Wei Tchou Recommends...

I haven’t enjoyed being pregnant at all and now, six months in, I’m angry at how unprepared I was for the body horror and emotional isolation. Since November, I haven’t written a sentence (I am writing this thanks to Zofran, a prescription anti-nausea drug I got yesterday), haven’t been able to read a book, haven’t been able to cook, eat normally, pick up after myself, or see friends.

I used to write to be in the world; I used to go into the world so I could write. Now my only way to be in the world is to actually go out into it. Here’s what I recommend: Go to Baja California Sur. Avoid lingering in the airport towns of Cabo San Lucas or San José del Cabo. Find Edgardo Cortes Nares in Santiago, near Sierra de la Laguna. (You can tell him I sent you.) For a fair fee, he’ll guide you through the desert, into the valley, at the bottom of which winds a white scratch of granite.

In the canyon, clear aquamarine rainwater collects in deep pools against the stone. It’s the moon, but with water. The water, cold as a slushie, explodes in the sunlight. Something in it erases nausea, instantaneously and completely. Gone too is the rolling headache, the unknowable future. It’s you, on the moon, taking a bath.

A particular kind of fig tree grows in the canyons, its muscular gray-blue roots feeling into and over the granite cliffs, leaving thumbprints of yellow and green against the blue sky. As soon as Edgardo identified it, I texted a photo to my friend, the writer Max Falkowitz, who writes Fire Escape Bonsai—a newsletter that documents his care of, among other tiny trees, resilient little fig trees. We texted about the fig. I was grateful that my moonwashed head could see the fig, that the fig was meaningful because of Max’s writing, that I could sit on the rocks and find our shared moon overhead.

—Wei Tchou, author of Little Seed (Deep Vellum / A Strange Object, 2024).