Choosing.

The next day as I was getting my feet kicked at 5 am, as I came out of my dream I felt like something in me had shifted. I pulled my head out of the blanket and to my surprise, smiled at the guard that had just kicked me. And what do you know, grumpy-pants smiled back. I guess I figured if I was going to be there for a while I needed to do something to feel better. I couldn’t keep puking and crying. What kind of life would that be? Something had to change and the only thing that could change was my way of looking at things. It is in the way we choose to see the world that the world we see transforms.
If I kept seeing things as irresolvable and against me, something told me they would remain that way for as long as I chose to see them that way. So I started smiling, it was my first assignment. Smile at everyone and everything, you have nothing to lose, you are in fucking jail in India. Life does not get any worse than this. So I did. I smiled at the guard that kicked my feet, I smiled at the girl that killed her sister, I smiled at the other guard that gave me attitude and looked like she wanted to kick my beaner ass. I simply smiled at life in general. I started drawing and writing in my journal. I started being the clown I’ve always been, I started making people laugh every chance I got. And things did start changing, after all freedom is a relative thing. It is, you could argue, a state of mind. The rest of it is just geography. But mostly freedom is in our minds. Freedom is something that, at it’s very core, can never be taken away from us. We suffer because we fail to accept the present moment as it is and simply live it and learn from it. We struggle because we resist life every moment as it is, and are always looking to change it based on the fantasy that, if things were any different, we would be better, happier. But it is that very resistance that keeps us stuck in the situations we resist. I have no idea If that makes any sense to you yet. It will. It does to me now. It is because I stopped resisting my reality that I finally allowed it to start moving and to change.
I remember every day at noon I saw a plane fly across the sky in the same direction, I imagined myself in that plane going home. Finally free. It was my daily meditation. A few days went by and I found myself actually enjoying my time there. Getting to know the stories behind the women that were around me. They were fascinating. It is a fascinating place, jail. I had to appreciate the experience and everything I was getting to see. I had a feeling somewhere in my nutty soul that I was there for a reason. Nobody goes that deep into a rabbit hole for nothing. But I wasn’t asking “why me?” as a victim anymore. I was asking because I wanted to know more. Somewhere in me I was willing to go deeper if that was where life was guiding me. I walked over to the soccer field, across from the jail food store, where there was a very large meditation room with hardwood floors and high ceilings. I stared into that room and thought to myself, If I have to stay here for years, at least I have a place where I can dance. I’ll teach dance! My whole energy changed when that thought crossed my mind. A possibility opened in a hopeless place.
Friday came with a letter from the Mexican embassy saying they had met with Evergreen and her cronies and she had put a deal on the table where, if we admitted to having done everything they accused us of, they would let us go and drop the charges. That’s how dumb she was. She wanted me to admit to doing something so she could say: no, she didn’t really do it. I hadn’t realized how dumb green people were. They gave us a deadline to sign the deal or it would be off. I personally thought it was so damn ridiculous I signed right away. Come to find out I was even dumber than my green nemesis. Mr. T didn’t agree and didn’t sign. I simply thought, once we are out of the cage we can handle this the Mexican way and it will be all done in no time. But he had never dealt with corruption at this level. He didn’t trust corruption the way I did. So he sent the contract back with his changes and said unless it was corrected he would not sign it. Monday came with a panic attack and visit from the Mexican consul. At 11 am I was summoned to the visitors area. Paredes sat there deflated, exhausted, almost defeated. I walked in looking like Kate Moss after Fashion week in Milan. Emaciated, disheveled and anemic. He took one look at me and started crying. I was really scared at that point. Did I look that bad? Although mexican men working in the government see corruption every day and deal with the scum of the earth, they simply do not cry or have panic attacks for nothing. So this was serious.
He said to me in his broken sweet voice, “I don’t know how to help you anymore mija. What did you do? Why do they hate you so much? I do not know what the fuck they want from you! T will not sign and they will not change this. I don’t know what to do anymore!!!!” He threw the contract down on the table and wiped his tears. I suddenly realized I had not waxed my eyebrows or lip in about three weeks and must have been looking like a Pancho Villa VS. Kate Moss mash-up doll. I held his hand, looked him in the eye and peacefully said. “They will make the changes, you’ll see, everything is going to work out just fine. And I will get my eyebrows waxed” – He looked at me and burst out laughing. He couldn’t believe how tranquil I was. Neither could I after what he had just said to me. But somehow I felt ok.