"People really can't try to kill themselves in front of me."

There is a place called Esterillos Oeste, a beach town on the Pacific Coast. It takes only two and a half hours to get there by bus from San Jose. In this new life that I lead, traveling solely two and a half hours to my weekend destination seems like a simple snap of the fingers. And here’s the kicker: Katie’s friend from home, Meghan, has a friend who owns a house in Esterillos Oeste. The two of them were hanging out there for spring break. Case closed. So Deanna and Katie made their way to Esterillos Oeste one Thursday afternoon, and it wasn’t long before Flo, Mike, Adam and I followed suit, all of us finding ourselves together once again on a beach in Costa Rica. Meghan is really a gem of a human, and her friend Kinza was so generous to house our large, loud (save Adam) crew of sweaty, swearing (save Adam) youths.

Esterillos Oeste is small and tranquila. Upon arrival it became clear pretty quickly that our home base would be Low Tide, an outdoor bar right in front of the beach. Low Tide is run by a bunch of Americans, and the main reason I felt the need to spend so much time there was because it offered this irritatingly addictive game to its patrons, complete with the promise of a free cerveza should one manage to triumph. The game is very simple. An old rusty nail protrudes from the wall of the bar. From the ceiling hangs a long string with a metal washer tied to its end. You step back to the pillar, aim the string, and let go. If the washer catches the nail and remains, you win a free beer as well as infinite respect, and your name is written on a broken surfboard mounted to the bar’s wall. The list of winners. Clearly I was hooked from the get-go, and would not rest nor eat nor sleep nor think of anything else until emerging victorious. Of course, Flo was the first to prevail. Watching him write his full name and ‘Austria’ alongside it on that surfboard and then proceed to enjoy his free beer only made my obsessive desire to succeed burn more furiously, urging me to be the next to achieve glory and write my name as well. And so I was! Breathing a sigh of relief, I asked for a Corona with lime and sat down to relax for the first time since being introduced to the game roughly six hours earlier. Shortly thereafter Katie, Meghan and Kinza managed to succeed as well. Deanna would finally reclaim her dignity by doing it the following day, after remaining tight-mouthed and frustrated for the entire first day because she just couldn’t seem to get it.

The waves at the beach were pretty intense. Teddy had warned me about the riptide in Esterillos, but I honestly wasn’t prepared for what I experienced. Standing still in the water was simply impossible, as I was always being pulled angrily in one direction or the other, if not out to sea. As could be expected, Adam didn’t have any trouble surfing the waves immediately despite the strong riptide, and Mike had no concept of the state of the waves because he went straight to the bar upon arrival, shielding, as he always does, his very white Canadian skin from the harsh sun. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person having trouble with the waves, because on Saturday three people almost drowned right in front of us. Katie, Deanna, Meghan, Kinza and me were lying on beach towels trying to catch some rays, chatting about dumb things and listening to the Backstreet Boys (yes, you read that correctly), when we heard a series of shrill whistles. Sitting up and looking out into the ocean, we saw two teenage boys flailing desperately in the sea out to the left of us, and also a woman a little bit deeper in the water, waving her hands above her head. We stood up to watch the action as a couple of the local lifeguards attempted to swim out and save the drowners. Now, Meghan is an ocean lifeguard in New York, and I could tell that she was having a very hard time stopping herself from running in and attempting to save some lives. She kept muttering to herself that the lifeguards weren’t doing anything correctly, and after a couple of minutes of watching them and realizing they were making literally no progress in getting anyone closer to shore, Meghan went sprinting into the ocean and assisted in rescuing the woman, who when they finally got her out safely, proceeded to collapse and pass out. I ran up to Low Tide and told them to call an ambulance. A bunch of the guys sitting at the bar asked me who my friend was and if she was a lifeguard. I told them yes, and one of them said, “Thank God for her. These fuckin' guys really don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” I had suspected as much.

The woman eventually came to, and Meghan, using her very limited Spanish, tried to instruct her to sit up and take deep breaths. At one point she got some ice from Low Tide to rub on the woman’s back, as this is a tactic she has used in the past to soothe and revive people. She'd asked Kinza what the Spanish word for ice was, and Kinza accidentally told her it was “helado” instead of “hielo.” So Meghan proceeded to rub ice on the panicked woman’s back, saying over and over again “helado, helado,” leading the woman to believe that some crazy American girl was rubbing ice cream on her back. Despite the whole ice cream slip-up, Meghan was truly a heroine, and I proceeded to buy her a beer to congratulate her on a job well done. Later on in the day, she was actually offered a permanent job working as a lifeguard in Esterillos Oeste!

That night we all relaxed in front of Low Tide and chatted with some new people we’d met. At one point, two girls who looked to be in their mid twenties came walking out of the bar, whispering with one another. Because I always have to have my nose in everyone else’s business, I listened intently to what they were saying.
“I know, I know, it’s really too much,” one girl was saying to the other.
“I just don’t understand why she has to act like that! But I really can’t deal with it anymore,” her friend answered.
As they strolled to the beach, another girl come running after them from the restaurant, yelling in what can only be described as a crazed, psychotic voice, “If you have something to say to me, why don’t you just say it to my face?!?”

