and am quite literally developmentally delayed, practically mooing at her.

She takes pity on me and comes out from behind her desk and roughly drags me, one hand on my inner elbow, up an escalator, and points to a desk. Then continues to push my swaying behemoth self and bags and three week hangover to the woman behind the counter, gesturing and talking in such fast Spanish I’m sure she’s doing it on purpose so that she can explain that I’m also a complete moron without faculty.

I slump in a seat, and am told by a security guard that I can’t sleep here. I realise he’s said it in Spanish and I’ve understood. Then I get paranoid that I’ve misunderstood and that he’s really trying to arrest me and start to shrug my shoulders and open up the flaps of my bag. He shakes his head and wanders off. I swear to god I wouldn’t know if there was a bag of cocaine in my goddamn bag. I mean like would I? I would, Ive checked it forty times for Xanax. Best go for forty one.

The smell of food is so close I warble over to a vendor and order empanadas and sandwiches. I hand over my cash and the vendor slams it back at me.

Her eyes say “what the fuck is this?”. I realise my mistake. It’s Peruvian money. I never changed any over, of course. She points down the escalator and I sigh and lug my three bags back down to wander aimlessly under the weight of all my belongings, embodying in a strange way, my mood, until I find the ATM.

I withdraw cash, find the way back, through the technicolor of transit and pay the lady for my food. I scoff it like it’s the first thing I’ve ever eaten in my life, I don’t remember what it tastes like the second I swallow. I wake up to the security guard again telling me to stop falling asleep. I am now sweating and almost certain he’s going to haul me into the police station and there I’ll be, getting jailed for life and on top of that the lady at the empanada stand will probably try to get her two cents worth and say I stole my tasteless sandwich, I have a real moment of dissociation. What the fuck is going on?

The lady from the counter telling me my bus is here and please go outside, next to the security guard, like a couplet of mimes, gesturing wildly. Ah, right, outside. Into the safety of the big yellow bus. Which is actually yellow, and I chuckle at that, before I once again drift out of consciousness. I fall asleep hugging my day back to my chest, cardigan draped over me like a package no one wants to claim.

****

“Do you want real coffee? I have some, but nothing comes for free, so if I catch you smuggling it behind my back I’ll oust you from the hostel for thievery” says Luis, the manager of the hostel. He has just greeted me at the gate. It’s early in the morning and I’ve navigated over the bridge to the hostel the boys are staying at, but they’re all asleep.

I’ve sat down and finally released my impediments, and the strong, pressed coffee that sticks to my tongue tastes like sheer relief.

“You gonna go in and say hi?” Luis asks, pointing to the door of a small dorm at the back of the hostel.

“Yeah, in a sec.”

Luis goes back inside. I realise my left pocket is full of American dollars. The cardigan is loose and I wonder how I haven’t dropped a fifty dollar fortune on the ground by now, except I don’t remember what I took out so I probably have. I pull the zip on the front pocket of my back, and bunch the cash inside. I jiggle the zipper lightly, and notice that something drops to the ground.

Holy shit.

There, on the concrete floor of the hostel, straight from the front of my back and fresh over the border from Peru to Ecuador. Through multiple check ins and check outs and passed outs and chair sleeps and vulnerable slumbers. Visions of the security guard shaking his head at me. A montage of all the times I left my bag unattended, as I scoped out paradoxical jelly cups or misappropriated empanadas with the wrong money. The clerks dragging me up the escalators, or my worries of my face rigidly smacked against the wall of... wherever. The forty seven times I ruffled through my bag and didn’t find it, and here it is, in all its insolent glory.

