In Mexico, sometimes people threaten to kill you and your family over morning coffee. You sit in a palace filled with fine art, seashells, beaded nick-knacks and all things of indigenous beauty and you watch the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean relying on the fact that no two waves will ever repeat the same movements twice and you sip your coffee and watch your brother pack a bowl as the words, “I will make sure to take away what is most precious from your brother. I will kill you and your family,” are said with a direct intent to fuck you up, let alone ruin your morning brew; he adds, “I will spare you the rape.” And the scorpions you’ve been warned about, “watch where you put your feet,” do not seem as frightening in this moment. And awkward laughter doesn’t invite the threat to turn into a joke, the sounds of a forced sort of nervousness do not invite him to take back the impending violence, and you look to your brother for some sort of salvation. But he is busy with a pipe. So you offer, in a half-jest but more truth, “Well, don’t do anything that will get me killed.” And your brother answers, after taking a drag off his pipe, “I won’t.” There is no such thing as taking back the moments of time when you lose your sense of reality. They are lost anyway. And to try and make sense of the nonsense will just make you vanish even more. Mexico had me lost. I write today in an attempt to find a salvation in words but for now, there is none. So I write about wine, and fiddle away at a memoir about a girl in wine country, hoping to secure a future of abundance and inner peace and maybe some love along the way. Death threats are strange when they actually feel like the real thing. You begin to watch the animals around you to define signs of danger. You stop thinking about lip-gloss and moisturizer and you observe the world around you as if it all movements are an imminent threat to your well-being. You trust no one, not even your own family. Mexico is funny that way.