A strange interaction ensued between the three of them, during which the rational girls spoke to Ms. Chemical Imbalance in a calm manner about what had evidently been abhorrent behavior on her part throughout the meal, while the lunatic proceeded to scream responses at them, until the two guys they were with eventually joined the conversation. As I have no shame, I snuck behind a tree that was just a few feet away from them, so as to get all the juice. I like being in the know. Eventually Crazyface started screaming at the guy who was apparently her boyfriend about how he never stuck up for her, and how he’d better make a decision: “Who’s it gonna be, huh!!?! ME OR THEM?” When he didn’t have a response, this un-medicated emotionally disturbed creature proceeded to sprint away from the group towards the ocean, yelling about how she didn’t deserve love.

I walked back to my friends to find Meghan standing up with a look of exasperation on her face, peering out into the dark, trying to see if the girl was indeed running straight into the water. “Oh shit,” Meghan said.
“Don’t worry about her, she’s just making a scene,” I said.
“No, but if she’s drunk and she goes into the water, she may drown,” Meghan responded, in a voice that didn’t convey concern, but rather extreme annoyance. “And I can’t ignore it when people are drowning, I’m not allowed to.”
“Should we go after her?” Adam asked.
“Ugh,” Meghan sighed. “People really can’t try to kill themselves in front of me.”
And with that, she and Adam started jogging out to the beach to search for the girl.

After a while, the other four members of the maniac’s group came walking up from the beach, and I ran up to them. “Hey!” I said. “Where’s your friend?”
“I’m not sure, we looked for her, but we can’t find her,” said one of the girls.
“Is she trying to drown herself?” I asked matter-of-factly.
They looked at me as though this was in some way not my business, so I reminded them, “I’m just wondering because MY friends went running after her to try to help her, and you don’t even care enough to know where she is.”
This shamed them.
“I think she’s just freaking out,” one of them said.
“You never know, I wouldn’t put it past her,” the other said.
“Well, hopefully MY friend is OK,” I said, indignantly. These people were really starting to bug me. It was their fault they had chosen to go on vacation with someone in need of intense chaperoning, but its my personal belief that if you want to be friends with such an unstable person, you should probably at least have the presence of mind to give a shit if that person wigs out and runs into the ocean in the middle of the night with reckless abandon. Anyways, eventually Adam and Meghan came back, soaking wet and armed with the tale of how the girl had been lying down in the water on top of jagged rocks talking about what a horrible person she was. Eventually they convinced her that she was just as deserving of life as everyone else on Earth, and successfully hauled her out of the water. A couple of minutes later, we witnessed the reunion between the girl and her boyfriend, complete with apologies and them walking off down the road, arms around each other. It would have been cute had the whole thing not been utterly absurd. So the point is that Meghan saved two lives within a 24-hour period. Quite impressive, if you ask me.

Soon, we all found our way to the beach for some lying around in the sand time, which is oftentimes just a solo ritual of mine, but always more fun when it includes my friends. Mike was really in rare form that night, and was cracking Flo and I up for a solid hour. At one point he came up with what he considered to be an unprecedented brilliant idea: skinny dipping. Flo agreed and I promptly declined.
“Come on, man,” Flo said. “It is fun, no?”
I told them that I would only consider doing so in my underwear and bra, but that seeing as the bra I had on at the time was particularly nice and had cost me a lot of money at Victoria’s Secret, I would sadly have to pass.
“I wouldn’t even let you do it in your underwear!” Mike announced. “All or nothing.”
“Well, I guess I’m gonna go have to go with nothing,” I laughed.
“All right then, Flo, as a unit…let’s go get wet,” Mike said, standing up.
I laughed for about five minutes, then sprinted to get Katie’s camera and to bring Adam along with me for some skinny-dip stalking. My plan was to snap a few naked pictures of Mike and Flo as they emerged from the water, to perhaps be used in some sort of near future friendly blackmail, and to maybe steal their clothes and hide them. I figured it would be creepy for me to do this alone, but acceptable and ridiculously funny if I could convince Adam to. Adam enjoys a good chiste, so we staked out a spot on the shore and waited for the distant nude shapes to come out of the water. In the end, all we managed to get were a couple of hilarious photos of me posing with their piles of clothes on the sand, laughing hysterically, along with one naked shot of Flo from behind which really showcased his severe sunburn lines. Not a complete success, but entertaining nonetheless.

Afterwards, we made our way to the “Discoteque,” which could be more aptly named the “Dark, Sad Bar,” where I played some pool with Flo against a bunch of guys from LA and watched Deanna try to teach Mike to salsa dance on the near-empty dance floor flooded with multi-colored strobe light.

