After Mission, I returned to my lake. You can read the corresponding post about two really big margaritas. To be brief about it, I arrived in Laredo emotionally exhausted. The Missionaries' contamination, their colonias, the dead man on the river, the shootings in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants who've died in Arizona's deserts... I hadn't processed it all. It was just too much to take in.
I came back to Laredo and reflected over a couple of margaritas at happy hour. I thought, I tried to write, and I cried. I cried and cried and cried. The waitress came up to me several times. "Is everything alright?" she asked, in maybe limited English. "Is everything all right?"
For me, it was. I'm healthy and comparatively wealthy. For so many that I knew, it wasn't.
With some demons purged--or at least tamed--I returned to my lake. That night I slept deeply, slept soundly. I dreamed of silence. Nothing else.
The next morning I awoke to the usual weekend campers. My campsite, you see, isn't exactly legal. I spent the day with them, living vicariously through them with every chomp of a carne asada and cast of a fishing line. It was enough to be in the periphery of their company. I needed to be alone but connected.
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