Something Wild

Under the grid patterns of a city there’s a life that breaks through and carries an overgrown existence at the margins. I prefer big cities because they’re more unruly so I chose them to live in: Mexico D.F., Toronto. I’d take long walks or long rides on street cars just to watch the avenues and parks unfold, looking for the pockets where something unexpected would bloom against the odds under the publicity of billboard ads, under the buzz of engines and electric wires and the clock-work of subway stops. A breakdancer all alone in an empty corner of a public square, a speaker on the floor and through it a loud burst of his favourite hip-hop band. Someone sitting on a bench, eyes closed, taking in the sun, for a moment not a person with a job but just a body looking for warmth. A group of drummers in a populated circle and among them a woman resembling a hawk, the sides of her head shaved and her black hair rising and melting down, and she doesn’t bang on a drum, she contributes long whistles and sharp shouts. I look at her and think that most of us humans are like beavers: we wreck the forests to build our dams, we’re industrious and destructive and disciplined and slightly overweight, but some humans manage to be like birds and they don’t build anything grand; they just fly and hunt for survival. I find comfort in the strangeness of the woman, same as I find comfort in the quick breath of the squirrels pulsing on neighbourhood trees, the pigeons on roofs and ledges, and (once) a real hawk perched just for a moment on a balcony rail.

There’s a man in an intersection in Montreal who waits for the streetlights to go red and asks for money with a cat sitting on his shoulder. He spoke to me in French and I couldn’t understand a thing except “miau-miau” which he would say as if speaking on behalf of the cat. I smiled and gave him money and he spoke more French and said “miau-miau” a few more times. The cat was silent and still, relaxed, entertained by the movements of the city from his vantage point. The cat was grey, short-haired and beautiful. The man had short hair, wore a leather jacket and was also beautiful. I have a cat of my own, also grey and short-haired, but he only lets me hold him for a moment. I love cats because they'll fuss in your arms, fight for their independence, demand to be left alone and come to you only if they feel like it (they remain some of the least domesticated of our pets). My cat, in his captivity, needs to constantly reassert his autonomy. This other cat is free to run away but he chooses the man and remains on his shoulder, helping him make a living in between the traffic.

I lived for a while in a brick building framed by a massive maple tree. The tree stretched across all the edges of my window. I was moved by its size and power when it was just the dark of its bones against the white of the winter, and then when it was green again, and during the fall when the glory of the yellow and red leaves became overwhelming. I ask myself if aliens looking at us from far away will wonder how there could be such a thing as a maple tree. Some trees are pruned or harvested, kept within reasonable sizes, made productive or ornamental, but the one outside my building grew large and feral, without obstacles, overpowering the nearby houses, feeding on the soil, the sun, the rain and the wind, with no need of us. I loved that tree especially, but I loved all the maple trees I walked under within Canadian cities; giants, all of them, living their lives beyond our boundaries.

The untamed maple tree outside my window, the hawk on the balcony of a condo building, the woman who resembled a hawk, the friendship between the man and the cat at that corner of Montreal, all bloomed out of domestic sidewalks, negotiating a wilderness among us while navigating our paved world, keeping parts of them wild.

There's a war between the forces that bulldoze the ground and regulate our minutes, arrange us in lines of mechanised movements, ensure our productivity and purchasing power, erect cost-efficient buildings and structures making them plain, practical, void of character and decorations on one side, and on the other a relentless beauty finding a way out, regardless, in between the cracks of our streets.

The machines are implacable but nature is a strong survivor, opening its way through the smoke and the tar. Maybe humans will be gone for good one day, our cement and steel ruins will get covered with grass, and grass will win in the end. The machines are killing the mountains but not yet fast enough. We still live under the comfort of trees. The trees breathe out their might and age, their scent and sap and their sleeping birds above us. They remind us we have bones, like the wolves, like the bears, we have eyes and pupils that contract in the light, same as a rabbit, same as a fox. We have warm blood and our bodies tremble with pleasure, quicken with fear. A part of us still belongs to a wilderness and carries the ancient memory of an open sky. A part of us just wants to sing old songs, for that forgotten sky.