That night Mike and Flo and I had gotten a room at this hostel that was shaped like a ship, because there wasn’t enough space in Kinza’s house for all of us to stay. Mike and Flo went back to the room to go to sleep earlier than I did, and when I got there, I laughed out loud at the sight of them passed out together on their double bed, Flo with a soda can in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other. Kinza and Meghan were leaving really early the next day to go back to the States, and locking the house up, so I went to sleep on my little bed, knowing that Katie and Deanna would probably be knocking on the door at 7 AM and crawling into bed with us to sleep some more. The following is a journal entry I wrote the next day:

3/21/10

Got on the bus today by myself and realized it was the first time I’d really been alone in a while. I woke up this morning in the room in Esterillos to the sound of Katie and Adam and Deanna coming in the door. Katie said she got ALL her stuff stolen last night, and instead of feeling bad for her I was just pissed off that she’d lost the 4000 colones that we needed to get us back to San Jose. We’re having cash problems. I also realized that I left my bathing suit hanging in the shower of Kinza’s house and wouldn’t be able to get it back to wear to the beach. Katie got mad at me for failing to be sensitive when I told her she shouldn’t have been so reckless that she spent almost all of our money, then lost the rest, which she was right in being mad at me for because even though I was completely correct in this assessment, I probably should have been more sympathetic to her. She rolled up a towel and swiped me a couple of times with it, I laughed and apologized, she laughed and said, "Good, that's all I wanted to hear," and then got in the shower. So I lied down next to Flo, waved goodbye to Adam who was going to surf, listened to the sounds of Katie showering the late night off of her and to the rhythmic breathing of Mike, Deanna and Flo, who had already fallen back to sleep, and decided that with no money for coffee or that banana smoothie from the Low Tide I had been thinking about since I had a sip of Flo’s yesterday, no money to rent a surfboard, and no bathing suit to lie on the beach in, I should just get a move on and head “home.” Sometimes I think you’ve got to know when to call it quits. I took a gross shower, dried off with my sleeping shorts, put on the same dress I was wearing last night, and headed to the beach to get some bus info.

I ran into the group of guys from California who we were hanging out with last night and talked with them at Low Tide where I asked Chris, the bartender from Michigan, if I could us my pathetic 1-dollar bill to pay for a café con leche. He told me to keep my dollar, for which I was grateful. I went over to the men who machete coconuts by the beach and then sell them with a straw through the top and asked them where and when I could catch the bus back to San Jose, then said bye to the Cali surfer boys and headed down the street.

As I walked, I thought about what Flo and I talked about the other night lying in the deserted parking lot at one AM. He was explaining to me that though he’s really enjoying his time here, this is just the beginning of his two-year adventure, and that when he goes off to travel alone, that’s when he’ll truly be able to think and to write about his life. I think that’s how I felt today—I needed some time to myself to be here in this place that has become like my home, around these people who have become like my people, just thinking. It’s funny how sometimes our bodies and our minds just instinctively know what we need.

I had to flag the bus down and run to catch up with it, and as I sat down next to someone who was also clearly an American and clearly on his own I thought, “freedom.” I have had nothing but fun with my friends and I truly love them, I’m not saying otherwise. I just needed a day. I looked at the guy next to me and wondered, what if I were one of these lone travelers? Or, what if I were one of these ex-pats working at a surf shop or a bar? What would it feel like to have no one relying on me, and no one to rely on? What would it feel like to have no concern for my future, to have no specific life aspirations to fulfill…to just live to be?

Flo asked me Friday night as we sat on the beach looking up at the stars, “Do you think you’re more than nothing?”
“Most of the time,” I answered.

On the bus, as always, I fell fast asleep, and this time I had strange dreams, sometimes waking up and thinking I was with people I know and then realizing I wasn’t. This happened to me the past summer as I was flying out to Wyoming. I fell asleep with my head against the window and dreamt that my mom and I were on the plane together, that we were on our way to an important destination to participate in some sort of critical mission. When I woke up and looked over at her, it wasn’t her, but rather the 10-year old boy who had been sitting next to me when I boarded the plane and fell promptly to sleep. When I woke up on the bus today, I saw empty seats and strangers, but I felt content. It was the most comfortable bus ride I've had since coming to Costa Rica.

I got off the bus at the Coca-Cola station and was welcomed with the sounds of Costa Rican urban Sundays; songs being belted out of the doorways of churches, vendors yelling about how much their sandwiches or games cost, music coming from the TV’s above the counters at Sodas, little kids laughing. I felt at first as though maybe I didn’t know which direction I should go in, but of course my internal compass pointed me towards Avenida Central and I walked my way through the chaos in my dirty dress, with my backpack on my back.

So here I am in San Jose, eating a salad and drinking a Cappuccino. All of a sudden it looks gray and stormy outside, which I welcome because as always I have been sweating all day. I’ve gotten used to the sweat—it no longer seems strange and unsanitary, but rather natural and more importantly, unavoidable. I sweat consistently here—it’s very, very hot all the time. I’m simply over it.

Happy to have been able to clear my head today, now I’m heading to Maximo to see what the news is with the Health Care Bill at home. There was a big Senate vote today, which of course I didn’t remember until I was walking to the bus. Because I am truly living in “Mirage Land,” as Katie likes to call it. :)

P.S. I miss Mom.