Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently traveling around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
This month, life got hectic.
It all started when I quit my job. Quitting is a dangerous act — and not because it suddenly and unceremoniously cuts off your income and denudes you of your identity as a productive citizen in a capitalist world, though of course, it does those things too. No — quitting is dangerous because it fools you into believing, at least temporarily, that you now have all the time in the world to do all the things you want to do.
And thus fooled, you begin adding things to your life willy nilly.
The week after my resignation, I got my friend Kristina to visit me in Mexico City. We packed each day, going on a taco crawl, visiting museums, practicing lines and taping an audition of hers. But apparently that wasn’t quite enough activity for me, because while she was still here, I also started an intensive Spanish class. Three hours a day, five days a week — plus homework — on top of near-daily salsa lessons and classes I’d already committed to.
I’ve never quite understood people who claim they get bored, because I feel I have an endless and ever growing list of things I’d really like to do, if I only had the time. This feeling long predated the beginning of my nomad life, though travel has intensified it. Mexico City, like New York, is one of those places where simply walking around town makes you feel like you're taking part in something vital, you’re an integral part of the city, part of its complex and visceral machinery, churning and yearning and grinding along toward a volatile and enticing unknown.
Of course there’s a lot about Mexico City that’s not like New York. The sounds, for one, are different. The constant calls from vendors who come down the streets selling everything from gas to used electronics in cars, carts, or on foot. Their plaintive cries often sound like wailing — lloronas and lloronos weeping the city to life.
So much here depends on sound. Even trash pickup is announced by a man ringing a loud silver bell, which brings people rushing out to the streets with their garbage. This way the city avoids those smelly bags of trash that constantly line the streets of New York — though I don’t understand entirely how this call-and-answer system remains workable, Mexico City being as big and varied as it is. How do people who work outside the home ever get their trash out for pickup?
I supposed everyone somehow figures out a way to make the place they live work for them. Would I, if I lived in Mexico City — if I chose to stay here for years instead of weeks? Would I continue to find it enchanting, or would, over time, its quirks inevitably start to grate at me? Would it all begin to feel tired, ho hum, even claustrophobic, would its now-exciting nooks and crannies start to slowly fill with inevitable disappointments, small resentments, cracked dreams, wishes unfulfilled? Would I eventually discover that the life I build here is neither more magical nor less uninteresting than the lives I’ve lived in the past, the potential lives I could live in other places?
Or would I find new ways to fall in love with this city over and over again?
One day I hope to return and find out. But for now, travels continue. Tomorrow, I’m off to Madrid. I’ll be taking with me a slightly improved Spanish vocabulary, a pretty huipil, nostalgia, and some bittersweet regret about leaving a city I love so soon —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
Have we entered the age of anti-ambition? I mean, who even wants to work anymore? “When 25 million people leave their jobs, it’s about more than just burnout.”
Can men who abused women be reformed? Forgiven? After resigning due to allegations of sexual and emotional abuse, former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman tells his side of the story, with the help of Anna Graham Hunter. “What would a genuine apology sound like? What would constitute true remorse? Was rehabilitation a realistic goal, and, if so, what would that process entail?
The perils of following in your religious father’s footsteps. Post downfall, Jerry Falwell Jr. tells his side of the story, and it’s a pretty fascinating read. “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”