Where’s the music that’s entirely ours? It’s not just in our longing for the time when we didn’t have boundaries between ourselves and nature (because we’re nature and there are no boundaries), it’s also in our unique roots and flavours and questions and ceremonies. I used to live in a tiny studio in a condo for young professionals, near the lake in Toronto. I lived in the gentrified part of an urban geography divided in two by Dufferin Street. On the other side the blocks were noisier, darker in skin colours, thicker in accents and community. There was a varied symphony of unique songs there, from people who travelled all the way from a different country or continent to arrive in Toronto, to adapt then to the new language and the new rules while holding on to their own heartaches and nostalgias, their way of spicing food and worshipping God, their way of sitting among family and celebrate a wedding, their way of carrying their hair, their way of singing. On my end, on the other side of Dufferin Street, there seemed to be very little of that; the well-toned, gym-trained people looked like they bought their clothes from the same fashionable stores, holding dogs manicured in the same grooming places, using their spare times to eat at the same trendy restaurants. There’s also a war between the forces that want to erase the songs our old communities kept alive to keep themselves living, the forces that prefer our identity to be something sold in stores and prescribed in corporate-sponsored magazines on one side,  and on the other the relentless beauty of immigrant, working-class neighbourhoods where the hallways in apartment buildings smell of curry and you can almost hear scotch bonnet peppers sizzling in hot pans, and someone plays the guitar leaning in a doorway, and someone belts the lyrics to the loud music in their living room while the neighbours don’t mind.

The world is relentless. It breaks our hearts. It can weigh us down. But beauty is also relentless and not dead yet, so there’s hope. If we look and hear closely, even within the cogs of the city we can find the pockets where the echoes of a wild music keep humming through the streets.

Art Among Comrades

My dear friend Arturo told me about this exchange between Orson Welles and a journalist in Paris:

- Did you ever cast a friend instead of the right person for the part in one of your films?

- Frequently. 

- Have you regretted it?

-  Frequently.

- And would you do it again?

- Yes!

Orson Welles explains that in his case, art is not the most important loyalty in the scale of our multiple loyalties and for him, friendship has more weight, although he respects those who put art above all other considerations. “They’re probably the most valuable artists. So I'm not defining what an artist ought to be. I’m just saying what kind of artist I am.”

The thing is, without sacrificing friendship as a value more important than art, Orson Welles managed to make masterful and canonical films.Perhaps his movies would have been even better if he always focused on casting the perfect person for each part, instead of offering the roles to his friends. Or perhaps an ingredient of the magic was that the films were created in the spirit of those who defend, above all else, the ties that bind them as humans and comrades. Maybe genius is a spark that ignites best in spaces where everyone is fighting for their friends' dreams, rather than just looking at their individual goals.

I’ve thought a lot about that interview because it's increasingly clear to me that art is nourished by communities, and the most unpredictable and vigorous art isn’t the result of isolated geniuses, but  the combined energy of unpredictable and vigorous groups. John Lurie (jazz musician, painter, actor in a couple of independent film classics and the mind behind two weird and wonderful television series, “Fishing with John” and “Painting with John”) wrote about his young, poor years in the rough and bohemian neighborhoods of New York (when neighborhoods like that still existed in New York). For example, he was friends with Basquiat, and before he was famous, Basquiat slept on the floor of his living room. My favorite story is a collective attempt to film a sci-fi movie in his apartment, with no money, and how they concocted a spaceship with aluminum foil, and how they recorded the sound effects in the kitchen. That wasn’t a canonical or masterful film. It was an exercise of imagination among comrades. Nobody became famous. No one won critical acclaim. Nobody earned a penny. But the beauty of friends practicing their dreams together, even the most improbable, even the most ridiculous, was a component of the electricity that moved through the alleys and rundown buildings and underground bars of the city, and that’s the electricity which gave us the art and artists we remember from the early 80's New York city.

That kind of electricity is born in free territories, outside the institutions that control the entry and exit for those who make “good art” into the spaces of success and recognition. If art could breathe only in those spaces, it would have died long ago. Art is not only what's made by select groups, chosen by the intellectuals in fashion, according to the accepted norms of good and bad taste, for the consumption of the educated classes. Art is something irrepressible humans do to stay alive, to communicate the mystery of themselves and the mystery of the world to each other. And to exist with independence and freedom, art needs communities. 

I like punk as an example of how groups become magic when they live and create in the margins of society (the most unpredictable and vigorous spaces of all societies), and jump over the walls imposed by record monopolies and agents and critics and marketers, and make their own magazines, and create their own record labels in the backyards and basements of their homes, and print their vinyl records on stolen machines, and don't wait to know how to play the guitar or sing with virtuosity to make music that's not meant to be listened peacefully in the living room and is not meant to sell tickets for elegant theaters but meant to crash your body and jump in the air and clench your fists, and all of it existed with its specific electricity not as the result of the individual genius of a musician or a band, but because entire groups of penniless kids created and sustained a raging and fierce ecosystem.

John Berger, reflecting on the power of songs, wrote:  “The rich listen to songs: the poor cling to them to make them their own.” There’s art that’s consumed, and there’s art that’s embraced urgently, to survive. The more urgent art flourishes in communities that need it to save themselves.

My Instagram profile bio says “artist,” I wrote it shakily at first. The word isn’t there as a reflection of my resume, or my professional merits, or my technical skills. It’s there to describe me because art saves my life. It doesn't pay my rent or my food, but it’s an indispensable tool to navigate the world, without which I would’ve been shipwrecked long ago. And what I like most, especially now, is that it’s a bridge to dream my dreams but also (when I’m very lucky) to walk into the beautiful dreams of friends, who, same as Orson Welles, include me in their visions and their songs, even if they could cast someone better for the role.

Love Song Duet

A haibun

This is an immigrant’s building across a mall with one dollar stores and an empty parking lot. I can hear my neighbours. I can hear the walls: a bit of sand, or water, or a mouse, trickling down. In the apartment next door, a woman prays. She sounds close, we sit next to each other, there’s only a screen between us. She improvises and repeats her calls , we put ourselves in your hands, oh God, Alleluia, yes Lord, Thank You Jesus. Her voice shakes, and I imagine a pair of hands pleading for a child, or a father. We share a February Monday framed in dead sidewalks and the ink skeletons of a couple of trees. In this building we can hear each other, but all our voices traveled a long distance and all our breaths started many miles away. I close my eyes and think of my mom in Mexico, stuck to a bed in her living room, unable to walk into her garden. I think of her garden, visited some mornings by a family of horses: three honey figures moving without hurry in their own tenderness. I think of my mom’s lemon tree, which fruits she doesn’t mind to be stolen, and her cypress trees, which she says are eager to reach the sky. I don’t believe in Jesus, or God, but I say out loud, along my neighbour: Please.

in quiet winter

the smell of tangerines

Love and Friendship

I grew up close to my sister. We are only one year apart. She was my first friend and since that early beginning we never left each other. With her, I learned of friendship as sisterhood and most of my life I nurtured close connections with women. For a long time I kept men at a distance. I dreamt about men, invented versions of them I fell in love with, but only crossed the real space between my soul and another soul with girlfriends: my sister, other women who became versions of a sister. We had the effortless intimacy of not having to be attractive, not needing to impress each other, not being mortified. Once, in elementary school, while talking, I saw bubbles of my saliva land in my friend’s face. She saw them too. We made a joke about tiny UFOs invading a human head. There was no embarrassment, we laughed until we couldn’t breathe. As I got older, friendship continued to be mostly a feminine space where I could display with honesty all my imperfection and laugh about it.

It took me longer than most people to stop falling in love with versions of men dreamed at a distance, and sink into the gritty affair of loving a real person instead, and be loved by him. But I eventually fell in love, got married, and after 13 years saw my marriage dissolve. I learned to be close to men and more of them are my friends now. Our friendships are not quite as unselfconscious as my friendships with women, they have a distinct tension. They are strong connections that happen to be placed outside of romance. I wonder about all the barely noticeable alchemies that situated us as friends, instead of romantic partners. There is, first, the mystifying accident of physical attraction -a sum of infinitesimal codes set by hormones and smell and taste and the wiring of the body, memory, subconscious, old and new dreams - that is either there, or not at all. Sometimes there is the distance imposed by an existing line, when they already have a partner, or I do. Sometimes there is an insurmountable age gap. Sometimes there is a geography limit, a distance measured in kilometers.

