All Apologies

“This country will try to break you”

It’s late on a Wednesday morning. I’ve woken up early. Waking up early here seems to be the default given the fact that by 530pm the sun goes down with the curt efficiency of a pub landlord draping the bar towels over the beer pumps three seconds after last orders. Bedtime is dragged from midnight, my fear-of-missing-out default back home, to 11pm to 10pm to what-am-I-eight-years-old?-9pm incrementally.

The day has already been busy with strange insect and bird noises shouting me into consciousness. Working oåut how an unfamiliar coffee machine works. Seeing a tiny rodent that looked like a pygmy deer darting across the garden outside. Heat. The sound of waves. A walk. A spell sat on a beach the colour of gold-flecked asphalt. The offer of coke from a guy sat half in and half out of a TukTuk at a time I would have considered far too early even during my three month fiend phase when I realised cocaine and me would end in a death spiral if I didn’t end the relationship and change my number right now. A consideration of lunch plans.

It's our second trip to Costa Rica, the one where we consider in earnest whether the previous year’s holiday rhetorical question ‘Could we live here?’ is put to the test. This isn’t a holiday, we tell ourselves, it’s a dry-run of what life would be like if we lived here, or as close an approximation as we can construct. No day-trips, cook most of your meals, find out when and how the bins get emptied. An unplanned test of life where there are frequent power cuts after a claustrophobic storm wrought havoc on power cables, including the dismembered one we saw snaking and spitting sparks on the ground near our bungalow that resulted in a night of torch-lit darkness.

And now I’m in the office of the estate agent (Real estate agent? Realtor? I never familiarised myself with the correct terms and I hope to be settled enough to never have to learn) saying that we’re planning to buy a place out here and start a new life and with refreshing honesty for somebody involved in selling property she says that her experience of gringos moving out to Costa Rica is that they either last two years or forever. The country will try to break you and if it fails, you’re here for life.

I’ve heard this rhetoric before. In my previous life as an Anti Social Behaviour Officer, a job that saw death and trauma and domestic violence and poverty and institutional inaction and suffering and overwork and far more faeces than any job should require, I would tell people new to the job they would either last a year or they’d be doing it as a career forever. I managed to achieve escape velocity by writing about it and selling a book about it and to a large degree that ‘s why I’m able to be sat in an office 200 yards from the Caribbean Sea talking about a change of life that will apparently hate me for the first couple of years.

It's not that I took the warning lightly. My first visit to Costa Rica included my luggage being lost twice, the worst case of food poisoning I’d ever had, my bank card being eaten by an ATM and being stranded by flooding in a prison-escapee-type motel. I knew the muscles Costa Rica could flex, I thought.

Well.

There’s all the stuff that I’ve written about here previously. I cringe at the arrogant idea anyone is reading this post, let alone coming here forearmed with the knowledge of previous posts and I’d add to that a dread of being the pub bore who repeats the same handful of stories. So I assume you don’t know what I’m talking about but I also don’t want to tell you what I’m talking about in case I’ve told you before and I’m afraid that’s where we’re at.

It's been a lot, about sums it up. The usual upheaval and stress of moving to country five thousand miles away while trying to learn a language and facing the sobering realisation that while you may have a decent way with words in your native language, you’re a drooling, farting bag of Scrabble tiles in a different language.

Terrible builders and power cuts and humidity and water shortages and supergluing foot wounds shut and isolation and doubt and delays and all the usual things anyone who’s been through this before – and any real estate agent who saw this coming from a mile off – could have told you was headed your way. You knew but you didn’t know in the bone-deep sense that only comes once it’s happened.

And then your wife breaks her leg in three places and the generalised stress of existence becomes a needle-point of urgency. There is only now and how to deal with this. And you do deal with this in a way that, in the long-range lens rear view mirror of a decade’s time might make you look back and wonder how you didn’t just both curl up on the ground and let the jungle creep over and reclaim you both. You carry on because there’s no alternative. But somewhere in the back of your head, the option of not carrying on? Okay, it’s on the table.

Then Anya dies.

You write a long post about the fading comet of your cat – I know, it’s a cat, in the grand scheme of human suffering and what about the economy and do you know how many people can’t afford a dentist and there are other cats and there you are talking about a cat, what is wrong with you? – and then she precipitously falls to earth.

She got weaker and smaller and less herself and we tried everything. Her favourite foods. New foods that would become her favourite for a shining day or two before being disregarded. Supplements. Medication. A day of renewed vigour would make you shuffle through the changed circumstances to see what the answer was. Did we change her water bowl at a different time? Put fewer biscuits in the bowl so she wasn’t overwhelmed? She ate a spoon of that crisis cat meat from the vet’s office, then another four hours later. That’s something, right?

