The Last time.
It is that yearly visit to the Yucatan Coast that is the yardstick of my adult life. This year here only with my sister, and remaining for a few rainy days post her departure to sit idle and watch the waves rush to the shore clearing the sargasso.
Both Chris and I seriously contemplated, for the first time, whether we would return again: there is a growing decreased familiarity with the past shared in this place; Some staff has retired. The hotel has lost some focus – certainly on the ability to pay good attention to repeat guests. Perhaps too we have placed this place in the way we were times – younger, with families, not in a frayed societal sphere, and unwilling to use our remaining turns around the sun in a way that is less than what we might wish for. It was also oddly, painfully quiet here this year despite low season status, reflective of the world dynamics at play in a tourist spot that relies heavily on middle-class escapism. Or are we seeing in the absence, an end?
I worked a great deal at breathless pace for more than half this trip, cleaning up office procedural issues that I must more permanently remedy upon my return, and adding on new clients to a full caseload.
I wondered what choices too I could have made to have led to a different life that would have felt secure enough to turn away work while in my so called down time. I surely know that some choices I might have made were interrupted, cut off by decisions unplanned by me.
No matter where I am in the world, the curtain still has to rise. The work still has to happen, though I envy those sister and brother counsel who close their office doors when they open those in their vacation spaces. I am not them - whether out of outsized responsibility or not, I am not them.
I wondered too what it must be like not to remain tied to the locus of my identity as a lawyer. That I even wondered is much the same as my contemplation that I may not pass this way to this hotel again ever and by choice - that there will be a last time for practice and a last time for breathing along this stretch of beach that has so been a mark on the timeline of life.