But sometimes even if there is a physical connection as much as a spiritual one, and no space or time obstacles to surmount, friendship blooms in a place where all the ingredients would have just as well sustained romance. Or we get stuck in a space where there is attraction and intimacy, but not enough momentum for a more serious romantic relationship. Which is less a question of why friendship wins and more of a question of why romantic love fails to get going. Which is really a question of why love happens sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t, even between people suited for each other. Which is really a question of how love happens at all.

Many precise conditions need to come together before it starts to rain: the wind’s speed, the humidity, the temperature, the clouds’ shape. I wonder if love is also a form of precipitation condensing out of precise, unpredictable, conditions. In my case, falling in love was the consequence of a series of moments composed as music, or paintings. They left a vivid impression on me and I can still picture them in all their clarity:

Toño (who I loved from afar, as a dream, in High School) was walking on the street, next to the traffic. We were wearing halloween costumes. I was a bird. He was a madman, with disheveled hair and black lipstick and a straight jacket, looking like he just escaped from a mental hospital. He began shouting to the cars going by: I'm a madman! I'm a madman! I’m a madman! I thought I had never seen anyone be so self assured and free.

He was licking a blue lollipop and showed me his tongue, asking if it was blue (it was). He walked next to me, and I liked the proximity of his very tall body.

Years later, Jason, the man I eventually married, stopped his march across the grocery store where we both worked, and explained to me the way the night sky looks outside the city, and all those stars, together at once. He described that starry night with the wonderment of a kid. I couldn’t believe such innocence was possible. I fell in love for good when I learned his life had been unsheltered, and ruthless, and I understood his innocence wasn’t just a trait but a quiet victory, like the smile of a battered boxer as he gets up for the next round. There were two images: the real moment of him explaining the stars, and the image I created of him as a battered boxer who smiles before the next round. Both pictures opened my heart for all of love’s beginnings.

I wonder if love always starts that way and we need a moment illuminating someone under an extraordinary light. And what if the moment happens and we weren’t paying attention. What if the opposite happens: we see someone under a light that disappoints us, and rules them out romantically. Maybe both the extraordinary and the disappointing moments are distortions invented by our fear or our hunger to be close. Or maybe all of it is a precise and accidental combination of temperature and atmospheric pressures, similar to the chemical system that attracts us to someone, or not. Or maybe (maybe), love is not always a sudden strike, but can be a revelation after a patient wait, a blurry picture slowly coming into focus; the sum of a thousand moments instead of a single one, like water finally overflowing its container after a slow, steady drip.

We think of our hearts as searching devices, and of love as the consequence of a successful search, landing in a soulmate. But our hearts make mistakes. For some, their heart is a well calibrated compass. When in doubt, they can ask their heart what to do, and their heart will answer with the truth. But for others, the heart learned along the way a pattern out of hurt, or fear, and the needle keeps pointing to wrong people, again and again. Or sometimes, we want love so much we keep jumping at its faintest possibility, and love becomes an invention we project on others, not the result of a connection, but the superimposed idea of one.

Romantic love fascinates me, and I don't understand it. It is (or so it seems) accidental, even when we approach it as a decision. Before we decide to love someone, something ineffable happens in our hearts. Love is the consequence of a thousand ways two people are similar, and a thousand ways two people are different, just enough so they can become pieces in a new puzzle- each indented corner matching a protrusion- and just enough so the picture of that puzzle is compelling. I may like a man enormously. We may understand each other deeply. And yet, we may be both passive in the specific corners of our souls where one of us needs to be assertive, so it turns out the pieces are there, the colours are similar, but the picture never sets.

