What I open my eyes to is a Mexican road. And truly it is as though I have been hurled into immediate and terrifying life. I am following a white sporadic line, that sometimes falls away in whole chunks of tarmac. To the right of the line and sometimes in its place there is a dirt ditch two foot deep. To the left, two lanes of constant traffic, the blurred and uneven road, and a hot and urgent noise. In the ditch men pick up plastic bottles and cans and carry them in plastic bags or buckets. Everything is the same colour. Their skin, and their clothes, the bottles and bags. It is the redbrown colour of a livelihood scraped from a ditch, and it seems for that moment to be the sparkling, grim colour of real and breathless life.
I stick to the white line, darting into the lanes of traffic when it falls away. There is enough room, just, for two cars on this road. Each one passes, only inches away, and I stick to the white line, impossibly awake, as the road begins to climb.
It follows the fence and San Diego, to the north, lies still, like a toy. As the city comes into view, it feels like the fleeting recollection of a picture from a dream, that flashes through the consciousness of morning - that comes, unbeckoned, without context or cause, just a strange and vivid image from another made-up world, that disappears just as you reach out to hold it; untouchable, untrue. I am following the fence and, though I am concentrating all my efforts on not getting run over, and not falling into the ditch, I realise that this means I am going the wrong way. That I have to turn around.
As the left turn, on the other side of the road comes into sight, and the chances of making the turn seem impossible, the traffic suddenly dies away. For the first time, at a moment so miraculous, the road behind me is clear. I turn back, relieved, through the centre of Tijuana and south.
The new road is quieter. There is a shoulder and space to cycle. Through the new and stifling heat I climb out of the city, and my heart thumps. Cars still race past, brakes still squeal under the sun, but the distance at which the vehicles pass feels safer.
An ambulance screams, and twenty minutes later I arrive at the accident. The cars scattered across the highway, empty, though crumpled in such a way as to provoke that profound sick feeling of having seen someone drive past you in the last few minutes of their life. A single police car´s lights flash in silence, red and blue, and passing vehicles move slowly past the wreckage, into the other lanes. In the dream, I thought, they would have closed the road, the cars wouldn´t have collapsed in such a way, and I would never have known this feeling.
It is the first day in Mexico, and it feels as if someone has taken away the net that lay beneath me.
Baja California, Mexico
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