Already the street is a sweltering thickness of noise, heat, car exhaust and the forlorn moanings of a Mexican love song blaring from a shop speaker. With a shopping bag of yogurt, granola and bananas, I step through a coded doorway into the hostel patio. All at once the air is cool and quiet, palms and ferns filling the air with a lush mossy fragrance. I eat my breakfast alone, dreamily dipping my spoon, watching dappled morning light shifting on the solid wooden table. And so another day in tropical paradise begins.
Yet, barging into this particularly lovely breakfast quietude, a tank-faced, bear-like, bushy-eyebrowed man slaps down his own bowl of granola and yogurt opposite me. He coughs twice - annoying, strangled coughs.
He has a strange vibe.
Giving off an aura-stink, he stares vacantly into his bowl with two melancholy, bluish gunmetal eyes. I clench my spoon, my chest contracts, the air darkens.
We sit in anxious silence - just the metallic clanking of our spoons and muffled horns and engine racket seeping under the door from the road.
A very strange vibe.
Yet too urgently does the sun-drenched glory of my day beckon, that I am out of there in the beeping of a scooter horn.
And paradise proves itself - too pure the Pacific air, too joyful the being tossed and washed by surfing waves, that strange vibes are the faintest of nothings. Swept away, not even swept, dissolved, forgotten, nada. And so I thought nothing of him throughout the golden radiance of that weightless day until I saw him again that evening.
The evening, when street lamps shine in monsoon washed pavements and the moist, calm air is filled with smoky cooking aromas - tacos al pastor, tortas de chorizo, quesadillas de pollo. In the shelter of the hostel, I am walking by the lush, green patio to my room to sleep, and I see him sat there, in the same place, at the wooden table - what a weirdo, I think. He makes one think of a bulky freighter lost in a black ocean. I manage a smile and enter my dorm room, climbing up the empty bunk and thrusting aside my daily debris to drift blissfully into sleep. I hear the door slide open. Of course. Of course it’s him…
He has immediately followed me to bed, proceeding to clamber loudly into the bed directly below me, clumsily shaking the frame, giving off three of those strangled coughs again. As if a trapped part of his soul was crying out to be heard or seen.
What a f**king weirdo.
Over an hour later, I am far from blissful sleep. Rattling fans, demonical coughs, menacing house music from the roof bar, rising noxious odours, my own extrapolative, expletive thoughts;
What the f**k is this weirdo doing - coughing, farting, where is he from, I bet he’s from…
Heavenly day and hellish night.
I eventually fall asleep.
During breakfast the next day, we have our first and last conversation. Details of his past pass heavily across the table, entering my heart, weighing it down into a deeper place, where a strange compassion arises.
