The original plan was to go swimming.
Sofía mentioned it on Thursday, again on Friday, and once more at 8:06 on Saturday morning, when she sent me a voice note that was two minutes long and somehow contained no useful information about where we were supposed to meet.
I listened to it while brushing my teeth. The important parts were: Progreso, around eleven, and don't be late.
I live in Mérida. I know how Saturdays go. You leave thinking you'll be back for the afternoon, and somebody orders another plate of food, and suddenly it's evening. I brought a towel anyway. Optimism is free.
The bus was cold enough that I regretted my sleeveless top for approximately forty minutes. When I arrived, the heat outside fixed that problem immediately. Sofía had sent me a location pin, but the blue dot was moving around as if she were personally testing the accuracy of satellite navigation.
Where are you? I texted.
By the water, she replied.
This described nearly the entire reason we were in Progreso.
I eventually found her at a table under a shade umbrella, waving at me with one hand and trying to stop a napkin from flying away with the other. She'd already ordered a drink. She'd also, somehow, acquired a little plastic bag of sliced fruit.
“You said eleven,” I told her.
“It is eleven.”
“It is eleven forty.”
“Still eleven.”
I sat down because debating time with Sofía has never worked.
We ordered ceviche and a plate of fried fish to share. Then we ordered something else because she said the portions looked small, which turned out to be a wild misunderstanding of the word small. The table became a collection of plates, lime wedges, bottles, sunglasses cases, and the two phones we kept moving out of the way of the food.
The wind was doing its own thing. My hair kept sticking to my lip gloss. A napkin escaped and Sofía caught it with the reflexes of a professional goalkeeper. Ten minutes later she spilled some of her drink anyway.
Across the walkway, a little kid was trying to bury his father's flip-flop in the sand. His father noticed, retrieved it, and returned to his conversation. The kid waited approximately six seconds and tried again.
We'd been talking for nearly an hour when Sofía remembered the swimming.
“Should we get in?” she asked.
I looked at the plates. “Right now?”
“After we finish.”
We did not finish for another forty minutes.
At some point we walked along the malecón, because it felt rude to come all the way to the coast without at least looking at the water from somewhere other than our table. The Gulf was a grayish green that afternoon. Not the color in vacation ads, but the actual color it happened to be. Families were stretched out under umbrellas. Someone was carrying a cooler that looked heavier than the person carrying it. A vendor tried to sell us hats. We already had hats.
Sofía insisted on a photo. I put my sunglasses on, stood beside her, and tried to keep my hair out of my mouth. We asked a woman nearby to take it. In the first picture, we were blinking. In the second, someone in the background was dragging a bright inflatable ring that made it look as though one of us had sprouted a neon halo.
The woman offered a third attempt. We said the second was perfect.
The afternoon drifted into the kind of conversation you can only have when you've known someone long enough to stop editing yourself. Sofía gave me an update about her cousin's wedding seating chart, which apparently had become a diplomatic crisis. I told her about the plant I'd managed to kill despite three different care apps. She said I should stop buying plants that needed care.
Helpful.
We walked back toward the bus in the late afternoon. My towel was still dry, my feet were sandy for reasons I couldn't explain, and Sofía was carrying half of our leftovers in a container that wouldn't close properly.
On the ride home I checked my phone. She'd sent the two photographs.
I saved the one with the inflatable ring.
An hour later she texted: Next month?
I replied: Only if you tell me where you are.
She sent me another location pin.