how we spend our days
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F662dd78e-827c-45ca-ab89-bf73853b23a0_640x135.jpeg)
It’s October 24th, 2022, and I’m standing at the kitchen counter, chin propped on my fists, watching my boyfriend eat the pile of rice and beans I’ve made us for lunch. “I’m making a list of everything I'll lose if I start to travel full-time,” I announce. He makes a deliberately neutral sound. “Book clubs,” I say. “Dinner parties. Visiting my mom for a weekend. My heated blanket. Owning two plants.”
We met in Sicily this past summer while I was traipsing around Europe, flirting with the idea of giving up my DC lease and committing to a nomadic lifestyle full-time. As summer waned, we wove our paths together, crisscrossing in Florence, Venice, and Switzerland. He made plans to return to New Zealand in December for a few months, and I booked a flight in the new year to follow him there, inspired by his rootless life, starry-eyed at the opportunity to see the world before anchors started pinning me to one place, before dogs, mortgage payments, kids. I started to lay in bed at night eyeballing the furniture in my room, already debating what I would sell or give away.
As fall set in, we decided to book a three-week-long trip together, punctuating a few months of long-distance dating with a few weeks of working and traveling together. We combine our requirements: somewhere outside of the United States due to his visa limitations, somewhere with the ocean in sight to help my fading summer tan. The house we choose is perched on a jungled hill above the ocean, thickets of vines and trees blocking us from any neighbors. We land on Nicaragua, in a small surf town outside of San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast of the country. The landscape glows radiantly green in every photo of the house’s listing. The AirBnb page becomes one of the top visited sites on my phone.
Our trip is delayed when a hurricane carves its way through the middle of our flight path. Instead, he joins me in DC for a week of working remotely, where our schedules quickly fall out of sync. I get home after he goes to sleep, buzzing from drinks out with friends. He gets up while I’m still half dreaming and starts his calls for the day while I sleepily check emails under the covers. It’s not until we’re sitting on the flight, stripped away from all the little infrastructures that govern my life, that I soften into the trip, leaning onto his shoulder while he sleeps through the orange sunrise. I take it all in: the muffled rumble of the plane, the strips of morning light poking through half-opened windows, and all of him. He’s his own full person, his own being, I think sleepily, and he’s here with me on this plane, and for some reason, that flusters me.
“There’s a world in which I move to like...Chattanooga. And meet a really nice guy and marry him and move back to North Carolina,” I tell him like he’s trying to snatch that away from me, like he’s holding that behind his back. He nods solemnly like he can picture it now.Our life is insulated, isolated. We wind up on red dirt roads that look like they have bites taken out of them, deep ditches and gullies carved out during nightly downpours. An infinity pool overlooks a jumbled green slope of trees that tumble down until they meet the mass of ocean below, which in turn rises up to melt into the skyline, an almost identical blue, miles away from my rocking chair view. Each morning I watch a mob of bright orange butterflies attack pink bushes to the left of the pool. Near the kitchen, a low-pitched whir interrupts the quiet as an emerald hummingbird makes its rounds through maroon spires of blossoms. Underneath everything is the constant rumble of the waves from far below us. The churning sound permeates everywhere: the living room couch, the gas range of the kitchen, through the mosquito net in our bedroom. We can go whole days speaking only to each other.
My boyfriend screeches upon discovering two scorpions on top of the kitchen cabinet, as he’s balanced on a stool, troubleshooting a router connectivity issue. "We are not telling my mom about this," I say to him over the top edge of my book.
The rhythms of our days are set by the flow of the world around us, and we float along obediently. The sun sets at five-thirty. We’re reluctant to drive in the dark up our cratered mountain road. Our days wrap up early without much to do after the last light. The howler monkeys chatter outside our bedroom by five-thirty in the morning, waking us up with the sun. We do little yoga flows at sunrise, overlooking the blue wall of the ocean. I send emails, take calls, and read compulsively on the hammock each day, inhaling books back to back. My days take shape around his unrelenting work schedule. My work is more gently structured, allowing for quiet hours uninterrupted by meetings. I drift around the house, bare feet padding across stone floors. I dip quietly into the pool when I get hot, I lay out in the sun when I get cool.