A big ol’ bag o’ Charlie White.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Nothing Bad will Ever Happen

I come to my senses at about nine am. I would say I wake up but that's not strictly true. Not at all, in fact. Eloise and I have snorted about six grams of cocaine now and I'm trying to figure out what to say to Simon. How do you tell the owner of the hostel you work at that last night when you went to smoke a joint, you got side tracked by taxi drivers selling cocaine who locked you in the back of a tuk tuk, robbed you and then shoved multiple bags of cocaine inside your vagina when the cops came? How do you explain that you were so wasted that the details were constantly stacking and de-stacking in your mind, and you weren't sure what made it happen but you were sure it was your fault? Because how does someone let themselves get that fucked up and go walking by themselves in a dangerous and foreign country?

When I got back up the hostel from that ordeal, my first instinct was to get back to the rooms and retrieve all the bags of coke from myself. There was a little rock stuck inside me, so i pulled it out and put it in my mouth to make sure. I knew that this would mean that I was essentially high as balls already, but just to make sure, I enlisted all the girls to hit the shit out of the bags with me. We did everything we all collectively had, which turned out to be a fair few grams. I couldn't tell you how many but I'm sure our totals combined was more than six. I just wanted to forget. Turns out that it just made me mediate on the details so much that they became a haze that was so incongruent with the story I had told the night before that it all became a muddle. Even remembering what I had said when I already was intoxicated and high and traumatized by the ordeal didn't make sense. Where I thought there was five of them, that couldn't be right, as they wouldn't have fit inside the tuk tuk. But there must have been more than three because someone pulled the door open when the cops came. And that's when they put the cocaine inside me. Obviously, without my permission, a man shoved his hands down my shorts and buried them inside me so I couldn't tell the police even if I had been robbed. "Oh sir! They robbed me! But I have so many bags inside me that they'll imprison me if I try. I left the tuk tuk and yelled at them, bit they told me to run, and I did, because I was scared. I don't even remember seeing the police but apparently they came to the hostel later in the night and were turned away by security.

All these facts swirl around my head. I feel like my serotonin has been blasted through the wall. I am steeping in shame and sparks of misshapen reality and nothing seems like it will ever be better again. I touch my face and it's so swollen from crying that I begin to cry again as a reaction. I go to the bar. Order some breakfast.

Luciano and Lucho are there, and they ask me why my face looks like it does. I tell them briefly what happened. I'm still high so the words tumble out of me as I force down a vegetarian omelette and cry through my mouthfuls. I'm too scared to leave the hostel, but I need to book a bus. Luciano offers to come.

As I'm finishing my last few mouthfuls, he places a hand on my shoulder, and runs it down my arm. It is the softest and surest touch I have felt for a long time. It stops me, right in the middle of my shame ridden crusade, like coming out of a cold bath and being wrapped in a towel that's been sitting on an oil heater. He touches my hand.

"Let's get you a bus ticket out of Mancora, okay?" Thick Argentinian accent and tanned face. I wonder why I never noticed how long his eyelashes were.

"Okay" I answer helplessly.

He leads me out to every close booking station there is and registers me for a relatively nice one that's leaving at 8.30pm. He does all the work. I couldn't speak Spanish if I tried at this moment, though. As we are booking the bus, I lay my head on the table. I've rarely felt this tired. It's the combination of drug comedown and emotional trauma, and if you let it, it can be lethal. Luciano brushes my hair from my face, places it behind my ear. I'm looking into the chocolate brown of his eyes and feeling like I'm just a little bit in love with him right now. Later, my mum tells me this is called anchoring. I know that I'm still highly intoxicated and that I'm not at all in my right mind but I know that I want to marry this man and have his babies at thisj moment, because he's the first person that has been nice to me, the first warm hand on my skin and the first pure heart that I've encountered. But this is probably the cocaine and trauma speaking, so I don't get down on one knee then and there.

Back at the hostel, I try to tell Simon what happened and I mess the whole story up and end up blubbering into his box of tissues. He asks me penetrative questions that I can't answer correctly and in the end I leave the conversation thinking that he must think I'm actually crazy and is letting me leave because he doesn't want a mentally deranged person working for him. I laugh when I'm back in the dorm and say "at least I got my wish" in a macabre sort of way that makes everyone uncomfortable before I run back to my bed downstairs and cry into my pillow whilst desperately looking for Xanax to no avail. The one time I could very much benefit from knocking myself out and here we are, stranded in a boat out to sea. My vagina still burns from the cocaine. I cannot for the life of me think of why they would put it inside me. I feel like Simon is right and I am a crazy person, for the tenth time today.

