A House Pt 5

Last week I went downstairs to my craft room with the intention of beginning the arduous task of packing for my move. I filled two boxes with fabric and then spent the next hour at my sewing machine mending a pair of sweatpants for my neighborhood bestie. I chuckled at my procrastination as my sewing machine’s patchwork function wove black thread in tight rows across the knit fabric. Mending is anti-capitalist. In that moment it was also counter-productive.

I just don’t yet know how to leave this house.

When you tell people your home is in escrow, they say “congratulations”. The feeling it stirs in me reminds me of stories shared by people who have lost weight because of illness, or depression, who keep hearing “you look so great!” from clueless friends and family. Yes, I suppose congratulations are in order. My house is selling for over double what I paid for it. The alternative of this situation, having to sell a house because of divorce and not being able to find buyers for it, is certainly more miserable than the position I am currently in. But then again, if my home hadn’t appreciated in value to the extent that it has, I wouldn’t have to sell it in the first place.

I haven’t written much about my divorce because I’m still wrapping my head around it. The experience has not been easy- it turned contentious without me knowing how or why- so there has been a lot of hurt and confusion that I’ve had to navigate on my own. Our uncoupling has not been conscious, it has felt more like a fever dream, and this grief paired with severing myself from the home I have loved for 14 years has been overwhelming to say the least. Because the universe has a keen sense of humor, my divorce and the selling of my house both gained momentum while I was in CDMX, a trip I planned months ago when I had no idea my life would be in such chaos. From the moment I touched down in Mexico City I was inundated with intimidating, condescending lawyer emails and the news that there were multiple offers on my house. I burst into silent tears on the back of the plane as I waited to de-board.

How do you celebrate releasing something you never wanted to give up in the first place? Each call with my realtor over the next few days was an exercise in the strangest restraint, attempting to match her excitement over the buzz around my home while also holding space for wide-eyed, frightened little Jasika, who was not ready to say goodbye to the most safety she had ever known, who had no idea of where she would be living next. Add to this my processing of the contempt my ex was exhibiting in our divorce proceedings, which left my head spinning and my stomach in a knot.

But reader, I still managed to have a lovely trip. If this is my life’s journey, to figure out how to make room for the rough and the smooth moments in equal measure when they present themselves at the exact same time, then consider me decked out in a brand new pair of HOKAs. I rode in the Uber to my BnB with puffy eyes and tears drying on my cheeks while taking in the exuberant, relentless green of Mexico City. Monstera leaves as big as my torso cascading casually across sidewalks, plants that people dedicate entire blogs to the delicate care of just growing haphazardly in any inch of soil it’s roots could claw their way into. I’ve never seen another city like it. In the midst of my stress and my grief, I could still recognize that beauty is boundless if only you give it space, surrender to it, stop trying to parse it out and control it.

When we arrived at our BnB, it was every bit as charming as the pictures suggested, older but cozy, sleek in the way that timeless design allows for. Two atriums in the apartment teemed with plants, both dripping down to the floor and stretching up to the skylights above, plants I didn’t know the names of, thick with impressive leaves in more shades of green than I have maybe ever seen outside a forest. The windows were tall and screen-less, which seemed novel for only a brief period of time before we realized that this gave the bugs free reign to enter and roam about the apartment. There was surprisingly, horrifyingly, no fan in the apartment. We didn’t sleep that night, forced to leave the windows open because of lack of airflow, an invitation not only for biting bugs but for noise from the bar positioned right below the window. I knew that some good earplugs, bug repellant and the purchase of a fan, though annoying to have to spend money on, would make the nights much more comfortable… until 6 am on the dot when jackhammering from the apartment next door began, soon joined by regular hammering, drilling, sanding, scraping, slamming- you name it, we heard it. It was diabolical.

After providing Airbnb with video footage of the incessant noise vibrating all the walls of the apartment, I got a refund and hunted down another place to stay in Condesa, this one also beautiful, but more modern and much quieter, save for the booming voice of the megaphoned-Mexican slowly trawling the streets in his truck while selling street food at truly ungodly hours of the night.

The evening before, me and the three people I was in Mexico with had gone to a vegan restaurant for dinner. I am not vegan and can’t tolerate soy very well these days, so I ordered a simple broth-y soup with vegetables in it, a side of French fries, and a watered-down margarita while everyone else had tacos. This, my first meal in CDMX, was the only unremarkable one I had the whole trip, which I soon became incredibly grateful for as, one by one, each of my companions succumbed to the same awful stomach bug over the next two days, presumably from the tacos I didn’t eat. Their bug was a gnarly one- the first leg of the illness for two of them was uncomfortable but didn’t keep them from being able to enjoy the rest of the trip…that is, until the bug had a resurgence several days after they returned home and knocked them out from both ends, and for many days.

I made it through Mexico without getting sidelined by a stomach bug but did not emerge entirely unscathed. On our third day in CDMX, we took a tour of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, about an hour outside of the city. We left our BnB early to grab coffee on our way to a stunning park in Roma Norte where we were to meet our guides who would transport us and a dozen other tourists to our destination. I purposely didn’t finish my coffee, as I’ve always had a small bladder- I need to do three pees for the average person’s one, and perimenopause seems to have exacerbated the limits of my urinary tract. I peed no less than five times before we reached the passenger van in the park, yet I climbed into it feeling the familiar dull ache of a bladder that would need to be relieved sooner than later. I was not alarmed- I would just have to hold my pee for a while, no big deal.

I was wrong.

