First Person: Lost in Tijuana

This story doesn’t start the night she spent hours with an incorrectly spelled name trying to find me on social media. It doesn’t start the next morning when I followed her back on Instagram. And it doesn’t start hours later when I sat in the airport making her a playlist on Spotify.

This story begins a week earlier, in the lobby of a Tijuana hotel, when I found myself entranced in the song of a siren named Michelle.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once penned, “But how could you live and have no story to tell?” His words ring true, as there are many stories contained within the chapters of my life. Those stories, the trials and tales of my existence, likewise with yours, are those of the human condition. For though it may pain me to admit, I am as human as us all.

After travelling to Mexico, I arrived at my hotel. I don’t remember the receptionist who checked me in, but I do remember who was standing beside them. As Michelle walked up to the adjacent counter, her coworker’s voice quickly dampened into Charlie Brown noises. She moved with a grace and beauty that men would fight wars over.

I spent the next week frequenting the front desk to buy candy bars and bottles of water I didn’t need. At the end of my stay, I prepared to head home. If you asked why there was nothing more than a series of three-word exchanges, I could lie but the truth is… goddamn, she was pretty and I was nervous.

Then she found me.

It’d be nice if I could say my intentions were noble from the start, and a better man might be able to. But I’m not a better man. What I can say is that she made me want to be one. I’m not sure the exact moment it happened, but it did.

For weeks I’d stay up till she got off work so we could begin our conversations at 2 a.m. I’d drift away and wake up to her still, there on my screen, asleep in her beauty. Despite the miles and borders between us, she felt closer than I’d ever known.

Now, I’d like to make something clear: this story was never meant to be a fairytale, and I didn’t want it to be. I’m not prince charming, I’m Clyde Barrow. I don’t want a fairytale; I want Bonnie. I want to roll the fuckin bones. I want someone who’s gunna ride.

It seemed I may have found her.

Sometimes time the jagged edges of two broken parts fit together, but sometimes they only create friction. Unfortunately, this isn’t a redemption story of a broken man finding his missing pieces in a woman. It’s a story of him watching the filth seep between his fingers and leak down his arm as his own Midas touch turns what he grasps to shit.

Like so many times before, it ended. Then I burned the bridge. But for reasons I’d yet to discern, this time it hurt.

I needed to think. Calling upon the spirit of mother nature, I consumed 8 grams of her primitive sacrament and embarked on a not so brisk 3 a.m. walk. I left the front door of my home and wandered into the darkness.

With a self awareness only found under the guidance of psilocybin I starred into the abys. Staring back at me I was confronted with the all-too-human voices I’d long buried in my unconscious. Screaming voices, refusing to be ignored, insisted that the Tin Man does have a heart.

In the morning I booked a plane ticket back to Tijuana.

We reconnected and spent the week together in an Airbnb by the beach. But like Chekov’s gun, her words began to betrayed her. Every word, every utterance, spoken or withheld, is a choice. An insight to a thought, a pattern, a behavior.

She shared her city, her spirit and her body, but not her soul. That she kept for herself. It became clear the woman who told me she wanted her other half didn’t know what she wanted. I wasn’t the only one broken. Our jagged parts didn’t fit, so I ended it.

Flying home in the wake of a faded mirage, I questioned what was real and was the product of a lullaby. But while it may be easy to pound my chest and add to the voices in the pit, I felt what I felt, and I know what it was. It seems I’ve simply been confronted with a tragic wisdom contained in the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

Before I met her I was content with the vapid and meaningless. I’m now more lost then when I started. I don’t think I want someone else, and I don’t know if I want her. But I do know I can’t have her, because she has herself.

I miss the smell of her hair, and the warmth of her body. I miss the way she talks, her voice, her accent. I miss the way she moves. I miss her touch. I miss talking on the phone until daylight reminds me to sleep. I miss hope. I miss waking up happy. I miss what I remember, and I’m enticed to wish I could forget. But I don’t.