I want life, the world, people, to leave their prints on me as profoundly as possible. I want to be touched, and moved. I want, by the time I die, to have a skin, a spirit, criss-crossed with many marks. I want to say: I was here, the world was here with me, I loved people, they were here with me, look, this is how they changed me. I always thought of romantic love as one of the most intense and sure-fire ways to let a human engagement touch, move, change and mark me forever. It probably is. But my friends are changing me too, all the time. They have an expansive influence and charge dormant parts of me aching to wake up. And we care for each other, just because we do. Not because we can promise sex, or the euphoric ecstasy of romance and the everyday tenderness lovers promise to each other. We cannot promise anything except solidarity (and laughter) for all our lives’ questions and labour.

Romantic love is more mysterious and fluctuating. It is more risky and maybe it demands more courage from us. But because it is born like rainfall, out of a precise chain of atmospheric pressures and changes in the wind’s speed and temperature, it can end as mysteriously as it starts. Friendship is more predictable and steady. It is less intense, but not less beautiful. What it lacks in excitement and ferocity it gives back in agency, and kindness. One can fall out of love. It is much harder to fall out of friendship. We cannot conjure romantic love, just keep ourselves open to its possibility. But when we find a connection to another person, we can cultivate it in friendship, like a garden which starts small and gets richer, more varied, as it grows, and will stay alive as long as we remember to take care of it.

Arturo is a dear friend I saw recently in Mexico City. He is a talented gardener of friendships. He has been friends since he was a teenager with a woman almost 30 years older than him. They met in a political group. They've lived in different cities for decades. To this day, they keep sending each other WhatsApp messages. Some of them are just the recording of her laughter responding to a joke or a funny comment from Arturo. He played the recording for me. It is one of those magical laughs that is born deep in the belly, and seems to shake the entire body. She imparts the wisdom of her age, advises Arturo to try everything, at least once.

Friendship is not a consolation prize for a man and a woman who couldn’t manage to connect romantically. It is in its own right a luminous, clean, form of love. We get to nurture and understand each other. We get to be ourselves. We get to be generous without demands, without hunger. It opens a bridge between our soul and another soul just as truthful as the bridge between lovers.

I often tell my friends about the romantic start of my parents' relationship. They have several stories, all of them poetic. I particularly like this one: they were dating as university students, and climbed a mountain to plant a tree together. Shortly after, they took a break during which they decided not to see or talk to each other. They had no contact at all, for several weeks. During that break, my mom climbed the mountain, found the tree, and tied a red ribbon around it. Later, when she saw my dad again, he had the ribbon tied around his ankle.

After 25 years of marriage my parents separated, and for a long time that separation was absolute. I had to distribute my family visits between my mom and my dad, making sure to spend the same amount of days with each of them.

Then, my mom got seriously sick, and my dad returned home to take care of her. Not as a lover or a romantic partner. As a friend. And out of all their love stories, this is by far the best one.

The Weight of the World

I came back to Mexico suddenly, to see my mom, who's sick. I've been spending most of my time in a public hospital. This is a country where the lack of infrastructure and resources is filled by humans, and their communities. There aren’t enough nurses, so patients are expected to have one family member beside the bed to help with some basic care needs, 24/7. Many families who come from out of town to the hospital and take turns caring for their loved ones sleep on a sidewalk by the entrance and set up makeshift temporary camps. The hospital rooms are filled with love, from daughters, sons, grandsons, sitting all night besides their mothers, fathers, grandparents, and getting no sleep. In the intimacy of the shared hospital rooms, we get the picture of family lives, with all their humor and warmth and the shadow of their conflicts. I hear conversations on speaker phone, a son talking to his sister about their dad, and asking her how to finish cooking his fish and shrimp casserole. My mom’s first neighbour was an older man, from a rural place, who was cared for with infinite patience by his grandson, but supported and visited by a large family. When he managed to go on a first tentative walk, my sister said to him “You’re so strong!”, in a frail older voice he replied “Yes, strong, yes, but just my smell!”. My mom’s second neighbour is an older woman, very sweet, cared for by her 2 daughters. They overhear the things that worry us (my mom’s surgery was suspended for lack of funds to pay for the materials needed) and give us encouraging advice as they walk by (don’t worry! they suspended my mom’s surgery too, and still she got it the next day!). I guess when the public institutions and the public support systems are as insanely unreliable as they can be in Mexico, people become each other’s support systems. You rely  on your family, your friends, your neighbors. Some working-class neighborhoods are material networks of support that literally keep people afloat. And in the meantime, while sharing a hospital room with another patient and their family, while sharing a piece of shadow from a tree sitting on the sunbaked patio outside the hospital, while sharing a “combi” (minivan type vehicles adapted to become public transportation and usually filled by people sitting and standing) you are too, part of a community, a temporary one, where people will make sure you don’t miss your stop, you have enough shadow from the tree (and some advice on miracle barks that helped them survive their ailments).It’s not what I would call politeness because people overhear conversations and chime in, uninvited, oblivious to any measure of a respectful distance. It’s just this ongoing, never-ending warmth, this constant recreation of spaces where you’re never treated as a stranger. I forget about it when I’m in Canada, but when I come back the contrast becomes obvious, and I fall in love all over again with Mexico.

