Then there is a moment of clarity that illuminates what you must do. It is not time to write a poem. Not time to take in the nighttime scenery breezing by the drive from San Salvador to El Tunco. It is not time to think back over the past week and pinpoint where misguided thoughts went wrong. It’s time to get drunk, and in the back seat of the car, before the inescapable vision of Juan and Stella holding intimate hands, you raise the bottle of Rum to your lips.

*

The last week had been filled with magic possibility. I’d met someone whose presence was like having a butterfly with a wrecking ball fluttering around my heart. I’ve mentioned in a previous post how she reminded me uncannily of a character of my novel “How One Guitar Will Save The World.” It’s not often, nor very believable that you meet a character from your novel. It sounds like a stretch, but if fiction is to have any meaning, we must believe that the muses work in this way.

The characters created in fiction are parts of ourselves and those we know. How often do our pens and typing hands harness some mysterious someone whose essence seems assuredly real? I’d spent five years on the manuscript she lived within and the parallels between the fictional and the real Stella were so uncanny that I still haven’t caught my breath from the experience.

When my protagonist, Liam, sees the fictional Stella for the first time, he narrates:

There is something so eerily familiar about her—intimate, like a part of my past has tripped over my future. Everything that’s not her has faded. She glows. A table has just cleared up and she sits down alone, smiling at no one in particular. She’s smiling at us, at the bar—happy that we can exist—happy that all this rabble rousing can exist in places like this, in countries like this, in a world like this.

In Nicaragua, Stella would sit with me all day on the beach and sing songs along with my guitar. She was interested in my writing, and not just to placate me, would ask me to read her my fiction and poetry. She would share with me a beautiful vision of inhabiting universal love and sharing that with the world. We hiked together. In San Juan del Sur, we bought balloons and stickers and handed them out to kids along the beach. We talked to strangers. Made friends. Shared drinks and sunsets.

On the unrelentingly romantic island of Ometepe, Stella and I spent every day since we’d met together. Together we’d travelled to the surf town of San Juan del Sur. Arm and arm we’d walked the beach. Be still my heart, I told it. I told her about my life in Antigua and everywhere, and she told me about the open-ended travels she was six months into. I told her about my mountain with cabins outside of Antigua and she told me about her lows, mental illnesses and being trapped in Austalia’s mental health system. She’d come out the other end of this with a wistful optimism, not broken or jaded, but careful and committed to being grateful for each moment.

I knew I was falling too far too fast, so I kept these flaring emotions as contained as I could in a box marked “hope” and endeavored to simply enjoy the unexpected instance of her company before the road took me back to Antigua and Stella to Costa Rica where she planned to enroll in a school that taught surfing by morning and Spanish by afternoon.

On our last night in San Juan del Sur, we were talking about our failed attempts at going on a week-long cleanse while eating sushi and sharing a mojito. I was preoccupied as had become my custom, not used to my heart doing backflips over my head. Then Stella said, “I’m coming with you to Antigua” and I did not tell my heart to be still.

On what would have been the eve of our separation, an embrace served as a conspiring pact to continue to share the air for the never-determinate future.

*

So we embarked from San Juan del Sur on a two-day journey to San Salvador where Stella had a friend who would pick us up to take us to the surf town of El Tunco, where we could stop for a few days on the beach before busing it the last six hours to Antigua, Guatemala.

I’d spent the last week arguing with a growing hope and someone who seemed like a good teammate for life. I told that hope often to shut up. I told it that hope that it was shallow and only existed because Stella was so lovely. I told that hope that it was distracting me from my work. I told it that I was lucky to have made this incredible friend and that it was greedy to want something more.

With Stella next to me on a North-bound Central American bus, the way she grabbed my arm when she spoke, the light manner of our interaction and her smile, the freeness of her spirit, I couldn’t help but hear the hopeful voice that asked me to look at Stella and see past the moment and wonder what I’d be like to keep traveling that road together.

*

When Juan came to the bus station it became immediately clear that he and Stella in their previous meeting had been more than friends. When he met her with a kiss at the bus station in San Salvador, when they held hands in the front seat of Juan’s car, I felt the Zen of resignation and the bottle of rum that Juan was passing around the car. Juan was kind and welcoming, and I wonder if he didn’t understand the predicament I was in. There was no reason to dislike him, only reason to drink rum. I needed that rum that night to find a dreamless darkness that would pull the curtain across the moment’s thoughts at least until the morning’s clarity.

At one fuzzy point in the night, I planned to leave a note early the next morning and continue north alone. But this was just the rum plotting. We arrived in El Tunco. There is a memory of playing guitar in a restaurant. Then someone—maybe Juan—is leading me to a hotel room. Then there is a bed and then nothing.

*

 

You wake up wet and the mind searchers for reminders of who you are, where you are, and what has led you here. It is 7a.m. You are in a hotel. There is a stone pool outside. Not a soul but you stirs. A black Labrador runs to greet you, shedding his affection. You find a pila and throw your bedclothes in it, reminding yourself that you are now twenty-nine-years old. You pull apart a half dozen cigarette buts and make something smokable from it.

You remember your plan last night to flee alone. You won’t be doing that. There is an acceptance, and it feels like relief with a sprinkle of joy. You think about your new friend Stella and accept that word. Friend. You are not the victim of anything, and if you are not the luckiest guy, then you are maybe the second luckiest guy to be traveling with her—your new friend. You can still be her friend, and be the best friend that you can be to her. And this realization feels like finding a lost puppy. The black Labrador retriever lays at your feet.

You pick up your guitar and write this song:

You are naïve enough in the moment, looking out towards the rock-lined sea, holding your guitar like a life vest, to think this is where the story ends.