I landed in Cancún and drove south until the road exhaled into Bacalar. The lagoon waited like an open palm layered blues I couldn’t name, quiet enough that my own breath sounded loud. Habitas felt carved from light: wood, linen, and the hush of water moving just out of sight.
The first evening, Diane gathered with her bridesmaids for a shamanic blessing. Smoke threaded through hair and bracelets, the kind of scent that stays in your clothes and follows you to sleep. No medicine was served only song, breath, and the simple permission to be present. Afterward we ate by the water, the surface taking the candlelight and stretching it thin, as if the night itself were listening.
Morning brought yoga and a soft, laughing stillness. I watched them practice, the instructor’s voice sifting across the dock, the lagoon barely wrinkling in the breeze. By late afternoon, rehearsal dinner clinked into a small salsa party horns and hands and the shy grin people make when rhythm loosens them. I slipped away with a paddleboard at dusk and drifted out, my camera zipped in a dry bag at my chest, Bacalar flattening under me into a mirror. It felt like kneeling inside a color.
On the wedding day they readied in separate cabañas. Her dress was straightforward, the kind of simple that knows exactly what it’s doing. Light fell through the woven ceiling and drew stripes across her collarbone; her mother smoothed a crease that probably wasn’t there. In his room, Brandon paced once, then twice, the good kind of nerves love that needs somewhere to go.
They married with the four elements as witnesses. We fed the fire a sliver of intention, touched water to our hands, breathed smoke, and stood steady on warm wood. The planner one of those Tulum magicians had tuned the palette to the lagoon: tender greens, pale sand, nothing louder than the sky. When the sun tipped, the water turned to glass, and for a handful of frames Diane and Brandon looked like they were walking on their future.
Dinner opened to a live band, then the DJ folded the night into a longer one. People glowed in that unselfconscious way the tropics allow bare feet, damp curls, a chorus of laughter rolling down the dock. I photographed hands finding hands, a father closing his eyes mid-hug, the way Brandon pressed his forehead to Diane’s like a promise he wanted to memorize.
The next morning unfurled gently: yoga again, a goodbye cocktail, hugs that were more like swings of the heart. Guests drifted away in twos and threes. Diane and Brandon told me about the small house they’d bought in town, how this place already felt like theirs. I believed them. Bacalar had worked its quiet on all of us.
I left with the taste of woodsmoke and lime, my memory filled with water and light proof that the most faithful photographs aren’t of what happened, but of how it felt while it was happening.
