If Belize was your family member

oh friend, you'd laugh it off, you'd give thanks

Sometimes I try to reimagine my favourite countries and destinations as family members. I think of Mexico as the eccentric aunt, the one who says the funniest things and wears what she wants and teaches you your first swear words in Spanish and follows it up with the best wisdom anyone has ever offered you. She is always cooking for you and, of course, cooks better than your mother but doesn’t want the attention. Whips something up quickly on a copal, humbly calls it a day. 

Costa Rica is your mother in all of her suffocating love. She is unbearable when she sees opportunity to be; I mean she is an outpour. She loves you, deeply. If you want rain, she will give it to you until you are drenched. If you want the ocean, you will spend the entire day being overcome by the waves. You want the jungle, yes? A sloth will sneak into your living quarters, a snake will occupy a quiet corner in your kitchen. Your mother will provide for you in all of her unstoppable force, no one will see it though, they’ll just thank her for the lush dew and the beautiful flowers in the garden. 

Nicaragua is your older brother who lived in his room, left the country and developed his entire personality. The seawater and the sun bleached his afro and his friends are basically all fishermen. He wants you all to meet and go out to sea together. He might come home for Christmas, he might forget. He’s your surfer bro. He doesn’t stare at strangers. He will teach you what the ocean taught him and then he will leave you alone. 

Guatemala is the cool cousin you only see outside of the country, the one who invites you to stay with her but is never in. You don’t know how to use the electric oven or air fryer and you don’t remember her instructions because she was very chill about it, and everything. When she’s in, she’s lots of fun though. Turns out she does like you, she is just much-loved, divides her time up very well, even has time for a cooked breakfast every morning, talks until it is cold; she is a Libra. 

Belize has to be the uncle who loves to laugh and buss a whine with the music from a passing car and laugh even harder as it drives away tooting. Full of stories, he seems to have travelled everywhere a boat will take him and yet he is always somewhere near, never leaving his beloved country. He tells the same joke twice because you laughed the first time and will obviously hit you quite hard as he tells it. He will never criticise you, he has never been a man to raise his voice. But make sure to answer with vibrancy when he hails you. You will know what he thinks in his mannerisms: the softened eyes and the nodding. He talks in riddles. He steps in as a father, a friend, a teacher.

Belize is one of my homes now. Even as a nomad, I have places that I lean towards and know I can return to with mental ease. These are places that I can count on as being warm, where I can reasonably operate on auto-pilot. Imagine reggae rhythms and the sounds of people greeting each other, catching up from car to sandy sidewalk, children playing outside like children should, this is the background noise that resets my nervous system.

I need to be somewhere where, as a Black woman, I feel safe and seen. I need to be by the water. I like to start my days there and I like the people who I meet by it. I need to be able to travel easily and/or to be around travellers and lovers of the world because even when not moving, the stories of others who love the world like I do keep me going. It needs to be affordable, and if not, then it needs to add value, softness, ease, and the rest my foremothers needed and once knew. This is what I said I needed in order to put my bags down, and empty them for a while. I wrote it down and decided that Belize was a good idea. It was going to be my third time. I found an apartment and settled for three months, the longest I had in almost a year and a half. 

In many ways, what I had seen of the country (Belize City, Caye Caulker, San Pedro, Seine Bight, and Placencia) was the familiar unfamiliar. Familiar because it was (ask any Jamaican) the closest sibling Jamaica has. If Belize is the uncle whose laughter is recognisable before you reach the house, Jamaica is his fierce older brother. The one whose locs are older than you and whose laughter is brief but creases his face perfectly. He cooks one-pot dishes that take hours but taste incredible. He used to be a ragga yute, he says, but is frail and gentle now, and mostly wants to talk about God. And moringa. You didn’t know this uncle’s government name until your grandmother said it in a story that one time. He doesn’t always say your name the way your parents intended but he is the only one to speak up against their over-parenting. He and Uncle Belize are the reasons you want to travel, first to Africa and the Caribbean, and then everywhere else. Just to see how life has kinship written in its soils.

Belize is distinctly Caribbean and while Central American countries (excluding El Salvador) all have the Caribbean Sea in common, Belize and its creole and its population resemble Jamaica in a way that made me want to call it home for a while. I didn’t understand the extent to which visiting a place for two weeks versus staying for three months would truly reshape my expectations though.

Those three months were testing. I learned many things the hard way, like the reality of living on an island where most people make their friends from childhood and are very Caribbean about being overly trusting of new people. Also, the boredom. More, being perceived as bored, having that conflated as being boring. Suddenly living in a small place where you are always perceived, where someone always knows where you’re probably going and who you’re usually with, got to me as a city-dweller minding my business. The small island vibe normalized someone always feeling entitled to commenting on something, your aloneness, your singleness, or something else.

There were absolutely good days. Every day I would go down to check if I could buy a litre of soursop juice, sometimes with luck, and everyday without fail, I would pass a man whose name I never remembered, but knew it was him because of his song “Sweet Jamaican girl”. That would be how he would hail me. Whether with company or without, he would sing and I would hear him before I saw him. It would be our inside joke that everyone around us grew to understand. 

Moments of cordial island justice in the supermarket

On tough days I called home while swinging in my hammock, making plans for later trips to London and Lisbon. I was between gushing over the island and threatening to never come back to it. Maybe I was wrong about this place, maybe my intuition was just, off? Where are you? Maybe I’ll just come to you. And then I’d never leave, just walk to the supermarket and forget something I needed because someone I met wanted to tell me, drunkenly, that I’ve been here a long time and ask why they never see me dancing at the I-and-I (literally the only club on the island at the time). 

Truthfully, I would always come back to gratitude. I was living somewhere new that I had to patiently learn. Somewhere I wanted to be, where they called me Rasta gyal and Empress because here, nicknames matter more than first names. And that I had one meant that I was recognised, noticeable, that I was part of it for a few months. Everything was alright, because every morning it was the sun that woke me up and I smile, or because I was living in a place where the motto is Go Slow, and everyone means it, and I smile.

I made friends with my neighbours

Kaila & Brendan

from Smith Street (my Canadian faves) who let me hang out with their cute pup Jameson, swapped funny island stories, and other joys. It was while lying in bed, thinking about what I was doing and where in the world I would next do it, that I received an email - I had my first paid subscriber. My neighbour friends downstairs, who introduced me to Substack, pledged their support when I had first given this space its affirming name. Life Is In Love With Me began. The island gave me tears of frustration and tears of laughter but it always gave me something. Called me over to watch as others played dominoes under the starry sky, sent me to bed with a full belly, and a new thought, to start tomorrow fresh.

Belize is still somewhere I will return to. Just like the Uncle who bangs your back until you let out a laugh, the country asks me to keep it joyfully moving. Even when I feel way too hyper-sensitive for living full-time in a Caribbean country (damn), there is something to laugh about, someone who will laugh with me. Belize, calling me sistren and making me wait an hour for roasted breadfruit, is the chaotic Uncle who means well. I have more to learn and more to laugh about until the joke has been rinsed to the absolute fullest.