Pink Paradise Lost?

The pink and white paradise where we honeymooned twenty-five years ago remains unchanged. The palm trees are as verdant and stately as they always were, the flowers as brightly colored and plump as if they had been painted onto the impossibly lush landscape. Pink jeeps still rumble by on the hilly paths to the casitas, the drivers chipper and ageless. Fresh croissants and coffee still appear as if by magic in the morning through the box cut into the wall of the casita; nothing there has become worn out or stale.

On my first evening this time around, as I looked in the mirror over the bed, I wondered why the person looking back at me had so many more wrinkles. I suppose paradise wouldn’t be paradise if it was affected by the ravages of time, but mere mortals are fair game, and twenty-five years have taken their toll.

Sounds like I got my panties in a knot, I know, complaining this way as I settled in for a few days of rest and relaxation with my daughters in a ridiculously beautiful place where people seemed to exist just to cater to us. Maybe it was just the petty annoyance of my thighs rubbing together after a month long chocolate binge. Or maybe it was the really attractive excavation I performed on my chin when I detected the beginnings of what would have remained an invisible zit had I not tried to squeeze the living crap out of it. Or maybe it was just that for some reason (possibly the ten minute headstand I did in a yoga class the week before) I couldn’t move my neck. The warm Acapulco sun had not yet worked its magic on my little infirmities, much less my psyche.

Even sunshine and warmth can’t fix everything though. The memories are just so hard to shake. When we arrived here for our honeymoon, everything seemed so full of promise; the meticulously manicured hotel grounds were merely a confirmation of it all. This time, the perfection seemed to stand in stark contrast to all that has gone awry.

With the marriage, that is. There I was with my daughters, two of the beautiful fruits of my labor, so full of promise and dreams. I may be a little worse for the wear, but perfection is an illusion, and even in the painted pink and white utopia so many years ago, things weren’t exactly as they seemed. Just ask the maid who walked into our little love nest to find me sitting on the toilet and puking my guts out in the bathroom garbage pail, begging my new husband to whisk me away from this god awful country. Was it an omen? No, I don’t think so. Just garden variety food poisoning; even paradise has its dirty little secrets.

There was an upside to the stiff neck, I think. It stopped me from spending the week turning around, looking back.