The Day Out of Time
Supernatural stories from the other side
When I wake up on the morning of July 25th I can already taste the pungent, heavy pause. Outside it is riper than the fly-covered mangoes bursting open on the musky shelves of the frutería. Wetter than the sweat rolling down the arms of men riding rusty bikes to work.
The Day Out of Time would be sticky, I think to myself as I pluck my glistening mustache by the light of my phone.
It’s 7am and the sun has risen, but brownouts roll through the streets of Tulum, shorting out the generators and sending my rented room with one tiny window back into darkness.
The heat has been rising like bread all week. Every morning I’ve ventured forth into the blinding day, on my way to whatever air-conditioned sanctuary I can find. I’ve worked from the outdoor pool patio on top of a forgettable micro-hotel with bad drink specials, in a sprawling shaded garden of a community cafe where I feast on vegan vita bowls, from overpriced cabanas on the beach and ramshackle taco joints down the street. Today I am taking myself to my favorite place: Kokomo, the only decent coffee shop in town. I wasn’t staying on the hotel strip with the rest of the tourists, although a few trickled in. Here I could perch at the front bar facing the busy esplanade and do two of my favorite things: watch people and write.
A feverish heat wave enclosed everything, steamrolling slowness into the already languid rhythm of living in a tropical beach town. I am brown and ruddy-cheeked from my daily walk and today the dial has turned up. Most days, my hands swell in the warmth by noon.
Soon I will retire to a cooler location to take a pulque but for now, I watch the street and the men watch me.
I am researching this elusive day, if you can call it that. What is a day anyway, when time has ceased to exist? What am I without time? What am I to do with this piece, this place, that has fallen off the grand scales that measure and balance eternity’s span?
Considered an interstitial zone, a sacred breath between thresholds, I am told by the internet that the Day Out of Time is when the universe was granted a small rest.
A 24-hour note of silence in the thrum of her endless drum.
•
I don’t see Jeks because I’m skimming through the archives of cryptic websites meting out the math behind the tzolkin, the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar used by the ancient Mayan civilization. The ones who inhabited this land long before it was a tourist destination. It is too early in the morning to fully absorb the galactic time cycles calculated by the sun’s span and reach, the movement of orbits too immense to fathom, all of it knotting and growing inside my head like spider webs.
I shake the dust out, suddenly fatigued even though I’ve had two espressos. Too many zeros to remember what a billion actually means.
Sometimes words do that — stop making sense.
I don’t see Jeks because I don’t need to. Instead I feel the quake of their entrance. An intriguing presence settles in a stool away. Out of the corner of my eye I scan them, make note: the heavy blue flannel with the long sleeves when I am panting in almost nothing. Long black pants and blond hair that blows languid in the thick breeze. I can’t see their face, just sunglasses and smooth angles behind rivers of wheat. Then they turn back to the large sheaf of papers they have set down on the bar as though it were a chest of gold.
Tika the barista sets down a shot of espresso and ten pesos, the coin with the leering grin of the Aztec sun stone.
I stood in front of the actual sun stone years ago, in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. A massive rock the length of several men across, chiseled with intricate deities and celestial events that outline an entire living cosmology while hinting at other, more sinister memories. A monumental object born of bloodshed, lust, and sacrifice, full of mystical stories that my mind cannot fully enter.
Jeks nods, says Ay, and tips her.
I am writing in my journal and watching their hands, just a foot away on the worn bar. The fingers are fine specimens — the kind of hand old world painters would sculpt with oils: slender, well-defined knuckles, smooth and white. Paws of a child, a goddess, a goat. Corded with muscle like I have known man’s hands but with the delicate skin and sensitive tips of a pianist. The left one sporting a heavy bronze ring with a black opal buried in the center.
Extremities of an ancient being, it seemed at first glance.
Many papers are shuffled, spread out, re-arranged by these hands. More are withdrawn from an overstuffed accordion folder.
The papers are covered in formulas, drawings of symbols; long stretches of typed text dense with scrawled notes and coffee stains. I can feel the hunger in their handwriting, the consuming nature of the information involved. I spy a small black pyramid, lines of poetry, initials, several doodled eyes. Graphs and clocks.
The inner workings of a magical mind.
By now we are both aware of the other. Neither of us has said a word but the energy between us grows a kind of fur, like an animal waiting to be fed. I feel the captivating tug of the heavens spinning the dice in our favor. It seems inevitable that we will speak and I am already in the initial tease, that tension of future pleasure, awaiting them, curious as to how we will break the spell.
I forget who first reaches across the weighted space to say hello, but all of a sudden we have found each other in real time, are talking, rapt and absorbed in a conversation that resonates with the theme rippling through the day’s ethers.
