Tears squeezed back from eyes in a mall. People with dark smiles and plastic baghopes walking by. The national pastime of Ecuador: shopping. Outside the mall, the fust has drawn its lid and a dry heat seeps out behind whitegrey clouds. Nevertheless, it has the aspect of fall or winter. The hot hot cremation of dormancy, or sleep maybe. I sense underneath the raspy brown sunburn of my skin that leaves are swirling, brownred and brittle. Bidding adieu.

Everything is bidding adieu. Everything is a goodbye.

We leave an import shop. A shop packed with everything Americana you could wish for. Corn flakes, lollipops, hot chocolate, M&M’s, a nice fat bottle of Baileys cream. The colors are stunning, blinding. Colors of memories unavailable at a certain latitude. Right there for your purchase, should you choose. I think of all the mornings I wanted to be alone, pouring my own coffee, making pancakes or a muffin with cheese on it. Am I just another one not seeing the present?

As we leave the store, T is talking about something. Receipts. About how every store in Ecuador, every crossing, every purchase, every bus ride, every Every comes equipped with receipt. The paper trail of this country. They don’t produce novels, but they produce novels of receipts. T decides to start handing back receipts to the stores: I Was In Your Space. I tell him he should strap a little machine to some suspenders and punch in the value of his presence at each locale. Print a little paper memory. And then I burst into tears.

Those who need to be needed. Who rise like fire under wet logs, light only on a dark night. Dripping wax along the soggy-bottomed morning of sadness. When I seem strong, they only get colder, more distant, but the second I cry is the millisecond they come running.

T hasn’t exactly been nice to me as of late. I’ve been upset. With him, with the world. He just seemed like a reminder of things I wanted to forget by coming down here. Last weekend, he told me I couldn’t dance. A longer conversation than I wanted to have. Beach semi-drunkenness, I had won a couple games of pool, not by reality (lost eight balls) but by remembrance of where the holes might be. There is music and a couple of Ecuadorian sharks who speak some spanglish with, some englespañol. I have sand on my feet, and T tells me I must have lying friends to say I know how to dance.

It’s the tone of the voice. Something about. Something Mean. That tone that wants, knows, wants to take down the world. That can’t stand people smiling to themselves. A tone that wants a little less innocence and a little more defense. It reminds me of so many words uttered in bathrooms, hallways, playgrounds, bars, apartments. A tone that appears nowhere else in the world but in the voices of us. In my head. I watched that tone come across the face of a three-year old pinching his sister. His mother told me he didn’t know what he was doing, but I saw the tone on his face. Pure knowledge of pain.

Power. This is what I see on T’s face when he steals some of me away.

We pretend later that it didn’t happen, maybe because I didn’t react right. I argued but I didn’t belt him across the face. Fight. That’s what I need to learn more of. Pounce and pound. A little p & p. An unspoken message: you can’t have me.

Because later he tells me I’m self-absorbed, and maybe I am, but why mention? Why say half of the truth. I’m so tired of halves dealt out sparingly. I never want another adjective applied to my skin. Not a belt or a bandaid. Nothing adhesive. Self-absorbed, perhaps, but I spend most of my days emptying my soul into my work and feeling as tired as the day after Christmas. I spend days pushing people away because I don’t want to use them to fill me up, don’t want to risk my thievery or lies. I won’t hurt anyone the way I was hurt. For me, self-absorption is not something that heals, but something that rides my back whipping and flogging. Self-absorption uses the adjectives that broke me. You, you, you.

But when I cry in the mall for no reason at all, T puts his arm around me, squeezes, panics. He takes me out for a drink and cheerfully reminds me that my future will be brighter. That time heals all. That those things that don’t kill you, make you stronger. He meets me in the half-light of cliché, the waitresses’ hats and charms fat and demonesque under stained glass refraction. The moment is met, and by the end, we are talking about actors and films, my hold filling for the moment with trivia and the care T brings when he is needed. The incredible Good he has to offer when he has the power to console.

At night, I wander around my room, scared. Scared of alone. Scared of goodbye. Scared of all these new beginnings, over and over again, from the time I was seven and said goodbye to the countryside I breathed in. Schools that fall away and rise up. Friends that turn to acquaintances that turn to dreams. Dreams where I can actually touch them. Where I matter. How many moments can I count that seemed so real, so full, like there I was riding on the outside of me, wide open and whole to the sun and earth? Little pieces of me scattered to the birds like rice to eat and choke overfattened on.

I said goodbye to Her. I said goodbye to so frequently finding out how little I matter in the way I needed to matter. As a whole soarer, a writer and thinker, a user of words and love. A soulmate in incredible need of her poetry. An equal. A many-type person. A person so naked and bare, a gift given and exchanged in the holiday crush. I said goodbye to Her, and it was also like saying goodbye to a part of me that I wanted to be, an ideal me in a less-than-ideal world.

