Manuel Antonio

The day before we leave Tamarindo for Manuel Antonio, we go out on a Catamaran cruise to a cove.  It's an awkward group of people - few kids, a bachelor party heavy on the tequila and pineapple juice that traders seem to obsessed with consuming.  The sunset is magnificent and when come back into the harbour, the world seems to have smoothed off some of the edges.

I finish packing and do the first of four walk throughs that will NOT be as thorough as I would have hoped.  We end up leaving behind a motley array of items, which a dear friend will spend hours helping me retrieve over the final 10 days in country. 

Perhaps the most challenging part of the trip will will take place here: managing the kids' realities of their own exhaustiona and teaching them to be bored.  There is wifi but it isn't robust.  The ocean is exquisite but they prefer the pool.  I walk in the mornings before the world stirs, finding magic and stillness.  We venture out to a few excursions, winding our way through mangroves, capuchin monkeys taunting us with their wizened paws.

A friend from Prague days puts me in touch a friend from Seattle. And it's the best gift of 2023, this introduction.  My daughter and the granddaughter form a bond and I gain a new friend, one who calls me on my BS, who shares my world view in the sense that most people are decent and kind, doing the best they can within the framework they are given. 

It is cathartic, this time I spend in Manuel Antonio, in a way I had been unconsciously avoiding.  It forces me out of what I can now recognize as being a type of Limerence - an hybrid limerence of geographical, romantic, and childhood. It begins to feel as though I am in a shoe that no longer fits but that I have spent so long in that I need help extricating myself.  

'Help' comes in many forms.  There are people who will provide sounding boards, people who will provide counsel, and that always unwelcome langiappe know as 'free advice.' There is the not-a-fling that has pre-occupied a portion of my attention, that sends a jolt of familiarity through me and will find me curled into the fetal position, sleeping with T-Rex arms wrapped around one another. There are song lyrics I pay too much attention to, the causal way I say 'Of course I am a romantic. I fall in love everyday, fully aware my heart might break.' 

There are waves that crash against rocks and my legs. Birdsong mixing with monkey cackles that make the hair on my neck rise.  A hummingbird will fly into a metal rafter, breaking it's neck, falling not far from of me.  Raccoons will scamper through the hotel floors, their chittering echoing leaving chaos in their wake. 

This week allows the three of us to slow down before returning to San Jose. It allows us to stop and enjoy being together and separate in the same space.  It shows our strengths and cracks and makes way for what ever comes next, in a way that I cannot possibly have expected but that feels like I already knew. Déjá rêvè, I discover, later trying to remember another sense of a sense. 

And as always, as it always is, what comes next is more.