Chapter 1: Day 17
It’s day 17 in our hotel in Cancun.
Somebody reading that might think that sounds pretty sexy. They might think to themselves, “Oh, are you on an extended vacation? Is this your honeymoon?” They might wonder if I’ve been lying out on a beach or dancing the night away in the Cancun nightclubs.
No. We’re not doing any of that. This isn’t a romantic getaway. This isn’t a vacation. There is absolutely nothing glamorous about my life right now.
We have only been on two so-called excursions. One was to a pet store on day one to buy boxes and litter for our cats. And about a week into our stay here, we went to walk through a local shopping mall. We needed to change the scenery. We needed to eat something other than tacos. And we needed to remind ourselves that we are in fact in Mexico, not just stuck in a random room.
And it is a random room. I chose it mostly because I had tried to book another one and didn’t get a confirmation. This room was the next one suggested by the booking site. It was cheap, close to the airport, and accepted pets. Good enough. Nothing fancy. A hard queen-sized bed with flat, unambitious pillows, a small desk and a TV. There’s a 7-Eleven within walking distance and our familiar taco place. But that’s it. It’s not the type of hotel you plan to stay in for a while.
As I look around, I see my cat, Oslo, lying on the dingy lambskin carpet we brought from home. He’s had it since he was a kitten. It’s where he sleeps, plays, eats his treats. And last night, it’s where he threw up. I think he’s adjusting to Mexican food.
We brought the carpet to give him a sense of normalcy. We brought one for our other cat, Sophie, as well. We had to. It’s where she gets her belly rubs. So it was a no-brainer that it had to come. We also brought a tattered paper bag Oslo likes to sleep on, a pile of random strings, fish and mice stuffed with catnip, their tunnels, their food bowls and water cups. All of their precious belongings. Their luggage was bigger than ours. I’m honestly not sure if our efforts were recognized. There was so much we had to leave behind. Their things. But mostly ours. So much we couldn’t stuff into a suitcase or carry over into this new life. I’m pretty sure Oslo is looking out the window and thinking, “I had to come six hours on a plane for this? Not worth it, people.” I’m hoping we have earned enough trust with them for them to understand that this was not the original plan and it will get better.
I’m also concerned that this move has broken Sophie. She runs to hide under the blankets every time there is a noise in the hallway. The only home she has ever known is the one we left in Canada. She seems afraid of everything. Whenever we turn on the air conditioning, which is often, she stares up at it with concerned eyes, and then begins to dig at the bed trying to get into her safe space under the sheets. But then she plays, chasing a crumpled up paper ball we brought from home, and I relax. For entertainment, she likes to hunker down in one of the four litter boxes, like she’s hiding, then scoot out of it when she’s noticed, taking half the litter with her. We don’t complain. She doesn’t have many ways to amuse herself right now.
That’s as close to being at the beach as I’ve gotten since arriving.
My husband, Ozz, sits at the desk, headphones on, pecking away at the keys on his iPad, humming as he does when he’s focused. His humming has become the constant soundtrack of this room. I find it reassuring because I know what it means. I’ve seen it before. He’s listening for nudges, creative inspiration. For that inner knowing that often prompts you to take action your brain might never have considered. He’s trying to find a solution to this situation. He’s been doing that for days.
The situation?
We are in the middle of moving from Canada to Mexico. We arrived with enough money to leave Canada, but not enough to move into the home we’ve rented in Mérida. Yet.
We found the perfect place. A colonial home in Centro. Close enough to walk to everything. High ceilings, colorful pasta floors, a refreshing pool in the backyard surrounded by tropical vegetation. The idea of having palm trees in my backyard delighted me.
We explained to the cats before leaving that we were moving to a new house. We even tried to describe it to them in language we were pretty sure they could understand. They knew “inside.” We had long ago told Oslo, who used to go out and fight, that he’s an inside kitty now. He seemed to get it. They definitely knew “outside.” That was that place beyond the patio door where birds were. So we told them their new house had an “outside, inside”—an open-air courtyard surrounded by tall walls where they could go out and chase lizards and bugs without being able to escape and with no way for anything to get in. Oslo and Sophie are going to be very pleased with this arrangement, even if they don’t know it yet. Sophie has never been outside. She is pure house cat. This expansion of her world is going to blow her mind. She doesn’t know it yet, but where we are now is not reflective of where we are going.
