I’d like to say that I’ve tried to write several newsletters for the past month, but the truth is, I haven’t. That’s because I got sick at the beginning of the month, and I’m still not better.
I’m writing this from Mexico City, where I will unexpectedly be celebrating New Year’s with Isma. I am lucky enough to be staying with some good friends and to be getting good care from my doctors. Hopefully we will soon be able to narrow down the possibilities of what is going on with me and get me treatment that will help me feel better and (very importantly) allow me to write again. I don’t think of myself as someone who has to work to feel alive, but that’s mostly because I don’t internally classify “writing” as “work.” Sure, I do for other people because they need some rubric to understand what I do with my life. But my own internal landscape of activities classifies “work” as my freelance jobs and “writing” as that thing I do to continue being myself.
For the last month I have hardly been able to do anything that allows me to be myself, and it’s been hard. I have been so tired all the time. Tired not just in my body, but in my mind, in my heart, and in my creativity (which I think to me is my spirit, but that might want justification). I think about my novel and the part of me that normally gets up and wags its tail just sits down with its head between its paws (hmm, interesting self-description, creative Alaya brain…) I feel overwhelmed instead of excited. Instead of getting ideas I feel like falling asleep. Needless to say, I have made no progress on it.
There is something about the slowness of this kind of illness, which I suppose is what people call “chronic” though I’m having a hard time with that label (it feels too soon and presumptuous without a diagnosis) that, perversely, does feel aligned with creativity. The way that it has forced me to notice smaller things. To divide time into larger chunks. To plan movements that I would not have had to think about before. That deliberation is also in the soil of creativity, and it makes the plants that grow from it hardier, thicker, more solid in the ground. I want to see what I can build from this, but I need enough energy to do so.
The other day Isma and I were looking for a cheap place to eat in my friend’s neighborhood, the kind of local restaurant known as a fonda. There were a few, but the one my friend had recommended was closed and another I saw was just closing. I’ve been having a hard time walking, so we paused on the sidewalk so I could catch my breath. I caught a small movement in the corner of my eye. Food smells wafted over us like a just-opened stew pot. A tiny gap in the closed storefronts that I could have sworn was a door a moment before had turned into a narrow fonda, six tables with weird reproductions of medieval art on the walls and a taxidermied bear head by the entrance. They were open. The cook/waiter waved us in. Every single customer besides us was over sixty-five, at least. The food was delicious. Sometime around the second course a barrel-chested man walked in and started launching one-liners into the back like rockets. A skinny old-timer in the back table perked up and launched his own zingers return. If it weren’t for the fact that every single one of these prima facie nonsensical declamations had quite a different meaning hiding under its skirts, I wouldn’t have even been sure they were talking to one another. It was kind of like they were doing the dozens but they weren’t taking the shit out of one another. They were measuring themselves against some giant albur1 scoreboard in the sky, which only they, and the other great players of times past, could see.
I didn’t feel as though I had stepped back in time, but like I had stepped into another world. A world that only slow people see; one open to those who pause at that unpromising spot on the sidewalk to take a breath, not those who hurry past, looking for the next good thing. I realized that at some point I had crossed over from being a fast and hurried young-ish person to being someone with more in common with the old and slow. It didn’t feel like a bad thing in that fonda. I hadn’t realized that slow people had their own things, too.
The next day we went out early to get some tests done. We stopped at a corner stand to get some tamales. An old woman in her slippers was ordering ahead of us. I recognized her from the fonda the day before. Isma, who always recognizes people from different contexts, surprisingly had to be reminded this time. I wonder if slowing down means that I’m looking more directly at people, now. I wonder if it means I’m less afraid.
Tonight I plan to have a very chill new years eve celebration, which will almost certainly end before midnight but you never know. And tomorrow I will celebrate something that truly matters to me, which is my ten year anniversary of immigrating to Mexico. I thought I would be celebrating this at home with my dogs, but it is appropriate to be marking the day here in the city that welcomed me, this questing stranger, home.
As I have the energy, I will continue to post here and have more content for subscribers. Emergency visits to Mexico City for tests and doctors’ visits aren’t cheap, so if you have any ability or interest in subscribing, now would be a very good time to do so. Thank you so much, and may 2024 bring you much joy and creativity.
A.K.A. the great Mexican art of the doble sentido, the double meaning. Think Shakespeare mixed with the dozens but extremely bad puns are allowed. Seriously, the style is mostly untranslatable because the punning rules are so lax by English standards.
I’m so sorry to hear that you have been so ill, Alaya, and I’m sending good thoughts that you and your doctors will find a solution very soon.