SLOW
HAUNCHING BEAST
ROATAN, Honduras – My last night at Anthony's
Key Resort, I write on a deckchair. After 10pm – the huts shuttered,
the other guests wisely asleep – the cay becomes mine alone.
One last Port Royal beer warms in the sand at my side. Moonlight sculpts the mangrove roots into gargoyles. A fish heaves from the lagoon, then smacks heavy into water.
Roatan was good to me: not just for the scuba certification – another notch in all-terrain Barbie's belt – but for the slowing, the softening, the stillness in a frantic year.
I head inland to the Mayan ruins of Copan next, then home. Truly home. Home for months on end.
And that might just be the toughest trip of all.
You sound so sad about coming home! Hopefully it hasn't been too tough on you since you've been back?
ReplyDeleteBeing home and away, can't appreciate one without the other. Yeah, so maybe that sounds incredibly cliché-ed but I can't write as eloquently as you, ok?
Keep the great posts coming, kid. :)
Home is hard to settle into, DB, and this hasn't been the smoothest re-entry ever. At least I love my city (Seattle) and friends here...
ReplyDeleteAnd I have two great cats too, even if Edward – the most ungrateful of housesitters – threatens to turn the rowdier one into a throw rug continually.
ERH, nothing will top:
ReplyDelete"On the beach, a seal carcass lies tangled up in the wings of a whale vertebrae; the tentacles of an octopus thrown over another seal like the arm of a lover."
You simply are the master of carcass composition.
Keep away from my tabby, though. I need the fat b@stard alive and warm in my lap, as winter sets in.
Jake leaps into the shower because he's curious, brave and a glutton for sensation.
ReplyDeleteNo idea where he gets all that from. Bad habits from his first owner or the Seattle Animal Shelter, clearly...
Weirdly, he doesn't really MIND being wet. And he smells much, much better after a soaking.
Not that Jake's stanky, just ... musty. About as you'd expect a thick-furred tabby with a litter-scuffing-compulsion to smell, unfortunately...
As for coats with belts, couldn't we buy you a trench and have done with it? Ax.