The trip feels like a preview of a future I’ve warily committed myself to start in a few months: leaving behind friends and family to cavort around the world, living out of a suitcase, chasing some eternal summer. I bustle around in the kitchen, relishing in the domesticity, the familiarity. He dumps hot sauce on my concoction, peacefully letting me work through my theatrics on the other side of the counter alone. My sleeves are rolled up as I wash the dishes with vigor. A howler monkey is perched in a tree outside eyeing me with interest, watching me pursue my own tangled version of having it all.
“I don’t really see you settling down,” my grandmother announces to me over lunch a few weeks later. “You don’t seem like the marrying type.”
We spend a day driving across the country. Nicaragua looks like Mississippi, I think compulsively. The urge to compare the landscape to something I’ve seen before hovers in me. For a few flat miles, the stretch from Managua to San Juan del Sur during the Nicaraguan green season could be the wide Southern agricultural lowlands I drove through on a twin cloudy day a year and a half prior, furrows slicing through verdant earth, and weather-beaten tin houses punctuating fields. Then suddenly, a volcano looms in the background, and a man drives a horse-drawn cart in the lane opposite us, and I’m uprooted again, yanked back into the here and now. I think about how I wish I knew more about the trees here. I wish I could see them and name them and break past the mass of green. I spend my time in places thinking about different places.
A continental divide means that we're constantly asking each other if we've heard of very mundane things. He rolls his eyes theatrically when I ask if he’s ever heard of Black Friday, but I remind him that I explained what a Cheez-It was a few weeks ago. He asks: have I heard of Fleetwood Mac? Do you have school buses, togs, stag-dos, and summer camps? Some things are unattributable to either cultural or age divides. Do you know who Meatloaf is, he asks me while we're hurling ourselves through muddy roads in four-wheel drive. “And you know all the words to Bat Out of Hell?” Somehow I, alongside most of the population of both America and New Zealand, fall between those two poles, so I watch while he hollers the lyrics to an unimpressed herd of cows in front of our car.
I do a solo outing to the beach one morning: it’s a fifteen-minute walk downhill through a well-worn but overgrown path, the greenery of the rainy season intruding onto the red mud trail. I dodge puddles of indeterminate depth, and the howler monkeys echo through the trees. There's no one in sight and a tingle runs up my spine. Before I see anything other than green, I hear the dull roar in the distance from the waves. A few steps later, a white glow starts pushing between the trees. The path spits me out on the beach, staring down a gray-white sky, black rocky crags, gray-tan sand, churning gray waves, and no one as far as I can see in any direction. The echo of the waves bouncing against the dense cloud layer above creates a sound so like a jet plane that I almost figured an aircraft was going overhead above the clouds. The sound was unabating, persistent, constant, distracting me from the book I brought to read on the beach. Up close, this was no soothing background sound, but a primal holler from the ocean to land. I wander into the water, and yelp as a wave grabs at my calves, trying to yank me in. The water snarls around my shins and feet, tugging affectionately, then smacks against me.
My friend and I text about our east coast winter, the slump we fell into last year as the days shortened, with the ubiquitous seasonal gloom in the air. Temperatures are dropping at home. I type to her while I look out over a sunset dipping slowly behind a bank of pink-streaked clouds. It’s like someone took a steamer to the wrinkles and folds of my stresses, as if the humid air just causes them to melt. There’s nothing new or revolutionary to observe here: if I chose to live in a surfer’s paradise for the rest of my life, I would not have high levels of anxiety. It’s a direct correlation. Listless winter atrophy doesn’t come along with me on the plane. My churning brain is quieter. Our trip is short enough that I easily tamp down the isolation, loneliness, the restlessness, and under-stimulation. I peacefully finish my to-do lists, I reach out to friends for meandering catch-up phone calls. I wiggle my toes in the bright blue pool, baking in the sun, sunk deep inside my head.
After a call one evening, I step out of the coworking space we’ve been using and head up to the yoga pavilion - a massive dome-like palapa with tiled floors at the very top of the property, looking out over dense trees and cloud-hugged mountains. It was the beginning of a wan sunset. The sun is daubed pink on the fluffy clouds engulfing the mountaintops, but without industrial pollution in the skies or dust floating through the air, the rays didn’t have material to refract off of, keeping the sky a pale glow instead of a violent burst. I lay out my mat and listen to a rooster crowing, to a herd of cows lowing across the street, to a motorbike weaving its way below me. Please, I just want more of this, I ask quietly in my head. Give me a life full of this. For that moment, I mean it.
