AustLit

'In a Californian spiritualist’s home in Mexico I am instructed to be grateful for things. Sunlight. Creativity. My strong body. Words written in the guidebook in the guesthouse where she’s running from her country and her grief, a trauma the yellow highlighted passages in Living Now and Buddhist Enlightenment and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in her bookshelf cannot relieve. I am grateful for Amaretto flavoured tequila. That assholes sometimes lose. I’m grateful my body is not hostage to anything – a person, a drug, a past – cravings and desire so etched in they strip the fat. I am grateful I saw the middle aged ex-pat woman with the pinched face and skinny arms eating an enormous mound of ice cream alone in a noisy restaurant after the second sitting – for how sad she was or maybe angry and how the ice cream didn’t seem to make any difference. I am grateful for stray dogs who sit on my feet in cafes and how I let them, trying not to think about fleas and ticks and tiny spiders and the dust of San Miguel crawling up my legs and lodging deep inside me. I am grateful the waiters let it go and let me take photos but chase the dogs out after I’ve paid but before I’ve left the building. I am grateful I don’t experience the world from a thousand-dollar hotel rooms and still argue about stray margaritas on the bill. I am glad the set of my shoulders and the tone and volume of my voice is not a certain kind of American … or Australian … or German. I’m grateful for Mexican children, born into an endless sea. Sleeping in the front seats of pick-ups while their dads sell mangoes and coconut strips to tourists, curling into their grandmother’s laps on street corners sucking on blankets casually as if they are the children of that New York family I visited on 5th Avenue propped up on a bulbous white couch watching Netflix.' (Introduction)