Musings from Mazatlán

It feels like returning home. Though I’ve never before stayed in this particular location. Never been to this resort. Still, it is Mazatlán and it is like home to me. I know my way around, though there have been changes, and I am not afraid to wander around by myself here. It feels natural. I feel like I belong.

The man who took over my check-in selected a very nice room for me, at a corner of the resort, overlooking the ocean. It’s lovely, isolated and quiet. Exactly what I prefer. Walking back to the little super-mercado on site, I passed by buildings and rooms directly across a walkway from large swimming pools with bars and cafes. Sitting on the balcón there would be like people watching along the Venice boardwalk.

        Or, maybe you can’t ever go home again, just as they say. Things have changed. Buildings I frequented––condominiums and restaurants––have closed and fallen into ruin. Friends of friends have moved away, or died. Family members have died.

10/26/2013
I went to the beach, walking barefoot in the sand and sea, and my head began to fill with words that seemed worth writing. I had ideas of constructing a new opening for an old story, but when I return to the hotel, shower and sit down to a blank page, I stare at the screen. Yes, words come. But they are not the inspired words I recall from the beach walk. They don’t seem to connect to anything that could be launched into the world for others to read. This is my great dilemma. I believe I’ll make some salsa and have a snack.


It is a hard thing to learn and a sad age at which to learn it. The truth of the axiom that one can never go home again. But so it is. I return to Mazatlán, hoping for what? To recapture the terrible romanticism of younger years? I won’t say “of my youth” because I was past forty when I immersed myself here, choosing this place to study, practice and learn a language I loved from my high school years.
I know you are asking, “Why Mazatlán?” (I can imagine raised eyebrows and “Really?” spoken with the dubious, questioning inflection of the day.) But yes, I chose Mazatlán because I’d come here year after year to vacation. One particular year, a year that altered the course of my life, I decided to accompany my parents and stay for two weeks. If I was to be in Mexico for two weeks, it seemed reasonable to spend part of my time going to language classes. So I enrolled in half-day sessions at a now defunct language center near the old center of the city. 

Today many things that were alive and vibrant in nineteen-ninety-two are defunct, long gone, like time-lapse photography, buildings have risen and fallen, businesses opened and closed, popular establishments have come and gone. Meanwhile, the people of this city continue to work and play and raise their families amid the waxing and waning tourism that supports the area, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. 
It is painful for me to see the changes in the city. And then there are the changes in myself and in my friend and ex-lover, Blas. We are both older and maybe wiser, though that remains to be seen. Our fathers are gone now. His sister has died. We both lost our mothers this summer past. He has a child and is divorced from the child’s mother. I was married, and then divorced, and now I am married again.


“I held you close to me, once in a distant dream, far from the shores of my fears. I sailed on this ocean where all I imagined could happen and now you are here." Beth Chapman...

10/27/13

We floated on the sea beneath a wave of pale yellow butterflies floating on the wind overhead. The buoyancy of the salt water made our swimming as effortless as the migration of the butterflies above us. It felt magical, and for a few moments I was happy again with Blas, like when we were together here and we’d go to the ocean late in the evening to swim in the incredible warmth of the summer ocean off the beach at Olas Altas. 
But it isn’t that time and my happiness faded when we said goodbye and I stepped off the bus onto the Malecón where I went for my daily run. It was hot; and later, my sweat mixed with the moisture of tears as I stared out at the vast seascape allowing myself to indulge in the feelings of loss that have swept over me time and again, like the incessant recurrence of a tide, since I was a young woman. Always, always, my sadness traces back to that time. All of my stories run like tributaries of the same river, separating and then reconnecting back at the original source.