Later I will take a short siesta: dispatch from Mexico City

I hope this finds you in delight. I arrived in Mexico City and in the taxi to my hotel, along with the cognitive dissonance of reggaeton blaring while rain fell gently on the windshield, I could feel my shoulders lower, my jaw unclench. It’s as if my cells, one by one, are waking up to a quiet joy, the kind that comes with feeling free. I smile periodically at the driver so as not to be rude and he takes it as an invitation to say something else in Spanish. I have no idea what he’s saying but it is not uncomfortable. 

When I arrive at my hotel - the only place I stay when I’m here - I see that the old man who attends the front door is the same one who was there two years ago, and I almost cry. After the year we’ve had, how cruel it was particularly to elderly people, I find that I am overcome when I see someone has made it to the other side. Judging by his amused response, my “buenas dias” is obviously a little too emphatic, my smile a little too wide, but I am delighted to see him. 

There are places that feel like home, even if they’re not familiar to you. And then there are places that remind you of home, where your soul and body feel comfortable because it is so familiar. For me, Mexico City is a place that reminds me of being at home. The days and nights sound like those of my childhood back home in Ethiopia and I think about what this means while I make my way through my neighborhood, usually with no real destination in mind but highly motivated by the idea of finding more food. 

My days here start with a morning walk and because I’ve only ever stayed in one place, just around the corner from Parque Mexico, I make my way down Avenida Amsterdam and watch the neighborhood come to life, listening to the sounds of bristles against cement, clearing away yesterday’s dirt from front doors. Vendors calling out their wares while they make their way through the streets. The man with the fruit stand quietly setting up (and me, loitering around him and pretending to be busy until he’s ready so I can get my mangoes).

While I walk, I stop a million times to capture the things that capture me, usually failing to translate how these images make me feel: the intricately designed doorways and balconies, the falling-down buildings that are adorned by plants and flowers and people, the way old and new mix so perfectly that you hardly see the difference. There is so much hope in the physicality of this place. The declaration that nothing is dead until it is discarded, forgotten. 

I compare this to how discarded and forgotten so much of my own city feels these days. The storefronts still covered in plywood, sidewalks filled with the lives and desperation of people who have nowhere to go. I walk around the city with headphones in and my eyes firmly planted on the ground, barely seeing much of the city anymore because it scares me to imagine what will happen next, how this whole thing will finally play out. The buildings in Seattle are certainly newer, but they feel much older and lonelier than the ones here, because of the life inside and around them. 

Naturally, I have been thinking a lot about loneliness and solitude, and why I do not feel it when I’m alone here but how sometimes I feel lonely even when I’m not alone back at home. When I say this out loud to people, invariably their response is some version of “you’re on vacation! Everything seems rosy on vacation!” And while I accept that, yes, to some extent vacation does make it easier to view my circumstances with much rosier glasses, I know it’s never as lazy as that. I think the deeper truth is that a society where people seem comfortable, at ease with each other makes me feel less alone. The sense of community that I feel here is not extended to me. I do not speak their language or belong to their culture. I am, in all ways, an outsider. But I feel more at home here than I do at home because everyone else seems at ease with one another. I don’t know if it’s empathy or something else but I feed off of that familiarity, the shared existence among everyone else. The people on break from work, sitting next to each other on the sidewalk to eat tacos or tortas from the vendor on the street, their ease with each other. None of it is explicitly extended to me, yet here I am warming myself in its glow. I wish we could build the kind of society back home where we have this kind of easiness with each other. Where we scoot over on the sidewalk to let someone else sit next to us, instead of getting up and walking away.