there is no running away to jamaica

Here an essay I wrote on my trip to Jamaica. Since I'm not publishing it anywhere, I thought, I may as well post it here. [I'm still deciding, whether I find my writing style possibly too sophomoric. Something bothers me but I can't pinpoint it.]

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Most people probably travel to Jamaica for a romantic get-away, a destination wedding, or a trip with friends. I decided to go on this vacation to get away from the pain of just having lost the love of my life. He was 36 years old when he left this world behind. But, as with all troubles we carry in our heads, there is no escape no matter how far one travels. “Wherever you go, there you are”. 

***
I booked the flight in the middle of the night and a few days later I found myself, as usual, running late with everything. I am one of these people who leave packing until the very last minute. I do try to start early, but real results I seem to only be able to produce when deadline driven, which brings my final and most productive packing time into the hour before departure. 

As I finally lean back in the old, torn-up airport livery cab, listening to the driver’s salsa selection, I realize I haven’t slept in almost 24 hours. Wait…that’s not that long. My nurse and doctor friends would laugh at me. I’m a wimp, I decide. 

Thanks to the God-forsaken hour (red-eye flights do have their advantages) we arrive at JFK in record time. I begrudgingly pay the taxi man the new going rate of $65 for an airport transfer and hurry into the terminal where, to my great frustration, I realize that I am already dressed for the Caribbean climate, not having considered the hours I still have to endure in wintery New York City and, not to forget, the ice-box plane.

The flight is quiet and I spend most of the time nodding off into all directions, conjuring up a particularly tricky knot in my upper back. Apparently, I look like I need to eat and hydrate, or maybe it’s just the culture, but the two Jamaican ladies on either side of me take turns waking me to ensure I ingest water and food. I am touched by their kindness and dutifully, although deliriously, sip on the mystery soda as I munch down the artificially engineered blueberry muffin I have received in a sealed plastic bag.

Arriving at Montego Bay, I make the first mistake, even though, I just read about this particular faux-pas the day before: I exchange money at the airport. Instead of 98 Jamaica Dollars for my US Dollar, I only get about 82. The driver who receives me outside the airport doors has already been alerted of my arrival by my nurturing seat neighbors. His name is Bullet and as he and I make our way onto the streets with a 20-passenger sized bus, I learn that, there appears to be a reason for his nickname. He drives like a mad man and I’m afraid he’ll either kill us, or the many people walking out on the streets. Also, I’m pretty sure he is driving on the wrong side of the road! After a few blocks, of course, I notice that Jamaicans drive on the left. I make a mental note to remember to read my island culture pamphlet as not to disappoint as totally ignorant dunce/tourist all week long.

Bullet blasts his Reggae tunes for me, tells me about his four children, texts and makes phone calls as he swerves from one side to the other, and when I ask whether we can stop somewhere to get food, he pulls over in the middle of a narrow, winding road, reducing equally mad-man driven traffic to one lane as we patiently wait for a guy with a machete to cut coconut, mango, and pineapple for us. About an hour and a half into the journey he delivers me to another bus driver, who takes me for the rest of the three-hour ride to the other side of the island. His name is Dean and he tells me about Jamaica’s increasing governmental mayhem, unemployment, and suicide rate. Since I still have not read any of my informational material, I am shocked to hear his stories and impressions.

Finally we arrive, in the middle of nowhere, a small place called The Cove. I didn’t expect the literal translation of their website’s blurb about the hotel’s remote location. There are no shops, no tourists, no vending machines, nothing. The next town is about a 15-minute drive away. As I settle into my lonely room in this perfect romantic hide-away, I am overcome with sadness and a tiny bit of panic.

The manager and I get off on the wrong foot. She doesn’t like me and I can tell. I have that effect on some people. I’m not sure what triggers it but it’s probably that I ask too many questions. It goes back to my school days. I had teachers who actually began ignoring me, or prohibiting me from speaking altogether. I don’t want to add any stress to my sadness and decide to compensate for her hostility with an extra dosage of honey on my part. This remains my strategy for most of the week and eventually she comes out of her shell to be nice and open.

The first few days are tough. J’s absence is overwhelming. He would have loved this place. He would have been in the ocean first thing, beckoning me to explore the area. But, without him, I am tempted to give in to my hermit tendencies and I never once set foot into the sea.