We agree on the important things: how much underwear to pack. We disagree on the trivial ones: how many bathing suits to own, if our socks need to match, if you can wear blue shorts with blue shirts. I don’t comment when he leaves jugs of water in our refrigerator, just in case of an apocalypse. He leaves me be when I refuse to hold hands if it’s hot outside. I keep a small tally in my mind of what works and what doesn’t and forget my totals by the end of each day. We make the bed every morning; we never leave dishes in the sink longer than a day, both of us quietly taking turns washing batches of them at a time. I leave him little bowls of food as an offering, and he keeps my nightstand dotted with glasses of water carried in before bed, and we tiptoe around our shared home like guests.
The fights we pick are small and flame out quickly, due exclusively to his amiability and not to any patience or grace on my end. I glower at him from across the table as he crunches happily on his food. He rolls his eyes and kisses my head as he walks past me, his noise-canceling headphones leaving him in blissful silence. He snaps at me one morning when I don’t text our landlord about our internet connection dropping during one of his calls. We bicker pettily back and forth, frustrated, late, and hungry as we drive to our coworking space, interrupted only by a hissing noise: the sound a punctured tire might make. We stop the car and both despairingly pace around it. I prop my hands on my hips and he crosses his arms and we stoically stare down our perfectly fine car. He sighs, he laughs and the tension pops. “I think this is the universe telling us to shut up and enjoy the fact that we’re here on this beautiful day,” he says ruefully, clambering back in the car. I buckle myself in suspiciously. Where’s his ego? Where’s his vengeful spirit? I rest my hand on his knee, a sheepish white flag.
“I think I’m having a hard time adjusting to being in a relationship,” I text my friend later. “I’m missing some skills.”
By the time we reach our last day, there’s little sadness in the air - we’re buoyed by the plans we have ahead, and the excitement about people we miss. Driving towards the airport feels like slowly ascending from underwater, the chatter of the outside world becoming louder and louder to us as we kick up from the quiet depths we’ve been hiding out in.
I go through customs first, and my ticket and passport are stamped readily by a bored-looking agent. While I prepare to put my bag through security, I hear him shout my name behind me. We discover that his online check-in isn’t accepted by the customs agents, and he has to wait two hours before his airline’s desk opens to properly check in before he can join me on the other side. Through our broken Spanish and enthusiastic gesturing, we determine that because I’ve legally crossed the border and exited the country, I can’t cross back over to his side, and we stare at each other over the chasm that the security desk has become. The agent takes pity on us and allows me to step back across the line while he holds my passport hostage, and we get one last quick and panicked hug before we get ushered back to our respective sides. I make my way through security by myself, find a seat by my gate, and slouch in my chair, feeling disconcerted and very alone.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa9481991-3635-4f78-8568-5be3d164a4ab_640x538.jpeg)
One of our last nights before the trip ended we lay under the mosquito net, and I rolled over and stared at him wide-eyed, restless before bed, interrupting his podcast. “What’s something you’ve learned about me since we’ve started cohabitating?” I ask him. “What’s it like spending all your time with another person? Is it weird going from being solo to having someone around all the time?” I’m determined to crack open the shell, figure out what is churning in his brain in the midst of all this zen-ish silence. “Is this what you spend all day thinking about?” he asks back, baffled. Yes, I think. Yes, and quite literally, all the time.
What else are you supposed to do in the void of all this quiet? Without the plans, and the plays, and the TV on downstairs, and the conversations with housemates, and the group chats for next weekend’s brunch, or March’s girls' trip, or November’s wedding filling up your phone, without the people on the Metro and the bartenders and the post office worker and the patrons at the theater, what do you do with all that space? The volume slowly turns up as I fly into Miami, then into DC, as I press my forehead against the cool glass of an Uber home. I flip through a brown noise playlist, looking for something as pervasive as the ocean roar to dampen my thoughts but come up short, so I let the churn of my life wash back over me, battering me like high tide.