What on earth possessed me to go on vacation alone?, I asked myself maybe 100 times this week.  And what on earth possessed me to come to honeymoon central: Cancun?  I have never felt so single, singularly alone, in my entire life. There is a big red sunburn mark in the middle of my back, the part you can’t reach ON YOUR OWN, to prove it.  I never knew it was possible to have so many conversations in my head.  I almost cried into my dinner plate the first night.  Then I went back to my hotel room with what felt like my 10^th glass of wine and guess what was on TV? Pride and Prejudice.  The gods had turned against me.  So I lay there, in Cancun, at 10:00 p.m. and cried my way through Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, I hope you give each other syphilis and die of insanity, I thought.

But something spectacular happened when I woke up on day 2.  I felt like a new woman.  Fuck being alone.  I love myself.  I also noticed that while I may have been eating alone, other people might as well have been too for all the conversation they seemed capable of having.  A sea of silence and a revelation: People are just as miserable together as I am alone! Ha-ha, triumphant solace! At least if I am miserable, I know who is responsible for making me so.

But it turns out, I’m not miserable.  Everyday, I woke up, ate enormous breakfasts full of the fattiest pieces of bacon, went back to sleep on the beach, woke up again, drank several beers and a delicious concoction called a mono loco, ate lunch, went back to sleep on the beach,  and swam in the beach.  I was like a newborn baby. Somewhere the self-pitying thoughts stopped too and I found my strength again.  The thing that makes me me.  My ability to tell the world to go fuck itself.  That’s the best you’ve got? I can drink you under the table, world, and take a crap on your face before you get me down again.  I swear. As Beckett said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

In the end, the Redneck Riviera was exactly what I needed to shake off a prolonged period of self-pity.  That and these monkeys that were my only purchase during the trip: