A celestial body (in an intimate infinite galaxy)
Itinerary: 1. Spend New Year’s in Tulum 2. Do a foreign language exchange (through sex) 3. Disassociate from my body 4. Reconsider what it means to access pleasure
It’s the end of 2021. I’m at a restaurant on a beach in Tulum and my neon green swimsuit, cut like a thong, allows my bare ass to make direct contact with the sand and the sun. It’s glorious.
I reach for my margarita, halfheartedly listening to the conversation at the table, but really paying more attention to the easeful way the water caresses the sand. The beach is dotted with people, half naked and carefree. Parents with freckly cheeked babies. Men forming a drum circle at the water’s edge. Women dancing, their long matted hair swaying down their backs. There’s a wholesome sensuality in the air. Like a Renaissance painting of toga wearing cherubs lounging in a garden.
Just moments ago, my friend was wading in the water, talking to a man she met online from Mexico City about tantric sex. Now the three of us are eating salmon burgers still salty from the sea, discussing who our ideal romantic partners would be, but I tune out, not able to put into words the feeling I get looking at the scene on the beach. What box do I check on a dating app if I want that?
As we’re getting up to leave, a man suddenly steps in front of me and shoves his phone in my face, the screen open to his Instagram page. I peer around the screen to get a look at him. He’s about five or six inches taller than me, and his dark curly hair and whimsical mustache, which turns down at the corners of his lips, make his large muscular body a little less intimidating.
“Hello,” I say, trying to start a conversation.
After a few casualties, I find out he’s from Argentina and doesn’t speak much English. And despite being in Mexico for two months now, I don’t speak much Spanish.
I type my Instagram handle into his search bar anyways, grab my bag and turn to leave, my friend and her Mexican man snickering behind me. The sun is just beginning to set over the water, turning the curvaceous clouds rippling across the blue sky a brilliant peach, and I turn over my shoulder to get one more look, feeling more wooed by the sight than my brief encounter with the Argentine.
Over the next day, the Argentinian and I exchange messages with the help of Google Translate and I invite him to go out with my friend, the Mexican, and I to Mayan Monkey, the part hostel part bar we’ve been frequenting.
Like every other night we’ve been, the rooftop bar is packed with sweaty, lustful bodies. Skin, peekaboo-ing through crocheted holes, rubs against skin as everyone clusters around the pool to get closer to the dj. The pool is lit an unnatural blue and it casts the open-air bar in an otherworldly glow. Turquoise orbs dance in my peripheral vision and my body begins to feel ethereal, as weightless as the hookah smoke swirling up up up around me.
Despite the size of the crowd, I’m able to spot him right away, towering over everyone when he walks in. A group of guys and girls who I recognize from his Instagram stories trail in behind him as he makes his way over to me.
I try to talk to him, but my mouth forms grade school sentences that feel awkward coming out, punctuated by the even more awkward hand gestures I’m making as a way of translating. He just stands there staring at me with a goofy grin, my feeble attempt at making conversation bouncing right over him, so I abandon my attempt.
Holding his gaze, I begin to dance, swaying my hips and inching closer. A conversation of the flesh. But still, the conversation is disjointed and one sided. He has a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stiffly step touching to some beat I can’t hear. I brush his arm a few times with my hand, trying to encourage him to engage with me, but he just giggles and shakes his head looking nervous. So I close my eyes and dance with myself, making love to the air around me, so charged with sweat and the heavy thump of the bass, I swear I can feel it caressing me.
I get lost in the current of my own ecstasy, hips swaying, mind adrift, the crowd turning into speckles around me.
I’m a celestial body in an intimate, infinite galaxy.
Then I feel his hot breath against my ear and my intimate galaxy vanishes. He’s leaning down to say something to me, but I can’t hear him over the music, not that it would matter anyway.
I grasp his forearm to guide him over to a quieter area by the bathrooms, grabbing my friend and the Mexican who are at the bar for reinforcement on the way, and his friends follow suit. Him and his friends huddle close with the Mexican to talk while my friend and I stand off to the side.
“He’s asking if you want to go back to his Airbnb with him and his friends,” the Mexican interprets for me.
“Sure,” I hear myself say.
And despite the awkwardness of our interactions, I feel compelled to go. Probably for the wrong reasons. Revenge? A cleanse?
