Go Slow But Keep Moving

I’m sitting on the porch at a coffee shop in Belize called Ice and Beans. This country has charmed me, mostly with it’s uninhibited embracing of the pun as a lingual flourish.

The iced coffee I got tasted like a bottled Frappuccino, which tastes like me being 12 years old. I used to drink them in the beach with my mom every summer. They were my gateway drug, the first unfortunate step towards becoming the caffeine fiend (caffiend?) I am today.

This place offers you a coffee shot when you walk in. I think it’s a cute touch and it saddens me that would never fly in New York. People would steal the shot glasses, or crack them against the counter and use the jagged glass as a weapon, or at the very least exit and re-enter multiple times wearing different mediocre disguises to try to drink the equivalent of what they would have hypothetically ordered were it not free. This place is adorable. I bet no one has even shat on the floor of their bathroom. #paradise

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking during the last few weeks about being alone. I like traveling alone. I like not having to match someone’s pace, to consider other people’s preferences. Alone is my most comfortable state, and it has been for as long as I can remember. This has had a mostly positive impact on my life. I can handle my shit without anyone else. I can mount a TV to a wall, negotiate the terms of my lease agreement, and wander around a new country on my own. But I do want to make sure I’m not avoiding any potential friend/partner or community out of fear, or insecurity, and upon very little reflection it became clear that I do that, a lot.

I was much better than this in college. I knew I needed to make friends so I powered through the discomfort. But at 31, I’ve got plenty of friends and my TV has been successfully mounted if you know what I mean 😏 I even hid the cords, if you know what I mean 😏 and set up my Roku by myself (eh ok that one doesn’t sound nearly sexual enough) sooooo I’ve been able to get by without too much external participation in my life.

As I flew between Miami and Belize City, I felt a tiny wave of anxiety wash over me. Some of it was due to the next to zero planning I had done for this trip. I had five dollars in my bag and it never occurred that maybe I should have at least a couple more, probably in a different currency. But most of it was definitely due to the guy sitting next to me who smelled like old cigarettes. This was not the eau d’an occasional smoker. This was someone who had been chain-smoking in the womb, someone who deliberately eschewed modern washing machines as they didn’t fit in with his lifestyle, that lifestyle being Margaritaville-meets-methhead. I breathed through my mouth the whole flight. As we landed in Belize, he leaned over me in the middle seat to look out the window and whispered to no one, “there she is.” Like Belize was a boat that he had lovingly built one summer with his dad, who left the family shortly thereafter and whose only communication has been a check for $20 in a card each year since on his birthday. I was so relieved when the wheels hit the tarmac. I really didn’t want to die next to this guy. I didn’t want my last smell to be old Birkenstocks and halitosis.

Landing in Belize, I promised myself that I would try to make at least one new friend, and was pleasantly surprised when I crushed that goal and met way more. Two of the people I met were two guys from Seattle who were staying in the same hotel for the first night. They’re friends who just travel together sometimes, which I found adorable. I’m not sure why. Girls go on trips together all the time, but it felt unusual for dudes. Either way, they were a great friend couple. They have personalities that are different enough to be interesting but similar enough to not be a disaster. They’re both the type of guy who would challenge a bunch of 20-year-old Belizean guys to a game of pickup basketball.

I’m gonna take you on a bit of a tangent now, apologies, BUT can I just say that the universe really loves fucking with me. One of them was cute, funny, has a legit job that’s interesting that he seems to be good at. He clearly found me cute (I don’t know how you know but sometimes you just do, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.) But he just bought a house in Seattle and almost definitely has a girlfriend. Everything goes to shit when property and existing relationships are involved.

It’s like this trick we’ve played on my mom a few times over the years, not telling her we’re coming home and surprising her with our presence. It was cute the first couple of times but now it’s just really tired. The universe needs to come up with a new joke for me. Every single solid guy I meet being unavailable is getting really old. If you need ideas of alternative ways to mess with me, I can help you come up with some ideas. You could get me audited or you could break one of my bones. Give me a surprise gluten intolerance. As much as I love bread I’d still prefer that to having impossible men constantly dangled in front of me, especially when I struggle so much with the whole idea of letting anyone in the first place.

In my more magnanimous moments I can convince myself that this is actually what my life is meant to be, that I should just embrace it. Little vignettes saved in my memory of short periods of time with interesting people. I can say I’ve learned cute little life lessons from each of them before releasing them back into the wild. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll even teach them a thing or two. It’s a fucking shame Garry Marshall’s dead. Netflix could pick up this series, and I could sleep with the resulting piles of cash in my bed as a proxy boyfriend. Cash is easier to understand, and it doesn’t have a house in Seattle, if you don’t count Bill Gates’s house in Medina, and I don’t.