I need wifi so I lie in the hammock with a sheet over my head so no one talks to me. Except the Israeli girls are worried so they intermittently check on me and hug me awkwardly in my hammock. Eloise buys me chocolate and cookies. Everyone is trying the best they can but devastation is something that often just has to be left to seep into the veins until it's no different than the blood that traverses there. I know I'll feel better in a few days, I tell them as much and hope they believe me. I have a mouth full of cookies and a heart made of stone.

My nose is broken again, or should I say, the crack in it from multiple breaks has gotten wider, and there is a bruise on the side of my face. When we were high we were doing handstands against the wall, but I fell over and hit my face. I remember trying another time, falling, and thinking, "I should really stop this now, it's getting dangerous", and I stopped. I was very proud of myself in that moment, for only getting mildly injured, and I wonder if my life will be like that or whether I will fall off the precipice that I seem so obsessed with standing on.

I lie in my hammock and think about suicide. I wonder how many people have committed suicide whilst on a come down from drugs. There has got to be a great deal. My serotonin feels completely depleted, stretched to its ultimate capacity, where I am lost and lost and lost down the well.

When I was back in Melbourne, I remember my friend Ray staring at me with a mixture of fear and distrust when I said I wanted to try cocaine. I acted like it was something that you just took once and never had a come down from. I mean, that wouldn't be true even if it was pure, but this shit is cut with so many other things, including but not exclusive to lots and lots of speed. Shit jacks your brain and drives you through the mill. Sleep deprivation does the rest. Ray says she used to have a problem with it and urges me to be careful and that moment comes back to me more than many times on this trip. Her, staring across the table filled with vegetarian Thai food and we're both telling each other how we want to stop drinking but I'm making a complete mess of my hope for sobriety by talking about my need to try South American cocaine like it's less dangerous somehow. The look on her face is etched into my mind and I pull it back with intensity every time I wake up the next morning after a night on the powder.

The girls come to remove me from my hammock, telling me that it's my last sunset and that we need to smoke a joint in the pirate ship. It's an abandoned shipwreck that is perfect for sunset watching with large groups of people as long as you remember your flip flops because there's glass everywhere. Luciano is looking after the bar as Michelle is fighting with Bastien again. I have a moment of panic as I realise how angry she's going to be that I didn't come to her but I quash it because it raises my heart rate and that's the last thing I need in this moment. I convince Luc to come with us, for a fifteen minute break.

We trundle out to the boat and he tells me that he's going to Huaraz to see the girl that he's been seeing here in Mancora. I ask him where he's going after that, and he says Ecuador. I tell him to come meet up with us, and hope more than a normal amount that he will.

The girls, Luc and I smoke a joint left to me by Uncle, a few days before, and it's so strong that within five minutes we are all in hysterics. Noga is telling me a story about Yuvi being on anesthetic, but it's the first time she's told it in English so Adi is sitting next to me laughing her head off, having heard it completely in Hebrew for all other times it's been told. The sun starts to drop in the sky, and as it moves closer to the horizon, I get very, very scared, very quickly, of being out in the dark.

As the now red orb of sun hits the sea, I tell everyone I would really like to leave. They don't want to but Luc offers to walk with me, and I set off on a fast pace because I really don't want to be in the dark again, the concept is terrifying, even with company. I want the sun back.

Luciano walks silently beside me for a few minutes, listening to me talk. He's the sort of person that doesn't say anything unless he truly means it, and English is his second language so he has to think about the structure of his sentences. I tell him that this has made me feel like I have to stop taking cocaine.

"These things require moderating" he says slowly, correcting himself as he goes.