I just came across this poem by Allen Ginsberg called “Song”. I think it’s intended as a poem about romantic love, but when I read it, right now, in a hospital room, worried about my mom, surrounded by people in other rooms who are also worried about someone important in their lives, it became for me a poem about a more universal kind of love. Allen Ginsberg says “the weight of the world is love”, he says “for the burden of life/ is love”. I can feel the weight of love, keeping us awake, messing up our sleep. But in the same poem Allen Ginsberg says: 

but we carry the weight

wearily,

and so must rest

in the arms of love

at last,

must rest in the arms

of love.

And I know this is true, too. Love is both the weight and the arms where we rest, as I lean on my sister, and my dad, and my friends, and my sister and my mom lean on an amazing community of people who volunteer to stay through the night at the hospital and give my sister and I a chance to sleep, they  cook food for us, take care of small domestic tasks we're too overwhelmed to manage. My mom is beautiful right now, full of love for all of us. So much a mom, always, asking me if I ate, if I slept, telling me to fix my posture and stop hunching so much. Love, in the end, this ability we have to care for each other, is what makes the wonderful and terrifying weight of love possible, and bearable.

Happiness

This is an old chronicle, written originally in Spanish years ago, right before I migrated to Canada, when I was a rural teacher for a year, in Michoacan.

José Guadalupe has light, honey-colored eyes. He is tall, has a deep voice, he is 14 years old. He is in the 8th grade, to reach the school he walks an hour every morning, through the woods. His house is in the woods, a clean space, with peach trees, geraniums. There’s always a quiet complicity formed around him, and every other kid in the 8th grade, everyone at school, everyone who knows him, both adults and children, would jump in a second to defend him, and they do, and they love him. There’s something in Lupe, charismatic and clean, that moves the world to close ranks around him and no one, ever, talks bad about him behind his back, no one rats him out when he misbehaves, no one makes fun of him when he makes a mistake. We all like to be around Lupe because he radiates aplomb and sense of humor, and because his heart is gentle and light. Last week I stayed with his family (every week I stay in one of my student’s homes). The road to leave “La Cienega” is dry and dusty but then we go into the mountain, we walk on pine needle carpets and enjoy the shade from the trees. We have to crawl through 2 or 3 barbed wire fences along the way, “it’s a shame we have so many fences” Lupe says to me apologetically, as if the fences were somehow his fault, he asks to hold my backpack while I cross, he realizes it’s heavy because its full of books, and silently he keeps walking with my backpack on his shoulders, it doesn’t matter how many times I ask for him to give it back, he just smiles and keeps on walking. When we get to the outskirts of his house, he weights my backpack on the scale they use for the resin, “8 and a half kilos”, “quite a bit”. From then on, he never lets me carry the backpack, no matter how much I protest and feel ashamed.

