Sometimes I sit down with this notebook and my favorite purple swirly pen and I don’t even know where to begin. Life is not a calendrical experience here in Tijuana. Blink and it’s only two days later, and already two days later, and everything in between is an impossibly vast journey that I remember as fragments of conversation, places and faces, emotions. I want to capture every moment, every heartbeat, because this is the bestest my life has ever been…but sometimes there just isn’t time to write, or even grope through my purse for my antique Polaroid camera. Sometimes I’m too busy enjoying myself, and two days of Tijuana remembering is just a hasty montage of moments starring the man who brought me here:

Nick standing in line at the taco stand, striking up a conversation with a couple vaqueros in huge straw cowboy hats and enameled belt buckles and cowboy boots, talking corn and cows, farmboys bonding.

Nick hurtling so aggressively down Carretera Aeropuerto — Airport Road — that Mexicans actually bother to honk in dismay, “high praise” as he calls it, winking at my seatbelted terror.

Nick sitting across from me at Beep’s diner, face even paler than usual, his mouth frozen in a gasping “O” as I wipe up the blobby chunk of bacon fat that I finally coughed out of my windpipe.

Nick discoursing about my alleged sex appeal amidst the bustle and bright vegetables of the Calimax supermercado, pausing with an eggplant in his hand, explaining very matter-of-factly, “I could starve to death in bed with you.”

Nick urgently waving me into a glassy storefront, hand a flapping bird, so I can marvel with him at a display of velvet paintings — really good ones, with Elvis and American presidents like Reagan and all the heroes of the Mexican Revolution cast in subtle purplish artistry.

Nick reclining cross-ankled on the bed, remote clicking in his fist as he replays the same scene again and again, patiently illustrating a point about Mexican masked wrestler movies, turning on a lightbulb in my head.

Nick glancing up from a cheap paper menu with PALACIO DE LA INDIA printed in Arabesque lettering, making a stricken face, imploring, “Not the really hot curry — that’ll burn like hell when I kiss you!”

Nick returning early from Maquiladora Alley to join my afternoon siesta, a gentle breathing that is almost lost in the fan blowing across me, the bed rocking, his body stilling to match mine.

There’s a disquieting moment too. We’re strolling amidst the dying grass and urban blare of Parque Morelos when a young mexicana mom and her toddler come staggering along on the sidewalk, going as fast — or slowly — as his stubby little legs will carry him. Maybe a moment like that clarifies your future, because I don’t look at them fearfully, the way I did when I was Saman’s anointed baby factory. Instead I look at the mother and child with a pang of curious hope, wondering if I’ll fall in love with Nick and have his babies.