March 2011 Vacation in Playa del Carmen, Part 1

I wasn't worried, but neither was I sure I wouldn't go totally crackers from the heat and heavy memories of all the years living as we did in Mexico. I am on vacation, after all. It's nothing but a party if you can leave. Humidity has an odor, like wet concrete, pork always sizzling somwhere on a plancha, chemical cleanliness hovering close to the density of jungle, never far away. Scented fever dreams make amends and I can be healed whole. Not without sadness and anxiety, but what adult can go anywhere without nostalgia wringing her heart in her hands, mingling desire and gladness from the past with strains of death and ghosts of who we had become without intent. Today, I put on my bathing suit and swam in the turquoise drift. I fought the current close to shore and finally surrendered, floating on my back but still kicking my fins like a siren whose song is always sinking like a stone.