"But what if I can't moderate? I just feel like I'm on a merry go round, that I keep finding new ways to push myself into destructive patterns"

He asks me to slow down and repeat myself.

To simplify, I say, "I just keep hurting myself. And I don't know why"

It is that moment before it gets dark, twilight, and the sand is beneath my toes. The sound of the ocean is like white noise in the background. Luc's feet move gracefully though he's tall and lanky and there is something magic about the way he talks, low and comforting.

"Sarah. Life is beautiful... But sometimes, It's difficult." He pauses, and looks out to sea. There is something about this moment that will etch itself profoundly in my mind for a long time to come. The look of his face in the half light, the feeling that it wasn't a person talking to me. That Luciano was a conduit for what the world that I had manifested wanted me to know. When you are told exactly what you need to hear, in a way that you will listen, you often feel that it is magic. But maybe it is just that it has been repeated to you over and over, and now you are finally ready to hear it.

"You already know what your problem is. You do, deep inside yourself, you know. And if you know what your problem is, then you can fix it. You can change the parts of yourself that you want to. I believe you can"

His hand brushes mine, an accident. I am trying not to cry, and neither of us speaks for a long time.

Later, when goodbyes are said, Eloise walks me to the bus station and we sit outside with our cigarettes feeling like shit together. She says she can't wait to go home and see Oli. How strange that we have come back around to each other, a strange little duo, full of mistrust and mutual admiration. I tell her that sometimes I want to go home, too. But as I say it, I realise that this is the first time I've had a moment of low that hadn't made me want to go home.

"Often I find that wanting to go home is just really the need to be surrounded by people that really love you. Not people that you have to question, not anyone you have to worry about the intentions of, you know? Just people that love you," Eloise says, and I look out toward the road.

I wonder why it's different this time, why the instinct to go home is left abandoned by the need to continue on. I think about the prospect of quitting and know I can't turn back now. But there's something else. I think about all the people back home and the incarnation of myself that they are missing, and I know that this girl still exists, just like everyone I've been, but I also know that a new me is unfolding from the fray of misguided actions and reactions.

I could go home to be surrounded by people I love, but I think about the Israeli girls and the boys waiting for me in Montanita and the touch of Luc's hand and Eloise's handbag sitting on top of my backpack waiting for the bus, and I realise that I can make a home wherever I am, in the hearts of those that I'm with, and they in mine.

[ladycapuletwrites]

Come Downs and New Clowns

I’m hiding in my room as I have to have a conversation with the bar manager about how early I can get out of my 14 day contract. I want to go to Ecuador with the boys but I'm in two minds about it.

That’s the next stop on the list.

I could stay, have a break, relax and chill out for a week and then go meet them, or I could leave earlier and get the party started over there. God, I don't even know where Montanita is, I’m just living for the people around me, and the boys, these beautiful men who have grown into a collective consciousness with me.

With Eloise’s arrival there has been news, and more people. She is one of the first imports from chilly Cusco to join the beach-side family. She gets a job the day after she arrives, and so does The Israeli Girls. I call them this because they deserve a title. I could call them The Wonder Women. And I could do that because I’m writing this is present tense, but in hindsight. So for now, they are The Israeli Girls. Or rather, four beautiful girls named Aviva, Noga, Yuval and Adi. They are the sunshiniest new employees to enter the bar and are more than fit to replace the boys. I’ve loved them from the moment they laughed and drank with abandon. But I still want to go with the boys. Safety in the fun I’ve been having, I feel like we’ve banded together. A band of Brothers.

 I don't know if that's the cocaine talking, and to be honest there was a moment there last night where I knew I had a choice between doing it and not doing it. I was sitting on Rico's bed and Angel was waving at me from the window with a joint, and Rico sitting on the floor with a racked up computer, and I could have just smoked the joint but instead I racked the line and then smoked the joint because nothing says excess like excess. And this, the result. The Israelis have invited me to drink by the pool, but I’m sitting in my room thinking the fan is talking to me again. “Girl you a party animal”.