Jeks is on hiatus from life in a small village on the outskirts of Wales, where her people had lived since medieval times, maybe longer. I come from farmers and drunks and dragon folk, she tells me, when I ask her where she is from.
She was one of the first to have made it past the borders of her brutal homeland of origin, a place I couldn’t pronounce even though she wrote it out; a place both desolate and exquisite. A place of no consequence at all. In her mouth, everything comes out filtered through an alien accent.
My tongue can’t even imagine the sounds.
Her story is similar to mine; to many like ours: a magical outlaw leaves the safe place they have come to despise in order to brave the world and find out where they belong. It is a story of borderlands, in-betweens, madcap leaps of faith.
Jeks falls into a reckless sort of surrender, stopping in certain places as she goes, of which there are many; all with their unique purpose and tenor. Some places offer respite, others escape. Each destination a sort of cave where one turns over the forgotten stones in search of a hidden message. Something to explain the tug of places one has never seen. Tulum is one such destination for people like us — a crossroads for those who desire to be reborn in some form. A place to shake off the crusts and curses of previous lifetimes.
She had been living here for a month by the time we collided, pale as a daisy, this androgynous drifter who looked like Kurt Cobain reincarnated. Her beauty was that of a bruised peach. A delicate exterior with an innate, intoxicating fecundity that went against all signs of life in this latitude. Her eyes were shadowed and eerily blue, her skin basically anemic, and yet underneath the surface there was the disturbing pulse of a subterranean ripening. The same feeling of a root expanding underground, out of sight.
I am captivated by this strange white butterfly. When I ask about her ring, she says it’s her dragon’s eye. It speaks for the one inside. Indeed, I do get a sense of another creature dwelling deep within her. Because anything feels possible, perhaps fated, on today of all days. Like a blank check from the universe, I’m cashing in on the fantasy and blowing each wish a kiss.
I can’t tell if I am in love with her or if the heat has finally cooked my brain good. It might sound slightly cliché, but I’ve never met anyone like her. Jeks is otherworldly, outside of this reality, as though she’s just strolled through a rip in the spacetime fabric.
I am secretly ecstatic when she agrees to a walk with me later that evening.
What can be done with a day that doesn’t exist? We decide to find out together.
•
I am early to Amapola, the outdoor bar where DJs spin tropical trance music underneath palm trees spattered with swirling LED stars. There’s an eclectic, small crowd: silky beach elites swooning around in the corner, wearing gauzy whites and staying away from the tourists in flip-flops. One sinewy man in Thai fisherman pants is dancing like he’s dying right in front of the DJ. I sip a sweating cerveza and survey the scene, petting the occasional stray cat that winds through my legs. Jeks is an hour late.
She arrives flustered, her daytime flannel exchanged for a black lace tank and red lipstick that bleeds at the edges; a spooky Cinderella slipping into the seat next to me before I recognize who it is. She has morphed again. The wifi is out all across town, she begins by way of apologizing for her delay. I got lost on the way here.
Who didn’t? But I don’t say it now or later.
We watch the movement for a bit and then, as though a cosmic hand has commanded it, we rise together without a word and head out into the night.
•
Our Day Out of Time adventure begins. Jeks and I fall into an easy pace. Attuned to an invisible call, we cut away from the blaring cumbia beats of the nearby Ladies Drink Free, past the glass-walled ATM spitting pesos at a line of people, down a side alley into the sleepy neighborhoods that slowly fade into the jungle a few blocks away.
Off the strip, the feeling of the night shifts. The energy is different on the fringes. Soon the burnt smell of exhaust and the shouts of men and their chattering harems drift into the background din, become like slow waves behind our winding conversation.
Now there is finally room for the thing that is unfolding, showing us how to hold it.
All I know is that reality feels wavy out here, where darkness has its own rainbow. I can feel the lifeblood of something beyond words moving through the earth and my body, a single hair standing electric.
A palpable aliveness pervades and intoxicates our senses. With certain people you can traverse many layers and lifetimes simultaneously, weaving in and out of dimensions as though they were rooms in a museum — and we, dazzled occupants penetrating deeper into the labyrinth.
We pass a silent man cooling off in his garden. I spy the red ash of his cigarette before we smell it, alerting us to his shadow. Smell of fried meat smoke and families gathered in front of the TV with all the windows open. There are no sidewalks and soon, no streets. Just gravel, edged with scrap piles of scavenged corrugated metal and gigantic water jugs, the occasional feral dog rooting for a bone.
Jeks wants to know why I am in Tulum too, and what do I have to tell her? That I have followed certain symbols that keep showing up in order to see what happens? That I have quit my job and severed all threads tethering me to Real Life and am now adrift in the ocean of my soul, so deep in the throes that I no longer know which end is up or where I’ll land?