The last person I slept with was my ex and I can feel traces of him still lingering. It may take me a while to clear him from my mind and my heart completely, but at least I can rid him from my body by filling myself with someone else.
The Mexican gets down the numbers of everyone in the group and the address of their Airbnb. I can’t help but feel like a little kid waiting off to the side of the schoolyard as the parents set up a playdate.
Before I head out with his friends, my friend and the Mexican staying behind, my friend clutches my arm.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks, scanning my dark brown eyes that never give away my insides.
“Not really. But it’s something I have to do,” I assure with a wink.
During the car ride to the Airbnb, I find myself half sitting on the laps of two girls because there’s not enough seats. Luckily, the girls speak a little more English than my suitor.
We get to talking about our lives, what we do for work, what brings us to Mexico, and their kindness makes me feel a little more comfortable.
As we pull up to the Airbnb, the girl whose thigh is uncomfortably digging into my left butt cheek turns to me.
“Yeeww know Arrrrgentiniannn men arrreee toxic?”
“Oh I know…” I trail off, thinking of my ex.
She shrugs, laughing, and we disentangle, climbing out of the backseat.
Yup. There's definitely some aspect of revenge.
The Airbnb looks like a trashed college dorm, though I found out from the girls that everyone is a decade older than me.
His friends sit down at the dining room table, scattered in beer cans and ashtrays, and he pulls me over to the couch across from them. He leans up against the back of the couch and starts kissing me as I hear cans cracking open behind me.
When he pulls my shirt down to kiss the top of my breasts, I become aware of just how bright the lights are above. Cold, blinding, unforgiving. It makes it feel almost surgical as his lips travel to the crease underneath my collarbone, his friends chatting behind me like residents watching the surgery.
I sneak a peek behind me and am relieved to find that they’re too absorbed in their own conversation to be paying attention to what we’re doing, but the rational side of me still feels like this is wrong. She hovers above me, reflecting off the fluorescent lights spotlighting down from the ceiling, scorning me for what I’m letting happen. But the me on the floor, whose left nipple is now fully exposed, has too much alcohol in her physical body to suggest we take this somewhere more private.
Eventually, he guides me into the bedroom just off the kitchen and I’m relieved that in there, the lights are off. The shapes of our bodies blur into silhouettes, as ambiguous as the dark frame of the bed and what I can only guess to be a pile of clothes on the floor.
Once we’re done, he rests his head next to mine and pulls out his phone, opening Google Translate.
Marry me.
I take his phone and type back.
No.
Why not?
Because we don’t speak the same language.
So? That’s not important.
And I can tell by the innocent way he’s smiling, like a little boy who just got a turn on the slide, that it really isn’t important to him.
He gets up to go to the bathroom and I turn on the lights, squinting to find my clothes. I notice brown on the sheets and realize at some point during our adult playdate I got my period.
“Fuck.”
When he comes back into the room, I ask him to take me back to my hotel.
A couple nights later, I’m back at Mayan Monkey, just my friend and me. It’s New Year’s Eve and everyone is passing around a bottle of tequila with movements made dizzying by the smoke machine.
“Five. Four.”
My friend turns her phone toward me to videotape the moment, and I throw my hands in the air with a smile on my face, but inside, I feel sick to my stomach.
“Three. Two. One.”
My head is pounding and I decide it’s best to leave.
“Happy New Year!”
I shout at my friend over the cheers, letting her know I’m going to head back to our hotel. She nods then turns back to the tall brunette who has materialized out of nowhere with his arm around her shoulder.
It’s a 15 minute walk along an unlit, unpaved dirt road back to where we’re staying, and I barely make it into the room before collapsing on the cool tile floor. My mouth is dry and sweat is trickling down my forehead. I feel a fever starting to surge.
I clamp my lips shut, dreading the thought of throwing up, but knowing my body wants to purge.
Purge two consecutive weeks of partying.
Purge too much alcohol and not enough water.
Purge decisions that leave me feeling slimy in my body.
Lying on my side with my cheek against the floor, I clutch my stomach trying to hold it together, but my body wants me to feel pain rip through my throat. To demand that I acknowledge it. To punish me for ignoring it.
—
During the five months I lived in Mexico, I found myself in bed with men often, an uncharacteristic move for me. Before that point, I’d only ever been in long term relationships.
At first, I told myself it was liberating. My body! My choice! And I choose sexual liberty!