 I feel so out of it today though that nothing makes any sense and I can't write my story cos my brain doesn't work properly. I used to get like this with meth comedowns, spend all these twilight hours looking up the long term effects of amphetamines and googling how long it takes you to get addicted just in case I was spiralling out of control.

 Holly Whitaker says that if you're lying awake at a ridiculous hour questioning whether or not you have an addiction, you probably do. Cocaine is such a strange, persuasive drug. It delivers what it promises, but then you find yourself scattered to the wind the next day and questioning which parts of your thoughts are you and which parts are the cocaine. It's a strange come down, I've never had quite so much of an urge to smoke weed before, either. But the combination of cocaine and weed is not only hysterical but has a tendency to explore your propensity for creativity more. Either way, I still question if I have a problem.

My best friends’ email in my head every day, challenging me to access that other part of my personality that craves sobriety. But then, getting high is fucking fun. I think that's the problem with traveling and taking shit whilst doing that. There are no yesterday's on the road, if you feel like shit, you really can leave whenever you want. 

 Eloise brings news of the Cuzco crew with her when she arrives. Snir has removed more and more things from his diet in lieu of his alcoholism. First he was taking cocaine but didn't like the fact that it sobered him up, then he removed two meals from his day, and then, began just eating snacks instead of meals, and now he's at a point where he's refusing to drink water because he also believes that this sobers him up and interferes with his beer. I just see him in my mind, completely fucking insane. Angel says he saw Snir the first month and then a month and a half later, that he thought he was a broken man at that point. But it's been two and a half months now and Eloise told me a story about how she woke up at midday to the vision of Snir, naked and pole dancing on the outside tables, hugging a balustrade. 

Shay got back from Cuzco and she said she saw this girl behind the bar who was completely fucked up and trying to serve drinks but her eyes kept rolling back into her head. I asked her what she looked like, showed her a picture of Stacey. That's the one. 

Eloise tells me a story about an Irish guy that’s staying at the hostel now, married a Peruvian girl. This was an entrance into the insanity of Peruvians because we all agree that the bar manager, Michelle, is terrifying. Hence my hesitation to tell her I want to leave, and with the promise of frienships reignited, and female energy gained.

So this Irish guy, marries his Peruvian bride and is for some reason always staying at Loki Cuzco because he keeps getting kicked out of the house. After the latest glitter party he arrived home to find himself locked out of the house. He climbed through the window and she came at him then, baseball bat swinging, knocked him clean out. He awoke and she was screaming at him, she’d noticed the glitter on his face, that had been administered by one Eloise, and Miss Peru goes mental because she believes he’s been out cheating all night with a glitter clad whore. She proceeds to trash the house, and he runs right back to Loki, where he drinks himself into a stupor and passes out in the staff quarters.

 The next day, he arrives home to find that Miss Peru has done thousands of dollars worth of damage  and that the house is basically unlivable, so he comes back to Loki, after hearing that his wife has moved in with her sister and insists he fixes the house for being a lowly cheating scum bag.

He doesn’t, so now there is a house in Cusco that’s been abandoned because of a glitter party.

I ruminate on this, and decide that drinking with the Israelis is exactly what I need. I’ll save the chat with Michelle, The Peruvian bar manager, for tomorrow. 

I head up to the top dorm, the one that I sleep in but don’t actually keep my stuff. I have one bed in the lower dorm that I’m supposed to stay in, and one bed in the top dorm that I sit in with the boys and wax lyrical about nothing whilst smoking on the balcony and sticking my head in a locker to intermittently snort lines. Speaking of which, I find Rico and Bruno, holding a rolled up note, poking their heads around the locker door.

“Well, you’re right on time”’ says Rico, handing me the note. “Girl you a party animal” I sing, and lean in.

