be easy. take your time. you are coming home to yourself. – nayyirah waheed
We have spent the last hour flipping between trying to find the ant colony in our bedroom wall and ‘encouraging’ a 7″ Wandering Gecko to go back outside. When I say we, I mostly mean not me. My assistance in the matter involved finding splattered poo on the floor, calling my husband to discuss what it was, seeing the gecko, screeching, and leaping back about five feet, scaring my husband so much that there was nearly more poo on the kitchen floor.
So far, so good.
When people talk about Costa Rica, they usually warn you about the roads or tell you how nice the people are. In the five days we’ve been here we’ve discovered that both of those things are true. What people don’t tell you is that you are now a very small part of a very large ecosystem. I came for the whales and the blue morpho butterflies, but my quality time is being spent with the birds and the bugs and the amphibians.
My husband – The Brit – keeps asking me if I am okay. The third question (after two about the screech and the pile of poo) he asked after he encouraged the gecko out was whether it had put me off of Costa Rica.
The thing about emigrating is that you have to re-learn everything. There is no more old normal. You enter this weird grey area between tourist and local that never entirely goes away, no matter how long you are there. When I moved to England for the first time, I at least spoke the language and had the right clothes. Here it is like stepping into a movie – with bugs – or a strange vacation that never ends. The learning curve is going to be pretty steep.
And so we are adjusting to our new normal. Our first new rule was always check under the toilet seat before you sit down. Other things we have learned already include: don’t leave a light on unless you want ‘company’, coffee tastes best when you are on the deck watching the rainforest come to life in the morning, the locals are as nice as people say they are, buy earplugs, and if you see a pile of poo – try to figure out who made it.
Eventually maybe meeting the neighbours will be so normal it won’t be accompanied my my screeching.
Maybe.
The past few days have apparently hosted a huge planetary dance: the end of something which began in 2012, the end of a 19-year cycle and the beginning of another.
Yesterday my husband found me sitting on the floor of our office debating the future of a pile of alphabet magnets. A pile of alphabet magnets that I had not seen in 6 years. A pile of alphabet magnets I had forgotten I had.