How to rise from the trashpile of those you love? How to leave behind mistakes made, moments lost, chances not seen because maybe they weren’t chances?

Questions, questions. I already feel the cultureshock of leaving this time, and of leaving Ecuador. But this place has been a place for me. A landscape to ride on. A wave to crash with. All those faces and faces, people met and people left. People touched and never seen again.

I skate in and out of a high fever. Finally the doctor is called and he recommends some antibiotics to test. If they don’t work, the possibility of something stronger… dengue or malaria… looms on the future. I walk around with sweat sliding down my back to my feet. Chills and exhaustion. Students asking for help at the last moment when they realize they are going to fail. I am working hard to care. The future week is a type of a carrot. I want my momma. I want my friends, all of them, lying beside me on my bed, holding me. I imagine their fingers brushing my arm that has not been touched for so long. In this fever, I would let them. Near me.

After a few drinks, which I shouldn’t have because I’m on antibiotics, I am not crying anymore. So, T and I go down to the artisans market and Bajia. The artisans market is a square of shops and stalls. The crush of junk and trinkets and multi-woven scarves. Acrylic reprints of artists I don’t know, but see over and over again. Hats and wall-hangings. I am getting better at bargaining, walking away, giving only what I want to. I am hot and sweaty and okay, a little rum, a little antibiotic. T and I meet, and then part, and then meet again. Bajia is thousands of kiosks and people, burned and stolen cd’s, quarter-priced shoes, fuzzy dvds for a buck. Coconuts floating in crushed ice. Bags collect and collect around me.

At night, I wear my new shoes to bed, thinking that they should cheer me. A reminder of a busy day. A friend who is not perfect visiting places with this me who is not perfect. Even with my shoes on, my thoughts are not as happy as they should be.

I know I will soon have so much fullthroat to see Bville. Late summer. Harvests and yellow plums sinking on a full tree. New framing. My sister and Peter, both of whom I love like a shock of white heat flowers. The smell of my land. Morning dew and pebbled sand. Salt slapping against a white sail. Ehban, Selah, Liona, Camille if she will have me, others. My cousin and grandparents. Bonfires. Silly silly Rumors and dancing. Hottub and landscaping with my mum and Chuck.

Like the previous weekend. When I pushed myself. When my sinuses filled again and again with saltwater and I blew out and sank sank sank down down to a life and self I’ve never been before. Landscapes fresh. A portrait of Happiness: dolphins, whales, a blue-peeling skiff with heat erupting, rays, turtles, flutefish, blowfish, porcupinefish, wrasse, stone scorpionfish, triggerfish, moray, snake eel, lizardfish, octopi…. And in it all, me learning to float three inches up and over reefs without brushing and injuring coral beds and sneaking little aggressors against my goggles. I expected, in a way, the same type of freedom that one feels when swimming, but scuba diving is not this way. It is confined and tight, not easy, not a skim and powerthrust in any which way you want to go. Slowswimming, a state of neutrality and hover. Uncomfortably more like meditation than motion. I felt so much a part and yet so separate, and it is something hard to speak about, like I am just not ready to think the words it was.

But what also hit me bright last weekend was Vroni, a girl, a ninita from Germany, so young. A form of innocent reality. Who kissed me smack on the lips and massaged my head in a sweet cuddle. Ran beside me on the beach and flirted with everyone everyone. It made us all feel so good. We all flirted back and ran, and patted the fluorescence on the beach. She tucked her arm through mine and told me that her only friend in childhood was a donkey, and it was nice to meet a girl to be a friend with here. She told me not to be offended or anything, or take it the wrong way or anything, or be weirded out or anything, but she thought I was beautiful.

Beautiful. Me. Such different Words. So easy to say, it seemed for her.

Such types in this world. Those who need a black-moment to rise and offer an arm. Those who run at the mere thought of a black-moment. Those who create black-moments, so they can rise and offer an arm. Those who fan black-moments, so they can condemn you when you fall. Those who run to you in their black-moments, and neglect you in the fullshine. Those who tell you you’re not to be trusted in their black-moments, who push you further away. Those who only want you when you’re strong and can give them anything. Or those who just want you strong for you. Who speak to you about beauty. Laugh with you. Speak other adjectives.

Those who have been helping me into the skin of the “I” I would like to be. The half-skin that burns bright and never wants. Who doesn’t just know she should shine, that she is privileged, that she is loved, that she is capable of stability under goodbyes and changes and deaths and fever and great, great beauty, but who feels it and does it. The organic one-me, not bisected and self-angry. The organic one-me, who does not shimmy and sliverfast from one type of helper or healer or candle-wax, to one type of breaker or cruel-powered bitter to another. The one-me that I pray I will find before too long.