But unlike how the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s made it seem – wild, carefree, easygoing – I was finding my brief entanglements draining. I wanted to feel free, frolicking barefoot in a field of colours with flowers in my hair, but I just felt weighed down, a heaviness appearing in my chest every time I got a 1 a.m. booty call.
Yet still, I’d go.
Three months after the Mayan Monkey incident, I even found myself back in Tulum, in bed with a man 10 years my senior again.
A beautiful stranger from Toronto, with tattoos covering his arms, had dmed me on Instagram a couple weeks before saying he was travelling to Tulum and was looking for recommendations. We were following each other for some reason and struck up a conversation that began with a like here, a comment there, and eventually turned into us planning to meet for what would be the first time in person, as many social media meet cutes – and dangerous disasters – go.
So on a humid day in April, I found myself hopping on a colectivo on the side of the highway (Mayan Riviera's form of public transit) to travel the hour to Tulum from the tiny town I had been staying for the past month. I climbed into the highly air conditioned white minivan, settled into the itchy fabric seats, and stared out the tinted window as the palm trees rolled on by, trying to convince myself it’d be different this time.
And it really did feel different at first. Not only did we speak the same language, which already meant we were off to a better start, but over beer and greasy tacos, we learned we had a lot in common. Same love for Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Same culinary and travel bug. I felt a glimmer of hope that this brief entanglement could satiate the connection I was craving.
After spending hours on the private rooftop deck of his Airbnb, him chain smoking cigarettes and me drunkenly rambling on about astrology, he led me back down the spiral staircase to his bed under the guise of wanting to watch some Anthony Bourdain.
10 or 15 minutes into the show, I saw his face turn toward me out of my peripheral vision, so I leaned in.
“You’re so fucking sexy. You know that?” he whispered as he peeled off my clothes.
But the compliment wasn’t directed at me because my mind had already drifted somewhere else, leaving my body open and hollow like a shell.
When he was done, he immediately walked off to the bathroom not saying anything, while I still lay face down, staring at the white of the bedsheets, feeling empty.
—
How breakups have broken, then rebuilt my relationship to my body
Break ups have taught me more about my body than being in relationships have. Something about the absence of touch. Suddenly falling asleep without someone’s arms wrapped around me after endless nights of having a shoulder as a pillow, and sinewy legs intertwined with mine.
When I find myself alone, in a bed that now feels too big, too cold, I’m reminded there was a body at the other end of those arms. A set of legs that stand on their own when un-intertwined. Mine. And now that body feels not quite my own.
There’s a sense of familiar unfamiliarity, like putting on a beloved shirt that got shrunk in the wash. The body feels new, but known. Something to be rediscovered, retraced, because it’s been touched by, worn by someone else, and their touch has left a lasting imprint on the skin as if it were clay.
There was a stretch of time when loneliness and heartache took up prime residence in my body and I felt merely an intruder. I thought sex would help me reinhabit my body and reassert power over it. But the one night stands only left me feeling even more like a foreigner – a blur of foreign bodies in foreign places.
I would stumble out of an apartment that never looked quite the same in the light of day, googling how to get home, and longing for a body that felt more like a home. One I could comfortably slip into at the end of the day and say, this feels just right. Goldilocks style.
It would take me a while to learn that the sense of comfort, familiarity, pleasure, I was seeking in other people’s beds could only be found inside, and not on a map as I made my way back to my apartment, my airbnb, my hotel, in yesterday’s clothes.
When I was going through a breakup at 22, I hopped on dating apps for the first time in my life, intent on fucking my ex right out of my mind. Every flirtatious Hinge message I sent was fuelled by anger, pain, revenge. One shower thought I recently had…I was prompted to fill out on my profile. Between the lines, I wrote: if only he could see all the fun I’m having now.
I wasn’t.
Now, newly single at 26, I have no interest in ‘healing’ through a type of touch that doesn’t actually satisfy me.
I want to take up space in my own body.
When I find myself wanting to get fucked, I remind myself I’m just trying to replace my pain with it’s counterpart, and if it’s pleasure I’m after, I’m better off staying home and getting fucked in other ways. Masturbation. Foam rolling. Smoking a little weed, turning off the lights, and listening to Ebo Taylor’s “My Love and Music” on repeat.