But the best part of the home is the reception area. I have already claimed it as mine. It is separate from the rest of the house making it perfect to be my little artisanal store, The Glitterwitch Galleria. It has a larger room with pink and green hand painted pasta tiles. The walls are a matching shade of avocado green. It has antique double doors with multiple planes of glass that open into the courtyard. It is weird how much I adore those little squares of glass. The house is furnished and one of my favourite pieces is a heavy round wooden table that you see as soon as you walk into the reception area. It matches perfectly an antique cabinet I will eventually bring from Canada. I have imagined both of them displaying my jewelry, perhaps on pieces of driftwood, with little fairy lights to highlight the glimmer of rhinestones and beads.
I have pictured setting up displays on this table and looking out to the courtyard to see the cats taking their baths in the sun. Sometimes I envision my art displayed on the courtyard walls and my customers viewing it, glasses of wine in their hands as they browse for the perfect piece to take home.
The smaller room off of the reception area will be my studio where I will make my creations. I know where my desk will be, where my supplies will be stored. I have already been living there, and creating there, in my mind for weeks. And soon, just two deposits away, that dream will be my reality.
Mexico requires first month’s rent plus two deposits to secure a property if you don’t have a guarantor, which we don’t. We made the first deposit before we left Canada, negotiating a two-year contract. The plan was straightforward. Ozz had several things in motion that we fully expected to mature by the time we arrived. Nothing has landed yet, but he reassures me that money will be coming in soon. I’ve heard that promise from him before. But now we are both at a place where I believe him.
We had no idea how much time it would actually take.
We chose this. The house. The deposit. The contract. The leap across a border with two cats and not quite enough money. We chose all of it. Eyes open. We could see how everything was aligning.
Not everyone saw it that way. When I checked in with my mom and told her we were scrambling to bring in the money to get to our house, she commented that we must not have planned very well. That stung. Admittedly there are brief moments when I question if we have made a huge mistake. Have I been gaslighting myself into believing in a reality that will never materialize?
From the outside, this move looks irresponsible and risky. Maybe even a bit crazy. It certainly would to my mom. My mom is the type of woman who pays off her credit card balance every month. And here I was living day by day in a hotel room, looking for money. The lack of certainty would’ve driven her nuts.
Whenever I brought up my move to Mexico, my mother would change the subject. I think my apparent recklessness was a topic she didn’t feel comfortable discussing. So she had no idea how much we’ve done to get here. And I’m not just talking about the hours spent researching properties, making decisions about all of our belongings, or finding out what was involved in getting our cats on that plane. Being a highly organized Virgo, I had planned every detail obsessively and had the checklists and Post-it notes to prove it. But there was no receipt to show all of the invisible work that only Ozz and I knew we had done. The conversations. The meditations. The months spent confronting everything that came up inside us as we moved closer to the life we’d been imagining.
She was forming her opinion based on how things looked from the outside. I was trusting that how things looked on the outside was temporary and soon my reality would begin to align with the life I had been holding in my mind.
We knew there would be a gap between where we were and where we were going. We just didn’t know exactly what that gap would look like.
This is what it looks like.
Every day starts the same. We wake up somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m. And immediately, the countdown begins.
Checkout is at one.
My first thought is usually some version of, “Will this be the day we find the six thousand dollars we need for those two deposits in time to check out? Or will it be another night in this cramped hotel room?” But, as Ozz and I lie cuddling, I push that thought away and imagine that we are waking up in the bedroom of our house in Mérida.
We try to be quiet and enjoy our cuddle time because as soon as we make a noise, Sophie begins squawking to remind us that it’s time to get up and begin cat chores.
Eventually we acknowledge her by squawking back. We then take turns giving the cats their morning love; I give Oslo a bum rub on his carpet then scratch Sophie on the head and tell her how beautiful she is while she smiles at me and quietly sings. Ozz rubs Sophie’s belly and then carries Oslo around while he smooches the top of his head. The routine never varies.
I hand feed them their “licky things,” squeezable treats we brought with us from Canada, their favorite thing, while Ozz washes their food dishes in the bathroom. Then I feed them. Before we left we had carefully labeled which bowl and glass belonged to which cat. But somewhere along the way, they gave up being territorial. Now they eat from each other’s dishes, drink from each other’s cups and share litter boxes. We think they are trauma bonding.
Next we diligently clean up Sophie’s version of the beach. Ozz uses a plastic glass taken from breakfast the day before as a poop scooper and I get down on my hands and knees, using a hand towel as a broom and my door key as a dustpan to collect the scattered bits of litter.