I bought a chess set for the group, last week, and it was a success. The kids learned the rules of the game quickly and would leap to the board in every free corner of the school day, throughout recess and once classes were over. Lupe asked if he could borrow the chess set to take it home after school. There’s no T.V. in his house because there’s really no electricity either, the small solar plant is only enough for a couple of lightbulbs at night, and the blender, but that’s it. Last time I stayed at Lupe’s house, 4 months ago, it was the rain season, and I remember spending the afternoon with Lupe, his mom, his older brother and younger sister, all of us sitting on the porch on a long wooden bench, playing innocently a contest in which, whoever says “yes”, or “no”, is out and loses the game. This time around Lupe and his brother Paco spent the evenings hunched over the chess board. At night his mom, a sweet woman with blue eyes and black hair, would pour hot guava tea for us, give us bread. Nights were cold, Lupe’s older brothers would seat silently around the clay stove, their hands darkened by resin, the marks of hard labour. Lupe’s dad would wear huarache sandals in the freezing air. He has the same wholesomeness and the same heart as his kids, and the same strength. A violent man only a few families told me about in secret used to live in the area, and the man always carried a high caliber rifle, he’d get drunk and shoot people over minor provocations, he killed many, everyone was scared of him. I was told Lupe’s dad confronted him once, and the violent man didn’t shoot, just left saying “you’re brave”. Finally, the army caught up to the man, and he died firing his rifle, and now he is just a distant story only some people talk about, in a quiet voice. Lupe’s dad doesn’t talk about these things, he talks innocently about other things, of working illegally in the States and how he crossed the desert at the border and spent two days without food or water, of the pilgrimage to Mexico’s main cathedral, walking from Michoacan to Mexico City twelve hours a day, for ten days, of his work collecting resin, of the deer he sees walk by sometimes very close to him in the woods, and how he never has wanted to kill them.

If you ever feel any kind of darkness pulsing inside, any sorrow or bitterness, go spend a couple of days in Lupe’s home, in that clean space with its geraniums and peach trees, protected by the mountains and an abundance of trees during the day, and an abundance of stars at night. Go spend an evening sitting around that kitchen’s clay stove, and look into a world that beats tenderly, a world without shadows.

On my way back to Morelia on the rickety bus that rattles through the potholes, looking out the window at the avocado orchards, the pine trees, I remember being aware of my happiness. A happiness without frills, incomplete; a soft awareness resting on deep, gentle pools, when I think about Lupe’s home, and the hands of Lupe’s older brothers, darkened by resin, and Lupe’s mom taking photos from a drawer to show me their family’s history, and Lupe’s dad using huarache sandals in the freezing air at night, and Lupe carrying my backpack, and the kids playing chess during recess.

Belief

I don’t always remember my dreams, but I remember this one, from a while ago: I died inside a car, the car was abandoned and rusty in the middle of a forest. So now I was dead, and away from the earth, in the center of a remote darkness. A presence was with me, I don’t know what type of presence, just some protective voice guiding me through death the way a doctor offers his arm to someone recently blinded. Everything around me was dark and empty, but in the distance I saw a small blur of light flickering on and off, with the speed of a steady heartbeat: one second of light, one second of darkness, one second of light again. What is that? I asked. The voice answered: that’s a universe ending and beginning again.

I like that dream because it felt true. There must be a scale for space and time radically more endless than ours, where the eons encompassing the beginning and end of our universe are just a quick pulse followed by another one. We don’t know much but this we know: the immensity we barely grasp is a small filament in a fabric of incomprehensible immensities.

I remember one fleeting moment from a Sunday spent with my family in Mexico City, years ago. They had tickets to Beethoven’s 9th symphony played by the National Philharmonic. I didn’t have a ticket (it was my fault). They went inside the theatre, and I stayed outside, deflated. I was in a small crowd of people, they were waiting for their boyfriends or their wives and I was just waiting for the concert to end. A young woman walked directly to me and asked unprompted if I wanted to go in. I said yes and she silently handed me a ticket for the first floor (the best seats), then she immediately went inside, and I lost sight of her. So, I got in, found an empty seat in one of the first rows, and was moved deeply by the music.

