emptiness

There is an eerie emptiness when I move about Nosara. I don’t see Latinos. Well, I do. And I know they exist with their problems, but I don’t feel their problems. But it’s not the existence of a resolution that I feel that would feel warm and fulfilling. I feel an absence of problems without the fullness. I only feel that they do not exist. The fullness comes from interactions with friendly foreigners, but there is no Latino culture around. I go teach a class. The student, I think only 7, refuses to participate in the exercise. Instead, he talks about his fathers, he explains that he has two dads, he particularly focuses on the one who will not spend any money on him and does nothing. He is serious and firm in his condemnation of his father. Too serious for his age. I ask him to do the exercise. He stares at me with the same condemnation and defiance. But I only continue with the exercise. There are other students waiting. Their turn. I ask them what they did yesterday. It’s all the same. Wake up. Pinto. Soccer. Beach. Nicoya. On the weekends. The boy creates disturbance in my mind that makes me feel far away from the classroom, far away from my body, but I cannot reach him either. Everything is far away and out of reach, as if I am living inside a plexiglass cage. The sounds are muffled and quiet. I sleep and wake up tired. When I don’t demand anything from the waitress she is distant and resigned. They don’t smile when they are alone. They are far away as well, further than the people in the cities. Maybe it is the lack of dreams or goals to be made here and hoping for something better somewhere else. Maybe it is grief.  I would rather see the people active and moving about with their crimes and poverty and problems than the emptiness of no one being here at all. Where is the center of the people? I always lose it when I come to Nosara. There is no center nowhere. Everywhere I go, cafe, gym, it demands that I forget, that I forget that I once knew its center.