NOBODY KNOWS WHAT DAY IT IS
BY NORA WAGNER
There are four buildings, twenty people, and one thousand surfboards in this town. At least, that is how it feels. When you arrive, you’re greeted by the jarring screeches of howler monkeys and the equally shrill screeches from volunteers gathered around a card game. It’s 30 degrees Celsius, not hot enough to force you out, just hot enough to never leave. This is how we’ve all gotten stuck here.
Playa Gigante, Nicaragua, is almost a place to find yourself. When I arrived here, I thought it might be. Instead, it’s a place where you dunk your head in the ocean – maybe a wipeout, maybe a morning swim – and you feel so content with the way sea salt sits on your skin that you don’t realise you’ve stopped asking who you are. You’re a face only known to the handful of other people in this town. The German man who’s lived at the motel for four months, the Uruguayan who returns to Gigante twice a year. More than anyone, you’re known by the dogs, the cats, the crabs. They have never known anything else.
30 minutes away from here, there is Popoyo, a surfing hotspot with built up hostels and multiple restaurants. We go there to meet backpacker friends passing through, people we met in Mexico or Bolivia; those who enjoy the luxury of coffee that doesn’t come in a packet. Popoyo feels strangely loud after Gigante. Shuttles come and go, everyone’s drinking something healthy and expensive, conversations revolve around where people are heading next. We never stay in Popoyo for long. We itch to get back to our beach before sunset. In Gigante, you are stripped of everything except your immediate existence. You arrive as a visitor. I was once the blonde girl who swims every morning. Now I am just another body in the rhythm of tide, heat, monkeys, beers, and sunsets.
This morning, I watched Lobo, the husky, follow us to the beach. Normally I wonder how he survives the heat. Today, I realised that he followed us yesterday too. And the day before. This dog has watched us just enough to know where we’ll go next. We don’t blink when the power goes out. We know the best spots for sunrise, sunset, the cheapest beer, the nicest ice cream. When someone breaks out of the spell and moves on to Ometepe or Costa Rica, another backpack lands on their bunk before sunset.
By midday, the town moves slower. The surfboards lie lonely, water dripping from the crusted wax of the morning before. A volunteer is asleep in a hammock, a paperback sprawled against her chest. Another is walking to the tienda for avocados and fresh eggs. Nobody asks what time it is because it hardly matters. Everything can wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow rarely arrives in the way that you expect.
If I’m being honest, I don’t remember the last time I checked the news. I haven’t talked to my friends from home in weeks. I don’t have any urge to connect with a world outside of this beach. Before this, in El Salvador or Guatemala, I was obsessed with finding myself. I wrote pages trying to work out if the girl backpacking Latin America was the same girl who left home. Here, I’ve temporarily stopped needing a self.
Nobody knows what day it is. We measure time by the swell instead. Yesterday became ‘the day we did karaoke,’ the day before was ‘the bonfire day.’ If I ask how long someone has been there, they’ll say “a few days,” before remembering it’s been nearly three weeks. When I started backpacking, I imagined buses, checking maps, chasing experiences. It is only in Gigante that I’ve forgotten the future.
Eventually, though, even places suspended in time remember they’re a part of the world. Every few days, someone swears that they’ll leave tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week, and then the week after. Then, one morning, they shoulder their backpack without much ceremony and hop on the bus that will take them somewhere beyond the swell. Gigante only survives because nobody can stay forever. If everybody remained under the spell, there would be no free bunks for someone else convinced they’ll only stay three nights.
I will leave soon enough. I’ll quit my promises of infinite residency in my dorm room. When I leave Gigante, I’ll remember that there’s places bigger than this town and that the world is waiting for me to become somebody again. When I leave Gigante, I’ll be left with letters scrawled in my notebook by temporary people that once felt permanent. I’ll have memories of the beach that will one day fade into my memories of every other beach. When I leave Gigante, I may never understand what planted me here. All that I will remember is the time where I existed as nothing but a body in the rhythm of tide, heat, monkeys, beers, and sunsets.
NORA WAGNER is a writer who grew up in the UK and now travels long-term. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Teen Magazine, and MessyGirl Magazine. She co-founded THINK Magazine, where she served as Editor in Chief. Find her at @norawagnr on Instagram, norawagner.xyz, or in a nearby airport terminal.