Intensely Alive

72 Hours in Mexico City: Mouth full of coca leaves, mezcal and innocence

Mexico City. The air smells like cilantro. Can I say that it is true, that the air in fact smells like cilantro when it is most likely a mix of 21.8 million bodies breathing and odorizing smog? My perspective is my experience, and in my experience I will claim that the air of Mexico City smells like cilantro. A fragrance carried on the wings of higher altitude and surrounding valleys.

I am in the back of an overpriced cab due to my tendency to be prey for airport taxies if I am not aware, and today I was not. I see bright pink, warm orange and vibrant turquoise in explosion in an urban and ancient collision. For a moment I have to close my eyes and shut out the overwhelm of delightful sensory information, because these days I am used to the specific color that is jungle green covered in red dust.

At 6.35 PM I arrive at my apartment. A rundown artdeco building on the corner of Colima and Jalapa. I push the heavy door open with my entire bodyweight and it shuts loudly behind me. The hallway reminds me of a grandmother’s treasure box with her black onyx floors and pink marble walls. Once shiny and beautiful. Now worn but elegance intact because someone decided to invest in timeless material. My home for the next 3 days has original floors, cast iron windows and ridiculous fake contemporary art, but in a matter of hours I will come to appreciate this. I have been consistently hot since October 20th, so the abrupt drop in temperature that occurs at night in Mexico City is an exotic and wonderful experience of physical relief. My limbs feel light and agile compared to the usual gravity caused by hot and swollen body parts. It is not a problem to me. To be heavier. Sometimes it is as I was born as high altitude impersonated. So swift, always ready to soar. Is there a difference between flight or fly? Or fight, is it, when we remove the “L”? So yes, just as I come to appreciate certain things that I don’t naturally love, such as fake art deco art, I have come to appreciate the weighted blanket I am now living under, also known as Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Yet as I find myself in cool, cilantro city air — thinner and higher than usual, the air that is, I can feel that my body is thriving immediately.

I fight the urge to stay hungry and tired on the couch and instead I decide to go pick up food. Ramen. I’ve not had any soup-textured food in quite a while. Due to the climate. Wrapped in a cardigan and in a long, chocolate colored sarong I traverse the busy streets of Roma Norte, with her rich green plants, that now embraced by dusk, seem even more saturated. What can we call the color green when it is almost entirely swallowed by darkness?

I remember how much I loved these exact shades of green 7 years ago when I was here for the first time. How something, and I don’t know what thing, but it is something, inside of me feels a very distinct sort of inspiration in a big city with higher altitude and lush greenery of all sorts of fantastical species of the plant world. Like Madrid. Oh I love a city of the valley. One night in Madrid I entered a dim-lit basement and watched the flamingo dancers move and sing with such rapture. Their sweat rained over the crowd like godly particles. What intensity. But now I am here in Mexico City and the green has turned dark, and I am about to pick up soup. I feel the city taking me in. Like a potential lover by the bar. Or myself looking at someone, looking at me. There is something extraordinary erotic happening between me and Mexico City as I walk through her streets like meridians or warm loins. I can feel it.

I feel so light in the absence of heat, I have turned into a vibrating vortex. I am aware that I am drawing attention to me, eyes and heads turning like magnets as my body moves like the wind. Am I doing this to seduce the world around me? I don’t think so. My hair is flat in the dry air so I don’t feel particular sensual. Maybe I am just doing it as an experiment. Could it not be so? That not everything I do must possess some greater meaning other than experimenting? Instead of search for relentless meaning, is not meaning enough to explore? It is exactly what my anxiety does not want me to do, therefore I must do it.

I wake up next morning with red, sodium-swollen lips. I make a strong coffee from a bitter, cheap grind but it tastes like freedom. At 9.40 AM, I am making my way to Condesa. At an intersection I meet Venus De Milo. I decide to take her photo. I am capturing something sacred. I can feel it and it fills me with joy.

An old house with curved staircases and walls have turned into a gallery. I meet my friend Alisa by her altar; copal, ceremonial maize, lava stone, red water - gathered by her hands, hands of friends and hands of the city. I say: “Is it you who smell so good?” and she says: “I hope so.” It’s hard to explain exactly what she smells like but there’s a depth, a mystery and something slightly enchanting to her scent. Not long after her perfume still lingers in the air over huevos rancheros and my eyeballs feel slightly fuzzy like I’m either jet lagged or hungover, but I am neither. We talk about her work as a cross cultural researcher. Work that has now turned into the altar; her first art installation. When she speaks about the original goddesses of Mexico, it is with force and fire, and a voice that is sweet. I can feel there is a Mother in her. How many Mother Goddesses and their temples have been destroyed yet somehow The Mother can never be erased. She finds new forms, new ways, new names, new shapes to let herself be known, even if her children do not recognize her. Her undying existence is a roar at eradication. I like to spend my time with people who are intense and specific in their ways. People whose minds are like a secret library where I can take the winding stairs up into the attic to read the sacred texts.

