The town was a brightly coloured mess, cacophonous, smattered, loud. Rainbow pastels like walls of glossy fresh fruit jostled for attention in the empty streets. The heat, tropical and enveloping at first, swiftly became that oppressive humid weight of Caribbean coastal towns; it felt like a colonial delta of olden times, of tobacco and sugar fields, lecherous plantation owners and cotton mills.

My pace became slow and tortuous in its attempt to move forward through the hot invisible mist; I felt as if two hands were pushing hard down on my chest. Drawing breath became a conscious difficult action. Yet somehow, none of this took away from Tlacotalpan’s mournful beauty. In its grinding heavy heat, the village carried a million stories; its chipped walls told of a once prosperous town fallen into disrepair – the vivid colours of an ageing woman who bravely paints on red lipstick, the shadows of life darting across her face.

Any place has beauty if it tells you a story; it’s what separates countless destinations from the next. It can’t always be explained in words, either. Here it was just an overwhelming feeling – and we all felt it. I entered the cemetery on the northern edge of the town, grey thick cotton clouds and a humid wind, more tombs than people awake. I tiptoed through half broken crucifixes and hastily painted slabs of stone. One tomb carried just a name, no date, and no one had even bothered to erase the lines above and below which had helped structure the letters onto the wall. A half-grave is horribly bizarre – was it already prepared for the soul for when it would pass?

Without warning or reason, a stubborn part of my brain pushed me to somewhere I didn’t want to go. I pictured my own grave, there on the stale ground,my name, two dates, and emptiness. Born and died. Rest in peace. Great friend, great mother. Whatever. I believe in the recurring cycle of souls, but there the thought that life would be taken away from me one day seemed despicable. I want to remember this round, to send a letter to that future me and say hey, look, this was you, what you saw, what you did, who you met, it was so glorious and there was so much to take from it, please, please listen..! The silence on the other end of the receiver was a deeply saddening thought.

A place can also feel like it echoes the stories of many others all at once. The verdant fields, low-lying, grazing white cows and palms; children playing on empty streets, old men standing forlorn and rotting in empty churches; that unshakeable slow and heavy humidity which makes villagers stare blankly into empty space or hold casual slow conversation just to break the leaden silence.