by Moriarty.

You take a narrow flight of stairs, wedged between two residential buildings, leading to nowhere. To your right, an abuela, dressed in an apron and not much else, is cooking on an open stove in the small courtyard, framed by white linens and old underwear, gently swaying in the wind.

At the top of the stairs you enter a rooftop. Concrete floors, two faintly French café tables, one in the sun, one in the shade, pressed against the wall. In my mind there are no menus, maybe there were, stuck underneath the flowerpot that’s taking up too much space on the table. You order in a cultural haze: In broken Spanish you ask the European woman you can’t quite place for the one thing that is on the menu, imaginary or not: French tartines, toasted bread with butter and jam, coffee and fresh juice. What juice, she asks you. You’re in Mexico now, or have you forgotten? There may only be tartines, but there are always options for juice. Name a fruit, two, three, all of them. It seems impossible to store so much fruit on this empty rooftop on this island that makes even Mexicans furrow their brows when you mention it. Holbox? Maybe you didn’t pronounce it right. There you are, on a tiny island off the coast of the Yucatán, with hardly any connections to the outside world, no cars, just yellow golf carts, mimicking taxis. Where does the fruit come from? Did it travel with the same broken down bus you came with? The one that only runs twice a day and never really stands still but passengers jump in and out of at dusty street corners, under the watchful eyes of old Mexican men, leaning against half-built huts in the bright sunshine, and ignored by the bloodshot eyes of policemen, lazily smoking weed in the shade. Did the fruit take the same small boat from the harbour (that doesn’t look like a harbour) to the island (that really isn’t an island)? Immediately you scold yourself for your globalized mind set. Maybe the abuela next door grows it in her garden; who knows.

Your table is too small for the tartines, the bowls for jam and butter and sugar, the two coffee cups, the carafe for the coffee, the can with steamed milk and the juice. Orange, mango, papaya, you can’t remember what you asked for. You just know the woman had it, you know you were surprised.

You hear the abuela shouting – or is it singing? – in Spanish, you hear the owner of the café talking in something that resembles Italian, you can’t quite figure the words out, and you make small talk in German, but really listen to the wind rustling through the palm trees. It smells like coffee, the spicy meat the abuela is cooking even though it is early morning, and the sea, hidden behind the palm trees.

Holbox is the place where two seas meet. Sometimes they merge, sometimes they don’t. On certain days you can see the edge where dark and bright turquoise water meet, but you never quite know which ocean you’re jumping into, from the edge of your wooden pier. You’ve learned to avoid the pier at 2 pm, when the fishermen come back from their route in order to pick up the occasional tourists, to show them the joys of “authentic Mexican fishing” and the satisfaction of fulfilling your primal needs by catching your own dinner. But most days it’s only you, the seagulls and their fish cadavers, looking out onto the oceans.

Is it the Gulf of Mexico, littered with traces of old beer, red cups and hedonism from the shores of Florida? Or the Caribbean Sea, with its rum-soaked tides that could drag you to empty beaches you’ve never been to before, places with rolling R’s in their name that vaguely remind you of Hemingway sitting at a beach bar? Drinking coffee in the morning, just like you on your rooftop, in that strange space between two worlds.

Between two seas.