At 1.45 PM we sit down to smoke a cigarette in a small park that is really just a concrete bench and a lot of cars. I vaguely remember a statue, but I am unsure. Two things are already very apparent to me when it comes to my time here in Mexico City. I drink more coffee than I drink water. And time moves fluidly through this dehydrated body of mine. Something is not adding up, because we have to make our way somewhere in less time than we got, but the lack of water is making my cognitive abilities slightly compromised and I am in fact enjoying not being high speed for once. Instead, experimental as I find myself these days, I enjoy being entirely up to someone else’s plans. We get there. Not on time but what is time? And instantly and intensely we must go again. Here it is with the time again, because now it is 3 PM, and we have to be somewhere in less time than we got. I manage to say: “Maybe I’ll be late”, because there is a market and I want to stroll and loose myself in trinkets and ceramics while I wrap my cardigan tightly around my waits because it is in fact cold in the shade. Music playing on vinyl and I find that I recognize a feeling of something I can hardly recall only that it is familiar and entirely pleasurable. This feeling of being just slightly cold, music, and faces, so many faces, and gold, silver and antiques, and kids playing, this to me is the whole point of living. Yes, I live for this moment. The moments I live for are not some promised land of the unobtainable extraordinary but honest poetry instantly realized in the presence. So I wander aimlessly but entirely content through the many stalls before I make it back home, realizing this thing with time again, now 5 PM and I have only had one meal, so I must eat before I venture out into this city that absorbs me completely.

I like routine and I find routine quickly. Half my life spent traveling alone, making fast friends with every foreign place and strange hotels, trying to make a simulation of home. I’m not telling you this to sound interesting or glamorous, I’m telling you this to explain why I within 24 hours order the same meal, at the same restaurant. Routine. Ramen. It is.

An hour later I am fed and in the back of an Uber moving through the boroughs of Mexico City which I accidentally keep referring to as “The City” but it is not a “City”, it is a country on its own. From a right turn into a neighborhood where I definitely shouldn’t get out solo, we take another right and now I find myself outside a big hacienda that has been turned into some sort of sonic light show. People interpreting their own way of fancy queued up outside, drunkly arguing with the doorman and why is there always someone who has to wear too much heavy-heady perfume? I have not been in a line for an event in a while, and I don’t wait for long here either because I am on the list. Not thanks to me, but thanks to my friends. I walk into the garden of the estate which might really reveal itself to be stunning and grande in daylight, but it is dark and light installations are greedily consuming all illumination. Above me, the stars are fighting to glow in all their glory through a polluted sky. To be a celestial body is to be humble in nature. There you are, burning with otherworldly brilliance but lightyears away and all the little heads that used to turn towards you are now staring into a fluorescent hologram imagined by the construct of the human mind.

Not long after I sit around a fire and I am starting to feel the swell of introversion. How many new people have I met in just 12 hours? What a privilege, and also, how tiring. The fire heats only the right side of my body, as my left is turned towards the small circle of people I’m sitting in. And there’s a chocolate tasting and names I haven’t heard before spoken off in high regard and I wonder how peculiar it is that no matter what humans find themselves doing we always find a way to measure our acts in excellence. But who decides what excellence is? How do we invent measure? Who is to say that something that was unmeasurable a moment ago, something even that perhaps should stay unmeasured, is now all of a sudden “finer” or “better” than the rest? Why can we not just enjoy what it is we enjoy; with its refined taste and delicacy or whatever sensation it may invoke in us? By putting a measure to something, nothing about the sensual experience, from the bite to the taste, to flavor or texture change. Does it? The part of us that take pleasure in something or someone being the best, the finest, the rarest, is that even the part of us that enjoy the very truth of it? Or is it the one who enjoy the idea of the truth?

I am thankfully awoken from my stream of thoughts when my friend summons me on a mission for mezcal and a mission it is. Flocks of people in fur and feathers waiting for drinks. We are in a hurry because our friend is soon to play under the waning moon. We have two weird tickets that should give us some sort of assumed importance or at least help us get to the alcohol faster. Nothing however really works in the ways that we are used to, and here is the thing with the time again and the sand slipping through my fingers. Somewhere hidden in the sphere I can hear the roaring laughter of The Goddesses as they play their tricks on us. Where might I just find myself to prefer a linear way to get my alcohol or whatever I might I want; when I want it, how I want it comforted by my idea of being on time? Instead everything dissolves and all I can do is to let whatever is remaining of me move with the cold wind beneath The Goddesses’s wings, her laughter rolling like waves. Somewhere between time and a mission for mezcal, we meet a man in a poncho who gives me a handful of leaves, and first in my naivety I think: “Oh, bayleaves” but they are coca leaves, and I am instructed to put them in my mouth. Not against my will, but to my surprise.

