The Gringa Trail

Mexico City, MX

My plane landed and I let out a deep, weighty sigh. If one had pulled apart that exhale's chemical construct, it would have contained particles of fear and shards of my heart that were never fully dealt with.

Mexico City—I thought about skipping over her bustling metropolitan sprawl since I had visited once before, but in the end that was precisely why I came. Years ago, I visited CDMC with an ex-boyfriend in celebration of our one-year anniversary. 1 year—that now sounds like a joke, but it was a lifetime to me in that season of my commitment phobia. Even more astonishing (and perhaps naively), we were talking of "some days" and "what-ifs" as though thinking about the future didn't set my insides crawling.

The fact that I had been willing to agree to couples counseling in order to begin figuring out if we were ready to move things forward in our relationship was a major signpost that this boy was something different to me. Every "I love you" was a representation of my desire to do hard things, winning out over my fear. Letting him see me felt like taking off armor I had welded to my skin, and yet I peeled it away layer by layer. It was different. And most importantly, I was doing my damndest to be someone different. "We're not running this time, Constance," was my continual internal dialogue.

I thought the trip had been a lovely first international travel with the man I adored. Of course, snipping and arguments broke out in the way they do when you're learning to merge your life with someone, merge your travel styles, communication styles—and let me tell you they were different, with a capital D.

So when we got into a fight shortly after arriving home, I felt assured we were going to get through it. But something about this one was different, it wasn't resolving. One day passed and we kept spinning our wheels. Two days and it became evident there were things underlying this argument that I couldn't seem to understand, as if the source lay just behind a door that only he held the key to. I could feel it, sense it, but couldn't get to it. Finally, on day three of that exhausting cycle, he burst out and exclaimed, "I'm not happy."

I didn't know what to do with that statement other than to tell him if I was the one making him unhappy that we should break up. His response—silence. Heartbreaking silence. And then he told me he thought that that was what he wanted.

After three days of going round and round, my nervous system had reached its capacity. I couldn't process anymore. It was all happening out of the blue for me. We had no prior conversations about how he was feeling, neither interpersonally nor in couples therapy, and I didn't know how to unpack it in that moment.

I asked that we take time to process and revisit the conversation, and we left that evening with a strange semicolon buttoning it all. Days passed and I never heard from him. Eventually, I put the piece of me saying, "ball's in his court" to the side and asked to meet.

We all know the unspoken rule of breakups: the one who cares the least and moves on the fastest wins. And if this was the measure, I was an expert at winning breakups in the past. Flawless record, actually. However, this was new. For the first time in my life, I had opened up all of me, held nothing back. And to walk away without a single conversation or stitch of effort to work on what felt broken, well, it went against the very fiber of the human I was working to become.

So I showed up that evening at a little hole in the wall and pretend like our casual bull shit conversation about the weather and the way he was treating me like a stranger was not wrecking me inside. I loved him and I would honor the girl who was learning not to run. I put all my cards on the table, expressing my desire to try, please, just to try. He said he would think and get back to me. Again, silence so profound you could hear the cracks in a heart forming.

It was nearly a week later when I landed in New Orleans for a work trip and turned off my airplane mode to see at the top of my notifications a text message from him. Everything in me said to wait, don't open it here in the taxing plane, but of course, I couldn't. It was a text, that had to be good news! Anything else certainly wouldn't come in that format. Oh, silly girl, what an overestimation of his courage.