043-My Mexico To-Do List
Monday Updates: Trying to fully explore Mexico City
I can hardly believe it’s been three months since I arrived in Mexico City.
Time has been doing what it does best. It moves, it accumulates, and I find myself with the same anxiety of being responsible for an overflowing conveyor belt.
So much has happened, though I couldn’t list it chronologically. Everything has a way of merging itself together. It almost reminds me of the Play-Doh I had as a child, eventually all the colors mix together and make brown.
This year, I’ve been attempting to move through this city with something resembling grace, but even that word feels too pure for what it actually is. Grace implies a kind of control, and what I’ve felt, mostly, is confusion, and a low hum of awe. And strangeness. My own, and that of everyone else.
I have an aunt back in Wisconsin whose voice I sometimes hear in my ear. Growing up, I was never close to my extended family. Back when I was growing up in the late 90s and 2000s in Japan, consistently keeping up with relatives was essentially impossible. We barely had Skype.
Over the years, as an adult, I got a bit closer to family. And for the past few years my aunt has been telling me I had Romanian gypsy blood. That’s why you’re always moving, she’d say, and would tell me about where my Romanian grandmother was born, and what she went through during the war.
I often wonder how much of a contributing factor it is. One half of my background is lined with people being displaced, and I wonder if, on a biological level, there is some truth to it. And our anxiety is passed down through generations of people who didn’t stay where they were supposed to.
Despite the discomfort, movement feels more natural than stillness. Like a sunflower turning toward the sun.
Now I live in a new room, in a house with 6 roommates. In a small, beautiful room. There’s a smart TV and dried flowers hanging from the white plaster walls. The windows in my room are arched and look out to the streets of South Condesa. My friend told me it looks like a mermaid house, and I agree with her.
But the strange thing about settling, even temporarily, is how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. At first, the city is a mosaic, marvelous and kaleidoscopic. But then it becomes normal. The filters slip in, boredom seeps through the cracks. What once gave you thrills becomes background noise. That’s what I’m trying to fight. Not just in Mexico City, but in myself. To resist the slow drift into complacency. To keep wonder alive before it calcifies into routine.
I have a list. Of things I want to do here. Some of them are small, some are absurd, all of them matter. This list feels like the one I made for Wisconsin, still left unfulfilled. That one still weighs on me. I didn’t do what I said I’d do. Not because I didn’t want to. But because life folded in on itself and other things, less beautiful, more urgent (like the injury), got in the way.
Still, I want to do what I can here before July, before I return to the Midwest for three weeks. The thought of leaving this country, even temporarily, makes me nervous. I’ve lived in other places: Japan, New York, and none of them felt quite right. Japan is home, and I long for it. Some part of me even feels that there is no place that feels as natural as Kansai, but it holds something heavy for me, something unresolved. There is work to be done there, emotional excavation, maybe some type of redemption, but I’m not ready for that yet.
And New York. Well, New York is its own story. I’ve spent time there too, enough to know that it’s not a city that tolerates softness. From being flashed on Wall Street, to being threatened on my way home, New York left me with a metallic taste in my mouth. There were subway rides that left me shaken, days that felt like a series of assaults. You have to be hard to live in New York, or at least numb. I didn’t want to become either.
Mexico has given me something else. A kind of gentleness. Not without chaos, but with a sense of hope.
So there is a list, a challenge to myself before I leave for a short period. It is all the things I want to do before I leave. The ones I really want to do are circled.
Without further ado, my Mexico to-do list:
If I’m lucky, this time around I’ll finally make it through at least the first half. But for now, I have work on my plate. For now I will be doing what I can, and then finding small pockets of time to make all these things happen.
Less than two more months left.
FIND ME ON
Monday Updates is a section of this blog where I’m letting my hair down, figuratively. I am often preoccupied with getting things perfect, rather than simply sharing and enjoying the process while talking about life. Instead of the tradition of hating Mondays, I’m going to try to associate them with creative freedom and allow myself to speak my mind without the worry that a perfectionist usually has. Things here may be a bit disjointed, incomplete, and occasionally nonsensical, but they may also be playful, curious, and whimsical. I will do my best to make it more of the latter.