I start to tell her about how I keep getting lost, but I stop. That myth no longer feels accurate or true. I start again: I am learning how to be me without the mask. I am hunting something — an ancient essence, maybe a way of remembering. Following my hunger, I’ve ventured deep into foreign lands. After all – new places invite new thought patterns.
I suppose, I finally admit, That’s the real reason I’m here.
To cultivate faith in the things I can’t yet see.
•
The internet tells me that early Mayans conceptualized time as a circle. Eventually, they believed, everything would repeat itself, or rather — meet itself at another level. Why not both? Think like the universe. Now that darkness had descended, my earlier research was finding its eerie reflection in the oddest of places.
As though we can’t avoid it, Jeks and I keep wandering off the paved road, inching closer to the jungle as we do so.
I recount one of my favorite memories from the first time I was in Tulum and how my friend Alice talked me into renting a decrepit cruiser from the local hostel so we could bike down to the beach one night and relax. The only way to get to the beach by bike was by a narrow dirt path that paralleled the impenetrable jungle on both sides for a mile or more.
We were well on our way when I realized my handlebars weren’t properly fastened, making proper steering almost impossible. I was already unsteady in the pitch black night with no street lamps to illuminate our passing on this desolate stretch.
It was so quiet out there that everything felt louder, amplified, our laughs screeching into the night — everything except for the oncoming bikers who would emerge from the black at top speeds in total silence as we swerved to avoid them. My friend thought it was a great adventure, but I didn’t get much further before I broke down, unable to ride a rollercoaster bike into the blank maw of night.
Yet several days later, when my friend and I were walking home from the bar, I would bark down a feral dog.
•
I don’t even know her last name but I want to tell Jeks everything. Under the cover of no-time I feel the animal urge to shed what has bound me, to peel back the old skins and scour the dark corners, to bare myself down to the soul bone. In our here and now, I feel the urgent call to open further into the not-knowing instead of closing.
To let go and ride life.
There is a French idiom that describes the ephemeral realms of dusk, that delicious, duplicitous moment of melting: Entre chien et loup — between a dog and a wolf. A third blurry entity, undefined. Like the time gap we are currently traversing, dusk is a place without location.
I am not sure where we are, Jeks says, for I feel us between many worlds at once.
A wise man once said: Laugh, and the joke will appear. As though we have already penned this superlative, synchronistic irony, we turn a corner and there it is: a portal. An immense black entrance framed by flickering green leaves. We breathe together in front of the hole beckoning us into the heart of the jungle. For a minute, we are silenced, taking it in.
Whatever it was, wherever it led, we decided against crossing the threshold of this doorway. All night we had been turning over the signs and symbols that had guided our lives, saying things like Now I see the pattern.
But maybe life is too wild to comprehend.
Both of us are disarmed by the other, but it is I who feel stripped, naked in front of the universe and her. By now we have been walking for hours under the cover of darkness, confessing secrets to one another in order to chisel through the crust of their hold. I confess that the most vulnerable act I can imagine is to do life in real time without the safety of a future delivery to some perfect destination, that precious guarantee. I came here seeking to strengthen a weakness and found that what I feared most — total exposure — came easy with this enchanting stranger.
I find myself wondering whether the dog might reveal itself to be a dragon after all.
•
I ask the universe to give me a sign, a portend. Tell me how I should know. Know where I am, whether I am lost again, or if this is a necessary detour; an unexpected doorway. Some things are only possible in the prismatic cracks. What else will I bury here, on this dark path? I seek an answer, an anchor, something that wasn’t of my own invention to spell it out for me.
We turn the corner and I gasp. Spray-painted on a concrete wall in front of us is a large red triangle, tall as my torso. The exact emoji for what I call my soul symbol. A lone street lamp illuminates it perfectly; impossible not to see. I receive the message.
Life reflects us.
Even as we are still together, I wonder whether Jeks and I will ever speak again. I don’t dare ask such a silly question. It still feels dangerous to shatter in front of someone, to live outside the shelter of my mask. But in this short, timeless expanse, a necessary message has reached my hands.
As the clock turns past midnight we head home down the long, loud strip of the main road until we reach the deserted intersection where I once barked down that dog. Here we will hug and it will feel done. Together we have turned over a stone and laid a hunger to rest. What has been heard and seen is now cleaned, released. In a matter of days I will leave, shape-shift back into another reality, turning over this fated meeting like a coin in my mind.
I will ask myself again and again what actually happened.
It is important to note: each thing may be true at the level it exists in. But if you can’t hold the truth, then you should not risk the question.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
