By Kat Sparks—

I learned to drive on a Volkswagen Thing in Mexico. Part jeep, part car, part truck, ugly as sin, with a hole in the floorboard the size of a dinner plate.

You could look down between your feet and watch Cozumel go by underneath. Gravel, dust, the occasional startled iguana. That hole was my speedometer. If the street was a blur, I was going too fast. If I could count the rocks, I could go faster. Reverse in a Thing is also not where you think it should be, a lesson I would learn again later, at higher stakes and in better shoes.

I was a free-range teenager on that island, back when that was just called being a kid. I had a car, a curfew that was more of a suggestion, and the entire Caribbean as a backyard. What I did not have was privacy. My father, Dean-o, knew I had broken a rule roughly four seconds after I broke it, which I remain convinced defies physics. I would come home rehearsing my story in the driveway, and he would look up from his glass, say my entire name, and the story would evaporate.

I resented it for ten minutes. Then I understood the lesson, which is that the world is small and people talk and you had better be someone you would not mind being reported on. Cozumel gave me independence and street smarts in the same package, which is the only honest way they come.
And it gave me the water.

The first time I dropped into blue water, the real blue, where the reef shelf falls away into a color that has no name in English or Spanish, something in me went quiet and has been looking for that quiet ever since, across too many countries to list. Cenotes, cold quarries, questionable boats captained by men named Chuy. Every dive is an attempt to get back to that first one, and none of them quite do, which is why I keep going.

Dean-o loved Mexico. Not the postcard version, the real one, with the bad roads and the good people and the church bells at hours that make no sense. He never gave me a speech about it. He just lived it in front of me until home stopped being a house and became a country. That is a hard inheritance to explain on a customs form.

Which is how a woman living perfectly happily in Austin ended up in the sierra of Guanajuato.

A friend told us about a hippie artist town in the mountains. Cobblestones, painters, a pink church that looks designed by someone in the middle of a very good dream. My husband, Agapito, and I looked at each other with that particular expression married people get right before they do something enormous. We came. We stayed.

Everything about San Miguel de Allende was overwhelming and beautiful and unknown, all at once. I could not find grape jelly. I could not find a hardware store, then found eleven on the same block, all named after saints. I cried at least twice a week, sometimes from frustration and sometimes because I turned a corner at seven in the evening and the light hit the stone and it was too much beauty to absorb standing up.

Then it stopped being unknown and became mine. The smell of San Miguel in the morning, wood smoke and wet cobblestone and the sugar cloud outside a panadería. The energy of it, which anyone who has spent a week here will tell you is not a metaphor. People arrive to visit, stay twenty years, and never quite explain it to their families back home.

Agapito and I had sweet years here. We drove out to the hot springs when the week got heavy and sat in the water until our fingers pruned and our arguments dissolved, because it is hard to stay mad at someone while floating. We spent Sundays in the Jardín, and here I must explain something to the younger readers. This was before WhatsApp. You did not text to make a plan. You sat on a bench and the plan came to you, wearing a hat, carrying a bag of oranges, asking if you had eaten. Whole friendships were forged on those benches, and the ones still standing are the load bearing walls of my life.

I started writing for Atención back then. Practical things, where to find the impossible item, how to keep a non-chemical home without importing half of it. I did not know I was becoming a person who explains San Miguel to newcomers. I thought I was answering questions about vinegar.

The bipolar got bad. That is the shortest sentence in this essay, and the heaviest. Anyone who has loved someone through mental illness knows the particular grief of watching someone you adore be slowly relocated somewhere you cannot follow. I will not spend your afternoon on it. I will only say that the sweet years were real, and stayed real, and nothing that came after took them from me.

Agapito died. Later, so did my mother. Different times, different kinds of quiet in the house afterward. Grief does not stack neatly. It moves in and rearranges your furniture. I found myself in Seattle with a whole life built around me. Furniture, systems, insurance cards, the correct hoodie. Everything I knew, and a growing certainty that I did not want it.

I want to be honest about what came next, because we lie about this part. Deciding to pack it up and return to San Miguel was not brave and it was not romantic. It was terrifying. There is a specific terror in dismantling a life you spent years assembling, with no guarantee the next will hold your weight. I made the decision, felt sick, made it again the next morning, and did that until I packed the Toyota, put the dogs in the back, and got behind the wheel. That settled the argument.

Here is what I found on the other side. When you rebuild from zero, you get to choose the blueprint.

So I chose community. Radically, deliberately, as the whole point rather than a side effect. That is where ExperienceSMA came from, and why so much of it happens around a table with food on it. Not networking. Not a mixer. A table long enough that you cannot possibly talk only to the person you came with, where strangers pass the salsa and by dessert they have somebody to call. I have watched it happen a hundred times and I am not tired of it.

I am building a life here on my own terms, a phrase I would have found insufferable at twenty-five and now understand costs everything and is worth it.

The hole in the floorboard turned out to be the whole education. You go forward, you watch the road move underneath you, and you accept that some of the dust is going to end up in the truck. And reverse is never where you think it should be. Sometimes you have to push down, and over, and trust that going back is actually the way ahead.

Kat Sparks is the founder and curator of University of Expats and ExperienceSMA.

https://experiencesma.com/