Turns out, I am the only guest for the rest of the week and so the place feels like my own private beach house. Being rich must be a lonely life, I think, as I glide through the empty pool on the deck overlooking the ocean. I make friends with the staff, the horses, and the stalker cats who harass me every time I eat. The cats remind me of my children as they relentlessly whine for what they want. As with my kids, I stay strict and stoic until I can’t take it anymore and finally give in (sharing my food, in this case). There is also a family of toads, which congregates in front of my room in the evenings. As long as I don’t start attracting unusual numbers of locust or other insects, I guess, I’m fine.

Because I don’t want to spend all day in my room obsessing over my iTunes library, I splurge on riding on the beach with a horse that continuously tries to throw me off. Sore from riding, I decide to book a relaxing boat trip for the next day.
The captain of the small motorboat, which, judging by its dilapidated look seems to have carried him for his entire 28-year-long career on sea, decides to take me along for the extended route without extra charge. And so, my one-and-a-half-hour ride becomes a six-hour long trip, which I am not prepared for, sun-protection-wise. Then again, had I known, I probably wouldn’t have been better equipped either, for I am certain, I would have completely underestimated the situation. I think, the only exposures to sun I have had all year were the walks between various entrance doors and my car. I’m not really sure what all the degrees in the burn rating chart mean, but based on appearance and level of pain, I would classify my sunburn at least of the second or third degree, wanna-be expert of all things that I sometimes think I am. I look like I’ve had a ‘spa-day-gone-wrong experience’, having become the victim of a bad chemical peel. None of the multiply applied sunscreen layers seemed to have made any difference.

Following the advice of the boat captain, I rub fresh cut aloe on the burned areas. “Works battah than da aloe gel or anyting,” he said before he left me at shore. And so that’s what I do. The fresh aloe makes me smell like onion all over and stains my shirt with brown spots, but I don’t much care - it’s not like I’m on the pick-up prowl or anything.
**
Except for the sound of the ocean, the nights are quiet. Too quiet. It occurs to me that if I am the only guest at this place, does this mean I am all by myself at night? I know, the manager goes home every evening but does the staff leave as well? Probably! I try not to hyperventilate as I consider the fact that I may be completely alone here! I realize, I am suddenly afraid of death again. I finally care about staying alive. Until that moment, I kept fantasizing about the many ways death could strike upon me to release me from my grief: plane crash, shark attack, car accident, food poisoning. When my fingers felt tingly all evening, I excitedly (!) thought to myself: “Oooh! Maybe I’m having a heart attack.” I admit, it was getting a little sick.

**The lights started flickering. Even though I would like nothing more than to reverse time and save the love of my life from his untimely death, I do not want to see him in any after-life form, even if this is just in the form of flickering lights. STOP making me even more nervous than I already am about this unnerving, complete isolation here! I’m going to sleep with the lights on tonight, I decide, flickering or not. Then again, maybe leaving my lights on could be an attraction to intruders. – I think, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.

**
I am just about to spend a couple of hours crying about J, when Andy, a friend I had made on my boat trip the day before, stops by the hotel to invite me on a ride on his dirt bike, a Yamaha DT175. The unplanned trip takes us all day as we explore the paths leading up into the nearby mountains. We dance with Jamaican villagers, climb for coconut, and eat goat soup from giant pots boiling on small fires at the roadside. I make friends with three teenage girls, exchange smiles, dance moves, and Facebook info. They even take me into their homes, which I feel truly honored about. We get into areas I’m sure no tourist bus ever goes. It seems like we’re getting a glimpse into the island’s daily culture – pure and untainted. On the way back, we get caught in the rain and pull over at a wooden shack by the roadside. It happens to be a tiny bar. Another motorcyclist pulls in to take a Ganja smoke break. As we stand there looking at the rain playing with the sun rays, the Jamaica man and I casually begin shuffling around the Domino pieces sitting on top of the small wooden table we are leaning on. Before I know it, we are in the middle of a full game and, finally, Andy as well as the bar owner, join us. It is such an unexpected, peaceful moment, reminding me about the beauty of life and how this motorcycle trip could be pondered over as a metaphor for life’s journey. Granted, I have a tendency to get nostalgic when it rains while the sun is shining. Accept the challenges you are given in life, incorporate them into your own reality, and then move on. What you cannot change you must own, even if it takes years to adjust.

