The week was a blur.
It would have been two days after your birthday. You would have partied for two days straight, long enough for time to soften at the edges, long enough for mornings to arrive without ceremony. Celebrations have a way of losing their shape when they last too long. They stop being events and begin to feel like weather.
By then, you and the girl from Norway had become something close to friends. Close enough to stop counting days. Close enough to move without explanation. You had known her for a month, which in that part of the world can feel like much longer. Enough dinners. Enough late nights. Enough shared silence to trust what did not need translation.
It was with her that you spent the last days of the week. From early evenings in Tulum restaurants, where the air was thick with perfume and conversation and birthday toasts that arrived late, to private house parties tucked into the jungle. Places without signs. DJs whose names were not introduced. Music that did not pause between tracks, only shifted its weight.
There were late-night drives. Headlights cut narrow paths through dark roads. Windows down. Music up. Bodies leaning into the rhythm rather than the seats. She loved music the way some people love language. Instinctively. Without analysis. She danced even when there was no space for it. Especially then.
She was from Norway. Brown hair. Blue eyes. A sharp nose that gave her face intention. Thin, but not fragile. A body that moved as if it trusted itself. She loved techno. Afro beats. What everyone loosely called Tulum vibes, as though the place itself had authored the sound.
You remembered how, weeks earlier in Turkey, she had made you play Justin Bieber on winding mountain roads, laughing at the absurdity of it, insisting anyway. That had felt like her, too. Unapologetic. Unconcerned with coherence. Now, in Mexico, the music had changed. Jungle beats replaced pop choruses. The volume stayed the same.
And then suddenly the week delivered you to morning.
The Tulum ruins stood where they always had, patient and unbothered. Stone against sky. Tourists move through in predictable arcs. You walked together without urgency. Neither of you reached for explanations. History did not require commentary. The sea beyond the cliffs looked unreal in its brightness, as though it had been placed there rather than discovered.
Later, you drove south into the jungle, toward Sian K’aan. The road narrowed. Green closed in. Heat pressed closer to the skin. At a bridge, you slowed, and there it was. An alligator beneath you, still and ancient, its presence undeniable without movement. You watched it for longer than necessary.
Further on, you found a road that did not announce itself. No signs. No markers. Just an opening where the trees stepped aside. You turned without discussion. The car followed instinct rather than plan.
The beach was empty when you arrived. Private in the way only unclaimed places are. Sand untouched. Water waiting. She took off her shoes first. You noticed this without comment.
The week did not resolve itself in that manner. It did not need to. Some moments are not conclusions. They are pauses that ask nothing of the future.
You stayed longer than expected…
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