And yet she waned. Needed help upstairs. Couldn’t jump onto the bed. Sleep. So much sleep.

The point where you say that you need to book a vet’s visit is a pathetic child’s prayer of hope that the vet will produce a shiny pill with ‘All Better Now’ written on the side. Sure, she’ll be a nuisance trying to swallow it but once she does she’ll spring up like a post-spinach Popeye and this tired, rheum-eyed animal you’ve tried to keep alive with love and hope will spring up the curtains in pursuit of a cricket. Sure.

The day comes. The night before you’ve sat on the sofa on with her on your lap, a fraction of herself, and you whisper over and over ‘It’s okay. If you need to go, it’s okay.’ Then you carry her upstairs and she settles on the bed she can’t jump onto any more and you can’t think that this is the last time because you’re killing her with your lack of optimism. That’s what you’re doing.

Then the morning comes and you get the cat carrier ready and you try to gently lift her into it but you need to sob in a corner for a while because you know What This Means and you don’t want this to happen but it is whether you want it or not.

The journey to the vet. The quiet. Comforting her in the waiting room. The look on the vet’s face as she examines her. ‘I’ve never told somebody they came in too soon’ is a quote I’ll later read from a vet. This tiny parcel delivered from a shelter in Carshalton to a steel table in Central America. So tired but still purring. She purred until the end. There’s comfort in that. My hand behind her ear. “It’s okay, pudding. It’s okay.”

It's not. They can try with a drip and a barrage of tests and it may extend things for a short while. An extension of this, her life as it is. Not her any more, most of her burned up and gone. More of this. That’s not an option.

No.

We discuss what ‘No’ will look like. An anaesthetic injection. Then an injection to stop her heart. Her Heart. We’re given time alone to say goodbye and kiss her head and tell her we love her and we’re sorry but we’re here. The vet returns. They’re compassionately businesslike. I’m told she was so weak the anaesthetic stopped her heart before the second injection was given. Her little, furious heart. “It’s okay, it’s okay” I repeated, kissing her head even after the vet confirmed she was gone. I kept telling her it was okay. The sense of hearing is the last to go, isn’t it?

Then the practicalities of where to take her and how to transport her. A biodegradable bag we could bury. A nice thing but a reminder she would biodegrade with it. My Anya, my pudding, my Anyarino, biodegrading in the ground.

She’s buried up on the hill next to our house. It’s a spot where you can see the sun set each evening over the hills opposite and flocks of parrots and breeding pair of toucans fly overhead. I’ll make sure the spot is kept clear as long as we live here.

We took her collar off, she wouldn’t need it any more, and it’s lived in my right-hand trouser pocket ever since. I touch it and say ‘Hey Anya’ whenever I walk past the place she’s resting. It’s another hostage to grief because at some point my ADHD brain will lose it or it will fall out of my pocket and the battery of heartbreak I’ve been charging will shock me once more.

So we moved on with things and that included inertia and my wife recovering from a seriously traumatic injury in a country where the after-care is essentially ‘Crack on with it’ and the various small things going wrong about the house. Amongst it all, the idea of sitting down and writing felt as alien as changing your watch battery while skydiving.

It’s all been too much. Too much continues to be on the menu. Just the other day we learned that our previous builder - somebody whom I wish nothing but the angriest genital warts imaginable – screwed up the roof over the holiday dome we’ve built (which he also screwed up) that will cost £1,000 we don’t have to repair. We have trees that need cutting back, that petrol strimmer we got to keep the grounds in order just broke, the bathroom toilet won’t flush properly any more and the kitchen sink keeps blocking. And so on and so on.

Too much has become all the time but eventually you realise that too much is just how it is. Who has a life without too much?

But the Too Much meant I stopped writing this stupid blog and if that’s all it was, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. But there are people who subscribed to this blog and did so on the assumption I would, y’know, blog on it and for that I am truly sorry.

ADHD procrastination means that when things get overwhelming, one of the things you get overwhelmed with is all the stuff you haven’t done. It’s a gloriously shitty feedback loop and it meant that the longer I didn’t write anything here the more I felt bad that I hadn’t written anything here and so the ever-rising ziggurat of self-loathing rises.

If you’re a paid subscriber, contact me and I’ll refund in full. This isn’t performative, I mean it. It’s the least I can do. Okay, no, the last few months have been the least I can do but this is the second-least. I intend to stop Too Much getting in the way from this point on but if you want out and want your money back, I completely get it.

Anyway, in a moment of serendipity that feels scripted but isn’t, the playlist I use while writing has just thrown up ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, a track I cannot listen to without dissolving into a puddle (I may one day do a blog about why Arrival is the best sci fi film of the last thirty years) so this may be the time to wrap this up.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I mean to keep going. In writing and in general. I really do.