When I moved to Mexico, I hit the ground running. I wanted to push my comfort zone, meet new people, not sweat my Spanish and just take it all in. I made it about a month until all the effort I put towards being positive and enjoying every moment of this experience toppled. I'm homesick. I'm a little bored. I've started to watch a lot of t.v.
I feel like the homesickness hit me all at once. I woke up on Saturday, September 16th wanting to cry. And that feeling has been living in that space where your tongue meets your throat and creates a tightness that turns your voice into a croak and seeps out from behind your eyes no matter how hard you think you're smiling. I take longer to get out of bed and also to fall asleep. In the spaces where I once felt comfortable in my inexperience and obviously foreign accent, I feel myself retreating.
Yesterday I went to the Sierra Gorda and Bernal with my co-worker Lucy and a guy she's been talking to, Paco. They have just started to get to know each other and are not quite dating but are headed in that direction. Robert, the other Fulbright grantee in Querétaro, was supposed to come with us but came down with the flu and had to cancel at the last minute. I was faced with spending the day alone in Querétaro or getting out of town for a few hours with Lucy and Paco. I felt so awkward tagging along but couldn't bare the idea of staying behind either. I taught myself the word for third wheel, sujetavelas and interjected myself into their day date. The funny thing about the second language is the worse you feel, the worse you speak. Holding back the tightness I quietly tried to join the conversation from the back seat and got stuck in a self-correcting loop of babble. I leaned against the window and listened to Lucy's music drown out their flirtatious teasing.
The landscape was beautiful, a vibrant green covering the rounded, rolling mountains. Paco took us to a short waterfall hike where the light blue water flowed through the sienna rock bed. The waterfall was extra strong from the recent rains and as it crashed into the pool below it sprayed mist, the word I had tried to describe to my English students the day before with an amateur drawing on the white board. Mist, fog, overcast, cloudy, trying to help them expand their vocabulary in preparation for their Cambridge exam. It was such a beautiful place and I was so lucky to have been driven there by the wonderful and generous Paco, yet all I could think of was Jamai, my partner in adventure and my sense of home, miles and miles away watching a slow bike race in the Golden Gate Park. The tightness clenched in my throat and I squinted eyes, trying to hold back tears as snapped a few close ups of the waterfall's mist to show my students.
Today I woke up to the frantic beats of the spinning class music, shoved ear plugs into my ears and slept for two more hours. I lingered in my room uploading photos and figuring out how to rotate a video I took on my camera. Robert and I met up to go sign up for a Spanish class together. We laughed at our daily blunders and our overly dramatic descent into apathy. Together we made jokes about the man that gave me a hard time when I asked where Avenida Tecnología was when it's really called Avenida Tecnológico. I looked at another apartment I don't want to live in and bought a couple books. Tomorrow I'll wake up before spinning starts and head to the CutOut Fest office and keep looking for the humor in this silly part of the process of getting used to a new place and another language.
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