Fucking men to reclaim my body didn’t work for me, because it was a way of running away from myself. A way of numbing and detaching from my body so I didn’t have to feel my current pain. But what I really wanted, which was a secret to me, was to dive back into myself. To feel myself, and feel like myself, again.
I want to feel it all.
The first couple weeks after my most recent breakup, I laid limp, my sweatpant clad ass leaving a dent in my grandparents’ couch. Every time I turned to my left, I’d catch a glimpse of my matted hair in the window, a reminder that I hadn’t showered in days. So I preferred to keep my eyes closed. Soothing them shut with alcohol, because if I were awake, I’d have to inhabit my body. I’d have to feel all my pain.
The crushing weight in my chest (grief).
The prickly feeling in my throat and cheeks (sadness).
The knots in my stomach (anxiety).
I’ve read many articles on how to move forward after a break up, and on many of those lists is the reminder to shower. It’s funny how we all resort to the same trauma responses, neglecting our basic necessities when we’re hurting.
“You’re reverting to a freeze state,” my therapist told me.
But it’s more than that. Showering just feels too hard when you’re going through a break up because it means you have to be present in your body and being present in your body, being touched, even by your own hands, is hard in those initial days.
I remember the first time I tried to touch myself after my first big break up. I almost threw up.
We experience the world through sensation, the body. Truth lies in our feeling states. So it's no wonder we cower to the mind when things feel like too much. Though sometimes hard, you can stop a thought in its tracks. But you can't stop the blood coursing through your veins.
When the body is alchemizing pain, it can start to feel unsafe. But I’ve been trying to remind myself that as much as the body is capable of feeling sorrow, it also has the capacity to feel joy and love. If we hide away from the body, we block ourselves from also accessing the beautiful things.
I want to use the body as a portal for pleasure. I want to remember I’m alive, which means allowing myself to feel through the full spectrum of life. When my body is curled up and weak because I haven’t fed it out of grief, I want to remember that this is also the same body in which I’ve experienced pleasure and joy. And I want to remember that it’s possible to do so alone.
I’ve made a promise to myself recently that the more pain I feel, the more I’ll indulge in pleasure. A pleasure that is all my own. Created by me. Felt by me. In me. Always there.
I want to rub cocoa butter all over my skin after my shower with the intentionality and purpose of kneading 100 year old sourdough.
I want to listen to Rihanna and circle my hips, eyes closed, a treat not a performance.
I want to shower in clouds of eucalyptus, soaking every inch of my skin, every strand of hair, like the first sip after a drought.
There’s something so romantic I’ve been discovering about showering. A sensual experience. A solo pleasure practice. Arousing the senses with bubbles, warmth, and sweetly crisp fragrances as you take care of yourself. On days when my mind has been in the driver’s seat, I’ll take a long shower, sometimes in the dark, so there’s nothing but me and my body. Me in my body. An intimate, infinite galaxy.
Recommendations, mementos, & discoveries from this journey:
For late-night dance parties with fire performers in Tulum, go to Mayan Monkey. This is the only place I went partying in Tulum, so there may be other, more exciting spots, but Mayan Monkey did the trick for me. It’s also a hostel, so can double as your accommodation. They also have locations in Cancun, Los Cabos, and Isla Mujeres.
If you somehow find yourself in possession of some extra money, are travelling to Tulum, and want to splurge, stay at Copal Tulum. This is where my friend and I stayed for New Year’s (thanks to her dad who very generously booked it for her as a Christmas gift, and I very luckily and gratefully got to ride the coattails of that gift). The boutique hotel is beautiful and looks exactly like what you’d think of when you picture a luxury getaway in Tulum – jungle terraces, tropical woods, a turquoise pool running right through the centre of it. They also offer wellness-inspired experiences and have two upscale restaurants/bars onsite.
All that being said, my hot take/unpopular opinion is: I didn’t actually like Tulum. I went three times during those five months, and never really enjoyed it. It feels like a vortex, I’d say. To me, the town felt awash in spiritual capitalism and Western gentrification, and the luxurious hotels that ran parallel to dirt roads where people were living in poverty didn’t sit well with me.
“My Love and Music” by Ebo Taylor, preferably listened to high and on repeat
My favourite pleasure practices as of late:
Breast massages with cocoa butter
Rubbing Sage essential oils on myself at random times in the day so I’m glistening and oozing lavender and peppermint
A cold jade roller on a freshly washed face