I’m all the way up by the stage, cheek stuffed with coca leaves trying to roll a cigarette, when my friend comes back with a face of victory and hands carrying two large glasses of mezcal. “Let’s dance” she say. I’m finding it hard to move my body at first. I’m so used to the heat wrapping around my hips, loosening up my joints and sweat making my hair big, wild and curly — is this another one of my self-implemented systems so I can decide when I can move, when I can find sensual enjoyment or when I cannot? I stand there for a little bit stiffer than usual. I’m getting in my head about it and all the ways to why I can’t enjoy myself fully, and now I’m thinking about all the other ways I am potentially making myself stiffer, and more awkward — not because it is so in reality, but because for a moment there I picked up a string of thread and weaved an entire tapestry.

Mezcal and coca leaves mix nicely in my mouth — something smokey, sour lemon and bitter leaves bring me back to a time I cannot remember I have ever lived before. A premature nostalgia is birthed in the present moment. I feel joy.

Next morning I wake up; sensory system sore from sonic stimulation. On my phone a message from my friend: “Lets go to the afterparty. I’m making coffee and waiting for your response.” I have only 36 hours left in Mexico City and therefor no time to hesitate, so I text her back while my body is still half asleep: “I’m getting caffeine and a croissant. I’ll see you at 9.”

I have done many things in my life. I reminiscence, often, on this unlikely tale that turns out to be it. My life. I have fainted at Leonardo DiCaprio’s chateau in St. Tropez. I have lived isolated in the jungle. I have thrown my body out of a plane. I have also co-piloted another small plane to St. Barths. I have bumped into an ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend in Paris outside Café De Flore wearing a zebra fur and Minnie Mouse ears. I have traveled to time before time and I bowed. But I have never gone to a morning rave. Now seems like an appropriate time to try it. I will try most things once.

I don’t like techno and I don’t like house as I find myself standing close enough to see the pearls of sweat on the shy DJ’s upper lip, I am feeling a sliver of the trance that seems to be the insatiable high, people get from going to a rave. A moment of utter relief, like one big organic orgasm. And as I look to my right I see a couple rolling on chemical oxytocin, grinding their tired bodies idly and lustfully up against each other to the rhythm of the music. I keep my sunglasses on.

Mexico City is a teleport I have decided. One moment you’re being offered psilocybin at 11am (which you kindly decline) and the next moment you’ve just finished your 3rd ramen in 48 hours, only to be evacuated because there is a potential earthquake. “I’m good in crisis situations” my friend says as she takes my hand, that is shaky from the 4th cup coffee (little water) and high altitude. It is now that I find myself realizing that I am experiencing a holy moment. Clustered together with what feels like 10.000 other bodies on Colima, we are all sharing the same breath as we anticipate if the earth is going humble us in such a way that she might just swallow us whole. If she so wishes to. The quietness is all consuming by the meeting of such force. We are entirely at her mercy. And here we are, human.

While I did decline psychedelics, I am not long after finding myself at Salon Acme, ecstatic. I have more than once experienced such ecstasy as a natural euphoria that comes from letting life push me all the way to the edge of my humble humanness. While nothing really shook beneath my feet, something inside of me has been loosened and therefore purified. I feel it. I see colors and shapes and hidden messages in art even more vividly than I did just a moment before. I stand before a painting; bright red, indigo blue and sun-like yellow; and there is the serpent, the flowers, the fruits and the trees. “This is divine”, I exclaim with vigor out into the room full of people. A young man turns to me to let me know that he is the artist. “What was your inspiration?” I ask. I simply must know what gave birth to something so intensely alive. He says: “Innocence.”

It is the next day when I realize I am 100 meters away from a friend I haven’t seen in 2,5 years — last time in Berlin, before I flew to Portugal. I have asked of life to gift me a miracle, more than once, and isn’t it so, didn’t I just say that the honest poetry was in the moment of presence? What more could I ask for than to sit in front of a person I love, and cry because here we are. Together again. Life, invite me in and let me have the courage to accept your invitation.

My last evening in high altitude and I am walking through now familiar streets of Roma Norte; the green has once again retreated into darkness. I no longer feel like a vortex, but like a walking womb as I have covered my jojoba oil soaked hair and face in my chocolate colored sarong. Wrapped around me for protection. Innocence has given birth to an intense aliveness, and I am keeping it close, keeping it safe, letting it live between my breath and my skin.