Almost two decades ago, while backpacking alone in Costa Rica, I fell in love with a Jersey surfer named Tom. I had escaped to Costa to get away from an obsessive, stalking ex. Tom had come down there to die. We loved each other for as long as the coastline allowed, for exactly three weeks, mostly spent drinking spiked pineapple juice, swathed in bedsheets as we watched the sun rise from the crab shack balcony.
Days we’d spend partly in the only bedroom, which smelled of unwashed adults and tropical wood, interrupted only by the occasional roommate tiptoeing in to grab a surfboard. The geckos chirped from the exposed rafters as if counting down our time.
Meanwhile, the expatriate surfers ran rampant with conspiracy theories: They were adamant that they’d escaped the U.S.’s malevolent underground, populated by reptilian elites who drank babies’ blood and ran credit card companies and slithered among Hollywood’s illuminati.
They were crazy. So was I. Wracked by PTSD because the aforementioned even-crazier ex was still compulsively stalking me back home, stuck in a spit-sized town without even locks on the doors of my rented house, I could do nothing to get away. Sometimes, I’d stand at the front door and peek through the blinds for hours.
At home, I had no support, no money, no house key, and a roommate who was the ex’s best friend. I’d literally look around the street corner, and my ex would be peering from behind a house. Friends caught him hiding in my bushes. Late at night, in an otherwise safe town, on an otherwise quiet street, he’d appear behind me. I began to think I was losing my mind.
Finally, one night, I came downstairs and found him lying in the dark on my couch. I immediately called the cops. Sadly, there was no restraining order to be had, as I couldn’t prove physical violence.
My body responded to the emotional stress in interesting ways, parts of it giving up. I developed functional neurological disorder (FND), in which the nerves in my foot went numb and temporarily stopped functioning. Sometimes I’d have to drag my lifeless leg alongside me like a club.
Since it was the Cape Cod winter, there were no jobs. So, I took what little unemployment I had and booked a flight to Costa Rica. Although I loved walking along the deserted Cape Cod beaches at night, the fact remained: I no longer felt safe in broad daylight. Costa Rica was known as an oasis of calm, a country that didn’t even have an active military. Between that and its quiet beaches, I hoped that changing locations would help me see outside myself what I so desperately wanted to see within: life, serenity, and the ability to feel my own nerve endings again; to spring out of the psychic grave I was stranded in.
One early morning at 3 am, outside our crab shack, Tom and I found a lifeless gecko. Convinced it was dead, I cajoled Tom into burying it. He grabbed a spatula, hacked away at the dirt, said I was a pain in his ass, and then flipped the body into its tiny grave.
Just as he covered the lizard with a handful of earth, it writhed, shot out of its own burial place, and flashed off into the jungle.
For years, I thought the story was just funny. But for years it stuck in my mind until I finally figured out why.
Of course, I left Costa Rica. I didn’t even have a good reason. I just cut off a lock of my hair for Tom and took off. And of course, he and I would go back underground: he to his addictions and I to my penchant for sketchy men, but this time, protected by a tropical fever dream with a gecko resurrected in the night.
Over the years, Tom and I have kept in touch. We talked when I broke out of a terrible six-year relationship with a man 20 years my senior. We talked as he descended deeper into the drink, pounding morphine and booze every night for what began as self-medicating, not yet intentionally trying to die the way he did in Costa, until one time, finally, again, he tried again.
And then somehow, he woke up the next morning. Yet, he kept on drinking until God and the doctors wouldn’t let him anymore. And even then, he continued.
Finally, his physician told him that unless he attended 90 AA meetings in 90 days, he would not be alive for his next checkup. He drank again five days later.
Then, finally, before he could go underground for good, he stopped.
As he liked to say, AA interrupted his funeral. And he has walked among the living ever since. And so have I.
We saw each other once, seven years after Costa Rica. I was a struggling, unknown graduate student who somehow got a poem accepted to The New Yorker straight out of the slush pile and was invited to the studio in Battery Park to record it. Tom took the train in from New Jersey. We met up in a dirty Midtown motel barely paid for by the English department, then he went with me to The New Yorker office, where I got to record “Cape Cod Pantoum,” and we ended up pitching backward into a Central Park fountain to celebrate, right after the confused stranger photographing us looked on in disbelief.
Now, both of us are married, neither of us drinks, and he reads my poems and comments, “We are both the gecko.”
Meanwhile, my second book of poems, Pulse, spent almost two decades underground. Many of the poems are either from Malpais or the Cape during the time I was being stalked. For the longest time, I kept stashing the poems in drawers, hard drives, and the back of my mind.
The problem was the poems I tried to bury were the ones I cared about most, which were never written by the version of me who lived among the normal humans on earth. They were unearthed by the dirty me, the buried me, the insane me, the in-love me, the drunk me, the traumatized me, and the one who wanted to believe madmen’s tales of reptilian bloodlines. The woman who fell completely in love with a random, prickly surfer from Jersey who had originally planned on coming to Costa to drink and drug himself to death because back home, he’d gone bankrupt and his suicide attempt had failed.
Somewhere in a parallel universe, there still are two fucked-up, beautiful people, eyes black with sleeplessness, perched on the balcony of a shack that barely stands on its stilts, watching the sun rise, finding a moment of grace. And the gecko is still alive.
The other reality is that, after two decades, I finally go back to Malpais, only to see the tiny, eccentric surfer town replaced by high-rises and 5-star hotels—stretches of a once-quiet beach where we fucked and walked, roped off by private homes.
It doesn’t matter. The shack will still be standing in the middle of it all. Steel buttresses replaced the stilts—a ladder instead of the swirling staircase. The downstairs outdoor kitchen was gutted. But it will still be there. And I will climb up the rickety ladder and into the bedroom where we once lay, and the blue shutters will still have tiny moons carved in them, and there will be stacks of toilet paper and a dirty blanket on the bed where some crackhead squatter had gone to heal or die or both.
To this day, people say, “You really wrote almost a whole book about a three-week fling?” They’ll also scoff, “You think the gecko was alive? When they die, their nerve endings just twitch.”
Short answer: Yes. And if you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I know when something is real.