Halfway through our journey I was in the back row of the van with my crew, changing positions every 20 seconds in an effort to find the one that would put the least amount of pressure on my bladder. I gripped the headrest of the seat in front of me, my finger pads turning white, head towards the tiny slice of window I had access to because I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone, as the increasing discomfort was so excruciating. I was in a van with mostly strangers on a freeway in a foreign country, presumably adhering to a closely-timed schedule. I could not find it in me to cry out from the backseat that I was having a pee emergency (peemergency?) and needed to use the bathroom immediately. Instead, I unbuttoned my corduroy shorts to give my bladder more room. I tried to count the seconds passing that were getting me closer to a toilet. I tried to meditate. I tried to experiment with the limits of my pelvic floor, doing slow Kegels in hopes of finding a sweet spot that alleviated the growing pain in my abdomen, all to no avail. At one point our guide casually announced from the front seat that we were “about five minutes away”, but when ten minutes later we were still in the far left lane of the freeway, I realized that no one was coming to save me and I would have to figure this out on my own.

One of our coffee cups was empty and I grabbed it, along with the pink plastic poncho I had purchased the day before when we got caught in a thunderstorm in the historic district. I draped it over my body, carefully shimmied my pants and panties down from my hips, and silently expressed gratitude for my years of annual health check ups where I learned to pee in a cup without making a mess all over myself. Despite the outrageous discomfort my body was contending with, I barely felt any relief as my urine pounded into the tiny cup. The van was by this point off the highway and driving on gravelly dirt roads and I was terrified of spilling it everywhere. But somehow I managed to empty half of my bladder without wasting one drop, get my pants back up and buttoned, put the lid back on the very full cup, and wrap it tightly inside of the pink poncho as if it were a bomb that would explode my urine onto everyone inside the van at any moment.

I have never been more proud of myself.

I’m not sure why this seems like such a big deal to me. I’m certainly not the first person who has had to do something drastic in order to contend with an untimely bodily function, and I won’t be the last. But there is some people-pleasing version of me that needs permission to operate outside the parameters of what is considered normal, or acceptable. I take such thoughtful precautions to ensure that I am never in positions like this- I usually stop drinking liquids when I know I won’t have access to a restroom, I close my eyes when they show throw up on tv so I wont gag, I don’t leave the house if I’m feeling even remotely sick, I always carry a pack of tissues with me in case a pulpy sneeze arrives unannounced. My muscle for handling the unconventional is atrophied because I demand to have some element of control over any potential unexpected thing that can happen. Is it bad if I relieve myself in the back of this moving van amongst a group of Gen Z college friends discussing Taylor Swift ad nauseam? Could I skip this little episode and simply be catapulted to another realm of existence til it’s over? Can I leave my body and let someone else handle it?

I found my answers- no, no, and no- and I lived to tell the tale, which is that I was brave and unashamed and I took matters into my own hands! But it took me so long to be brave and unashamed that I am currently finishing a round of antibiotics to knock out the UTI I contracted in the back of that van. Better than a stomach bug, but still.

The rest of the trip unfolded, for better and worse: Another crash out initiated by more aggressive, intimidating correspondence from the nasty lawyer. Visits to vintage stores like Goodbye Folk where I had some mighty retail therapy and found 1. a silk kimono so deep in my color palette it’s like I dreamed it up and 2. the most perfectly distressed royal blue chore jacket that’s ever existed. Lucha Libre, which was almost as amazing as the giant cup of chamoy-laced Michelada that I diligently sipped on in my seat mere rows away from the ring. Multiple calls with my real estate agent to help me navigate the best and highest offers that came in over asking (“congratulations!”). An endlessly inspiring walk through Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology, where I delighted in the kinship I felt with an ancient people that made the same ceramic and textile art that invigorate my life now. I walked the aisles of three fabric stores selling almost exclusively polyester before I found one with rayon and linen blends in Jasika-coded prints. I went to the most striking, gravity-defying library I have ever visited, marking off a square on my Birthday Bingo card. I ate some delicious tacos, tried pulque for the first time (tastes like kombucha), and had one perfect margarita, but was ultimately most captivated by a guava Mezcal drink I ordered at Expendio de Maiz, a restaurant that sat us down with three other parties that included a friendly black Scottish woman and brought us out one delicious plated taco at a time til we said “no mas, por favor”.

CDMX was much like my trip to Paris last year, a microcosm of life smashed into the span of a week, with peaks and valleys and wins and sadnesses, sour moments and guava pastries. After a solid week of having had my travel desires fulfilled, I was eager to get back home to my routine, but was of course thrust right back into the middle of the chaos that awaited me: house rental hunting (an exasperating exercise which merits it’s own blog post), packing, tracking down paperwork to provide my divorce attorney, having to vacate my home at the last minute to accommodate the buyer’s inspection schedule.

It’s been a relentlessly intense couple of weeks to say the least, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now, which seems like a miracle even though it’s not, it’s just how time works. I finished mending Cyndi’s sweatpants and now most of the craft room is packed up. Nothing stays the same forever, because everything is always cyphering: the good, the bad, the ugly and the breathtakingly beautiful. I prayed while I was in Mexico, something I rarely do. I didn’t pray for things to change, didn’t ask the universe to make anything go a certain way, I just prayed for relief. Relief from the grief around my house, from the grief around my ex, from the fear around losing things in the divorce that I single-handedly worked really hard for, from the anxiety around not finding a beautiful place to move to after the anguish of leaving a place I love dearly. And the relief came! Again, not because of a miracle, but because surrendering means making way for both ease and aggravation in whatever rhythm the universe wants to play for you. The music won’t stop, but you can trust that the song won’t stay the same forever, either. The older I get, the more I trust this, welcome the beat thrumming inside my bones.

This, you can congratulate me for.