I went on a snorkeling trip, the one thing I had booked online beforehand. As my mother would attest to, I’m not big on booking things before I take trips. I say that it cramps my style but the truth is that it’s boring when it’s hypothetical and the fact that I would usually be trying to do it in between answering emails at work makes it just feel like too much of a chore. I realize that is the most obnoxious sentiment in the world, but we’re in this together. No backing out now.

The upside of this, of course, is that I don’t have to expend any additional energy. The downside is that sometimes I don’t get to do some shit. I’ve never ridden a horse in Ireland, for example, and that is my fault.

This time I decided (the day before I arrived) that I would sign up for a snorkeling trip. I figured that being out on a boat would never not be a good call, and so I googled “snorkeling Caye Caulker Belize” and booked the first one that came up.

I’m really glad I did. One of the charming parts of this island is that as you walk down the Main Street (there’s really only one of them) you are loudly encouraged by multiple friendly men to take THEIR snorkeling trip. There are easily 15 tour operators in a half-mile stretch. They also comment on your butt if you’re me.

I had no problem with this conceptually (the guys in New York yell much less enterprising things) but in all likelihood I would have been overwhelmed and would have choked under the pressure, ultimately deciding that snorkeling was not for me, even though I’ve done it multiple times in my life and always loved it.

I ended up on a boat with two other American girls, both of whom are nurses in Southern California. They were nice and friendly and had done expert things like resuscitate premies and bring waterproof cameras on vacation, both of which were very impressive to me.

The boat was amazing, I don’t need to tell you guys that. It had everything: sunburn despite all of my best efforts, new friends, coral reefs... this is not a travel blog. You get it. The highlight was probably the fact that we saw what I’m sure were all of the sharks in existence gather around the boat to be photographed (and also fed but I knew their real motivations, they wanted to be #stars.)

I did bring waterproof mascara for this trip, thinking I was a genius because #theocean but it backfired terribly. I think the last time I bought waterproof mascara was at least 10 years ago and I’m pretty sure it’s gotten stronger. Like drugs. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s generally a really bad idea to fuck with, ever (...like drugs) and it’s definitely not something you should wear on the daily. It clumps immediately and then dries, making it impossible to adjust. I knew this. But for whatever reason I expected to still be able to remove it, somehow, maybe with just a little extra eye makeup remover and a positive attitude. No luck. It is permanently affixed to my eyelashes and I’m just going to have to move forward like this. I accidentally pulled out like three eyelashes trying to get off before I threw in the towel. So my eyes are surrounded by permanent spiderwebs now I guess. It’s a look.

On our way back in to the dock, our tour guide Oliver cut the engine and pointed to a school of huge grey fish swimming alongside the boat. He told us that they were called tarpon, and they were protected etc. I don’t know. I don’t do fish.

He pulled out some much smaller fish from a cooler and passed one to one of the older men on the tour who I believe had not spoken the entire time. He instructed him to hold it out by the tail about a foot above the water. After a second or two, A huge tarpon jumped out of the water, pulling the food from the guys hand. Everyone clapped politely for Mr Doesn’t Talk, like our plane had just landed in the midwest. The captain asked if anyone else on the boat wanted to try.

This isn’t the type of thing I volunteer for, the things that I feel are just as interesting if I watch someone else do it. One of the nurses however boldly jumped at the chance.

She held the little guy she was handed over the side of the boat just like the other guy. All of the sudden, the fish jumped out of the water AND CLAMPED ON TO HER FULL FIST. It let go almost immediately and disappeared back into the water but as she pulled her hand back in to her body you could see that there was blood everywhere.

Then I got to see a study in proportionate, measured responses that you rarely find within the contiguous United States. Oliver didn’t even blink, he just sort of poked one of the other crew members and asked him to see if the first aid kit was where it was supposed to be. The girl whose hand was bleeding just said “ah” and then asked her friend if she could pass her a Clorox wipe. She wiped her hand down, and then wrapped it in her towel and that was the last we heard of it, even as the towel starting sprouting bloodstains. I kept waiting for someone to start screaming, even if it was me, but everyone else regarding it as not a big deal made me feel silly for even suspecting that it might be.

I did ask if Clorox wipes were how you were supposed to treat flesh wounds. Turns out it’s “not the best option but it’ll work in an emergency.” I was glad to at least hear them refer to it as an emergency, though their energy level didn’t reflect it. I suspect that it’s all relative.

Leaving the island, I stopped to take a picture of a sign I had walked by countless times over the previous six days, that said “go slow, but keep moving.” It was referring to a spot on some stairs where they were imploring the public to not sit. But I know myself, and I know that that pic, even out of context, is something I should keep close by.