Rotten Wood.

In Guatemala I am volunteering in a bicycle workshop and trying to speak in Spanish. I am a girl who has a lot to learn in a shop full of Latino men and often get relegated to jobs like pairing pedals and sweeping the floor. Tell you what I can lace a wheel better than any of them though. I end up being robbed by the wife. We left for 24 hours to climb a volcano and when we got back the money had been taken from underneath my mattress. She was just jealous because I had bought my ceremonial guipile from another woman. Dona Ana. She was tiny and unmistakably Mayan. I liked her colours.

I feel the threat hanging in the lazy air and leave the workshop to travel with a Salvadorian man I have met and kissed in Antigua. We wheel and deal together to make whatever money we can. He has a pair of scissors and makes flowers out of beer cans. I buy waxed thread and knot it into bracelets. Sometimes we juggle and one time I paint the faces of all the local kids until there are squalls of butterflies and clowns and dogs swirling around us.

Each day we make enough money for a $4 hotel room and something to drink and smoke.

Things are not great between us. We argue. We have both been on the streets for too long.

I tell him about my past. He is not surprised. He, too, has performed his deeds for a place to sleep for the night.

One day I run away to where he cannot find me, across the border in Mexico. This time I do not wade through a river of gold. I make friends with people who sell chia seeds on the street. I weave strings into rainbows. I miss him. I end up hanging out with someone new. I buy him a beer.

I tell him about my past. He is not surprised. He ends up forcing himself on me after he refuses to give me back the money I give him for beer.

San Cristobal is beautiful, though.

You might think that here I get lost, this is the point where this character loses her way, but I never felt lost. I have always felt at home on the road. Maybe this is my blessing and my curse, the geasa that the old druid waved above my head when I was born, the feasting I could never refuse. I cant even remember how, but I end back up in Guatemala city, juggling with fire at the traffic lights for coins from the drivers. Petrol fumes suffuse the heavy air. We make a journey to a lake, a large body of water inside the crater of an old volcano. There air is cleaner here – when I am not dancing with fire. I realise the mountains I see here are not the same as those ancient megaliths that stretch out across the horizon where I grew up.I realise that one day I will need to leave.