 

 

Also, stop planning and overanalyzing everything. Go with the flow, I tell myself, and somehow things will work out and you will have experiences you could never have anticipated on your itinerary.
If I hadn’t agreed to hop on a motorcycle with a man I barely knew, if I hadn’t stopped at the roadside up in this poor mountain village, if I had let my sadness or the chance of rain deter me from going altogether, I would have never had any of these wonderful experiences. I am aware that not every outcome of a situation can be great (for example, it didn’t help my 2nd-degree sunburn to be on a bike all day) – but if you open yourself and take some risks, your life may just be much richer than you would otherwise allow it to be. Bad and good experiences, both, make up the fabric of our lives. We learn from it all, we become wiser (hopefully), we gain a better understanding of life but most importantly, we breathe this world around us – we live. If we lead our lives this way, we won’t have to worry that we may have wasted any moments of our short lives, for we will have made sure to have been in it, consciously – even if this consciousness happens during the most ordinary moments of the day, while you’re washing the dishes, feeling the water on your hands, listening to music. And if the moment is beautiful, be thankful. It is a really wholesome feeling.

It has only been three months since I lost my soul-mate but I can say that as awful, disorienting, and heart-wrenching of an experience grief is, it has also been an education of my spirituality and connection to life. Moreover, if it weren’t for this devastating loss I would have never left my job. I would have remained unhappy but resistant to change, for this is what we do. We just accept the ruts of our lives even when we want to change them. But, for some reason, we think we can’t. Turns out – we can. I finally left my secure place of income because I got a real good lesson on what truly matters and that we have little time to tend to these things. There are always other ways of finding means to an end. If I need to make money to support my children, then I will find a way that doesn’t make me hate my life 80% of the time, for this will most definitely make me sick eventually and most likely affect my relationship with my daughters, even if it is “just” in the form of losing my health at an earlier age than necessary.

One of the most inspiring things I took with me when I left Jamaica was Andy’s response to a question I posed when I heard his story. He was from Germany and had just emigrated to the island together with his wife and son.
So, what are you going to do for a living? I asked in disbelief about such a brave decision (and –reckless– is what I really thought).
We’ll figure it out, he said.

I was just blown away by this confidence and lack of worry. What about health insurance, what about income, what are you going to do? It will work out somehow, was his opinion. Just follow your dream and things will fall into place somehow. Not always as expected, not always with ease, but somehow.

When I dug deeper, I found out that he also had experienced loss before he changed his life style into something that included more living. It was his father’s death that served as the catalyst for Andy’s metamorphosis. Maybe one of the reasons we suffer so much when someone close to us dies or becomes seriously ill, is to encourage us to re-examine our own lives and make changes we would otherwise have never made. In a way, grief may be a necessary part of the cycle of life just as death itself is. And, I suppose, you can apply this philosophy to suffering, in general. It changes us, it teaches us, it is an opportunity for growth and wisdom.

Oh – I really wish I’ll be able to keep that faith and introspective insight I brought home with me from this journey. That it all will work out somehow. In the meantime, because I still don’t really care about what happens, I am willing to take all kinds of risks and my faith is stronger than ever. Life will be what it will be. I can’t plan it all out. I just have to learn to swim with the current instead of trying to dictate the direction. And if I think back to my younger years, this concept worked. I planned to a certain degree, but more or less, I followed my passions and everything always panned out well for me. The moment I tried to take over and control every last thing – a side effect of motherhood, maybe – I think, I threw off some sort of natural equilibrium.

Finding this equilibrium shall be my quest until the day my reality-check brain kicks back in and tells me to get a job! But when this happens, which surely will be the case earlier than I am ready for, I want to be prepared to counteract panic-inducing neural activity of mine and assuage myself with the promise of balance in exchange for patience (and – yes – possibly, bouts of poverty).
Just follow your passion and don’t ever give up. You only have one life. Live it well. Make it count.

 

[You can check in with me at a later point in life to see if my self-motivating soliloquy worked or if I sold out and caved back into the system. I hope, I will be able to tell a different tale when asked whether I can stick to putting my philosophies into action. And thus – I prepare for battle against a system of little boxes and molds that will surely try to suck me back in using dirty fear tactics such as thoughts about financial stability and health insurance.  And, of course, in reality, nothing is sucking us in nowhere — it’s all in our heads. People didn’t worry about health care in the middle ages. They just lived and tried not to die too early. Either way, death was part of life. ---- We have a luxurious type of freedom not everyone in this world has. We sometimes forget that.]

Jamaicans bury their deceased in their yards.
This is a so much healthier approach to death, I think.
It is everywhere. You can never pretend death isn't part of life.