Down at the bar, the girls have just come back from surfing. What the fuck is that. I’ve been here for over a week, which is more like a year in Loki time, and all I’ve found time for is, well, you already know. Aviva is sucking down on a slushie and comes up very close to my face.

“Hello Beautiful, I hear you like to do things in groups”.

Thanks Eloise.

Angel has already given me the lowdown. “Aviva the Conqueror”, were his slanted words. Every pretty girl in fifteen miles is charmed and bedded by this fearless mistress, and she is mildly intoxicating, standing so close, aware of her power, I start to think about the fact that there isn’t many things in the world more attractive than a woman aware of her own power, no matter what it is being used for. It’s exotic, foreign, and though it shouldn’t be, it feels taboo. The chained and trapped lioness released from her bonds, ready to claw your heart out. I liked her immediately.

The other three, wet from the surf, and Eloise perched on a stool smoking her cigarette with that finesse I could never bely, all beckon the boys and I over. It’s like a school disco on the third dance when finally, all parties move into the centre of the square.

“Wanna smoke a joint in the pirate ship?” Says Noga,

The Pirate Ship is an abandoned ship wreck that’s been painted brilliant colours about a kilometre down the beach.It’s fitting, and at the mention of “Pirate Ship” Ryan appears out of thin air. I’m buzzed from the coke and high from the weed so this all sounds like a splendid idea.

 Our ragtag crew wander down into the sunset, watching the horses carrying awkward tourists along the shoreline. Take our flip flops off, but put them back on to climb into the ship, as it’s littered with glass shards.

 Noga, slightly stoned, begins a story, about Yuval. She’s talking about Yuval coming out of anaesthetic. It goes as so many anaesthetic stories do; some freakish developmentally delayed demon takes over your friend and suddenly your friend is a mermaid and is missing teeth, and they’re in a ketamine-like fantasy world. Adi is absolutely wetting her pants laughing. She explains that it’s the first time she’s ever heard this story told in English.

We take a snap. Well, I take a snap, miss documenter, chaotic narrator and gonzo journalist. We are all standing happily and the sun is doing that thing that it does every night in Mancora, making pink cocaine streaks out of the sky and telling the future for our little beachside home. Smooth sailing, evermore.

 ***

 We have to remember that I was mostly high when I was doing this, so recreating the story from fragmented experiences is the only forte allowed to me. 

With that in mind, the next thing I remember is being in bed with Bruno and Adi.

Bruno and I make a bro pact that we won’t touch each other; it would be too weird, like sleeping with my cousin.

But we decide to share Adi as if she were a prize. I kiss her, then he kisses her. We all take our cloths off, and lay in bed with each other like sardines in a can, squashed either side. It gets awkward for Adi having to turn her head left and then right so I decide to go down on her. Only, the light is shining through the window and Rico is in the bed adjacent to us sniggering like a child. She can’t enjoy herself, and I’m, exhausted, and the light is hurting my eyes. It’s like that scene in Romeo and Juliet (The Baz one) where Leonardo is under the covers making grand gestures of love, except there are three of us under the covers and it is awkward, and this is all taking place in a dorm filled with people who are too high to sleep pretending that they are asleep. Well, everyone except Rico. I decide to leave the party, and get into the bed further down the dorm.

I slip uneasily into a jagged sleep, lulled by the sounds of Brunos bunk knocking against mine.

 ***

 “I know exactly what you guys were doing last night”, taunts Rico.

“Nah man, we were just sharing the catch” said Bruno, over our toasties, trademark cigarette hanging out his mouth.

“Didn’t touch each other, too weird.” I say.

“You know it’s our last day today Sare” says Angel.

“Yeah”, I say, pulling a cigarette out of Brunos packet to stave off the nausea.

“ My mate has come down from Montanita, his names James.”

 And again, as if things happen by magic in this story, James appears, just as I hop behind the bar for my shift. He is cocky and very sure of himself, young and “bro” and Australian and I can tell why Rico likes him. I can also tell exactly why I won’t.