Then we get dressed. My clothing, which hasn’t been washed in over two weeks, consists of a tank top that gets saggier every time I put it on and a pair of comfy pants with a hole in the knee that is steadily growing larger. I gave up caring about how I look quite some time ago. I used to be fussy about things like my clothes, wearing a bra, putting on makeup, and doing my hair. Now? Not so much. We joke that we are slowly becoming hotel goblins.
Afterwards, we say goodbye to the cats, tell them we will be back soon and step out into the hot, humid hallway to make our way to breakfast in the dining room. Scrambled eggs with something new in them every day. Today it was peas and carrots. A side of refried beans and, if it’s a good day, salsa verde. We make coffee, thicker and stronger than it was at home. I miss my caramel K-Cups. The coffee maker here spits coffee out on one side and then water out the other. We have been here so long we know exactly where to place the paper cup to catch both of them. You can tell who the newbies are—they are the ones who burn their hands trying to move the cup midstream.
Then back to the room. Sophie runs to hide when she hears us open the door. Oslo is getting braver, pushing past us in an attempt to check out the hallway. We think he’s planning an escape.
Then we work. Ozz at the small desk, me sitting on the bed behind him, both of us focused on our iPads. We all stay like this for hours, the two of us working, one cat staring out the hotel window at the parking lot, the other safely hidden under the sheets.
I’m creating content and offers for potential hypnotherapy students or clients to bring in some money to pay for another few days at the hotel or hopefully enough for those two deposits. For Ozz it’s the follow-ups. The reaching out. The propositions.
Often money trickles in, but usually just enough for another night or two at the hotel and something to eat.
We pause at some point to get tacos at the nearby restaurant. At first I hungrily ate things I couldn’t pronounce and couldn’t recognize. At some point I developed preferences. Now, I just long for something different. Sometimes, we treat ourselves to a pizza or sandwich from the 7-Eleven. Gourmet dining at its best. We watch English YouTube videos to wind down. I still have to learn Spanish.
And at the end of each day we go to bed, once again snuggled in each other’s arms. One cat sleeping on the paper bag that smells like his Canadian home. The other in her tunnel. And as I drift off, my mind flip-flops. Part of me adds up how many more days at the hotel we can afford. The next checkout is just a handful of hours away.
But there is another part of me, a bigger part of me, that is strangely calm. I know that this is a liminal space. My old life has fallen away. But my new life hasn’t quite taken shape.
Years earlier, I’d worked with a business coach who was also psychic, a wonderful combination of mystic and practical businesswoman who could talk to me about energy one minute and tell me how to fix my marketing the next.
At the time, I was struggling to let go of something in my business. I kept going back and forth, trying to figure out what I should keep, what I should change and what I should let go of.
Finally, she asked me a completely different question.
“What do you want to experience in your life?”
The answer that came out of my mouth surprised me.
“Luxury.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by it. But she told me to start putting myself in the energy of luxury wherever I could. Go somewhere beautiful. Sit in a luxurious hotel and buy a coffee. Give myself small experiences that felt like the life I wanted instead of waiting until I had that life to experience them. The more I put myself in the experience of luxury, the more I was aligning with its energy. And what we align with is what we attract.
Then she warned me about something.
As my vibration changed, she said, things that were no longer a match for where I was going might begin to fall away. That was the point where people often panicked. Their relationship changed. A job ended. Something stopped working. Their lives appeared to be falling apart, so they grabbed at whatever was leaving and tried desperately to put everything back the way it had been.
Her advice was simple.
Let it fall away.
I never forgot that.
And now, sitting in a hotel room in Cancun with so much of my old life gone and my new one not yet fully formed, I had to admit that an awful lot had fallen away.
My businesses. My home. Most of my belongings. Relationships I thought I’d have forever. The roles I’d spent years identifying myself by. Even the country I’d lived in my entire life.
From the outside, it could certainly look as though my life had fallen apart.
But that wasn’t how I understood it.
I believed I was in the space between the life I’d asked for and the life I’d been living. I didn’t particularly enjoy the space between. I hadn’t envisioned manifesting luxury while sitting in a hotel room worrying about how long we could afford to stay there.
But I knew this part too.
Don’t grab at what is falling away just because the new thing hasn’t arrived yet.
This is the awkward gap where you’ve let go of the first trapeze bar, but the next one hasn’t reached you yet. For a moment, there is nothing to hold on to. You’re just suspended in space.
That’s where I am.
I’m trusting that soon my fingers will feel the cold metal of that next trapeze bar.