I remember an even smaller moment from a couple of years before that, when I was in High School. I arrived at Mexico City’s eastern bus station alone, after a 4-hour bus ride, at night, and stood in the line to purchase a ticket for a taxi. The man selling the tickets told me not to purchase one, not to take a taxi, to take the subway instead. I asked why and he wouldn’t say, he was calm, and serious, and adamant about it. People with his job just mechanically ask your destination, mechanically recite the price according to the distance, take your money, and print a voucher you hand over to one of the taxis lined up outside the station. I had no clue why this man, who looked and behaved like a reasonable person, wouldn’t want me to take a taxi that night, but I felt compelled to listen, and I thanked him, didn’t buy a ticket, got off the line, took the subway instead. I felt like the man in the booth knew something and wanted to save me, that I was being protected from a crime or a catastrophe.

I don’t have any set beliefs about God’s existence or inexistence. I haven’t experienced anything miraculous and inexplicable. My experiences, as you can see, are too subtle and explainable, barely even noteworthy. I just know I’ve come across many times the kindness of strangers and these events felt like the consequence of a more enigmatic kindness. Probably there was no magic there. Most likely there was no magic. But I like the idea of a magic so faint and restrained you can easily miss it, and I hold on to that idea for its beauty, rather than its likelihood.

I remember very clearly my aunt Alicia as she said goodbye to us, while dying of cancer, 5 years ago. She was several years younger than my dad, had a sharp brain and a prodigious memory, was a traveler, was the life of the party in every party. She had the best jokes and could tell them landing perfect punchlines, and she had the best laugh in the world: a loud, luminous laughter that expanded across space and would fill a room completely. I always wanted to be seated in the same table as her, it was the loudest and more interesting table of any family reunion. She could really cook, and draw, and paint, and tell a story, and speak in public. I remember her talented, self-assured in her talents, and strong. She wasn’t a morning person, and she was always late for things, and had a temper. She had no children of her own, but she loved and spoiled all of us, her nieces, and nephews, with generosity. She was loved deeply by her husband. One Christmas they both went on a shopping spree and spent a small fortune on toys for us (11 nephews and nieces!), when we were little, and her face beamed with a child-like excitement as we opened the presents. Dusk was her favourite time of day. She was a night person. She wasn’t religious. She went into her death bravely, unsure of what would happen. Maybe just darkness and silence and the end of all things, maybe not. Remember me, she asked us, as she was saying goodbye. In a moment of inspiration, Lilia (her older sister), said: we will think of you at dusk, in the moments between night and day, and Alicia smiled at the idea. So, I do, I remember Alicia from time to time when it’s dusk and the trees become powerful shadows against the sky. And when I do, I hope the mystery she is now can see through my eyes, from the mystery she inhabits, the blue light against the darkened trees. I don’t believe in this idea with conviction. I’m just captivated by it and can’t let it go.

I’ve been listening to “Hope, Faith and Carnage”, the series of conversations between Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan. I like when they talk about religion. Sean seems more firmly rooted in the non-believing side, while Nick is tentatively crossing into the believing group, pushed by the grief of losing his son. Nick says sometimes you have to believe not because something makes sense, not because something is likely or even true, you believe because you’re compelled by the poetry of an idea, and the idea is by itself healing, and does you good.

Nick Cave tells us that we will one day be touched by grief: a pain too violent and too overwhelming. No one escapes that feeling, he says: if you haven’t gone through that pain, it is waiting for you in your future. Since love exists and the ones we love can stop loving us, or their hearts can be stopped by death, we’re all bound for grief. That kind of pain will change you, Nick says, and can get you closer to the questions that can’t be answered through science and rational thought. Maybe the believers are the ones who have always known with more clarity than the rest of us how fragile we truly are, they have assessed the weight of our mortality, the depth of our wounds, and how much we need to be embraced by something bigger than ourselves. Maybe the non-believers are just the ones who can face that fragility without any outside help. I don’t think I’ll ever be a religious believer, the capacity to become one seems beyond my nature and out of my reach. Maybe, like Nick Cave says, I’ll get closer once my heart is truly broken. I know I’m not strong enough to accept a cold universe, a random universe, without any hidden poetry, without any hidden melodies sung just beyond our hearing range in mysterious, incomprehensible spaces. For now, I hold on to the promise of that music humming beyond our rational understanding. I hold on to that promise (without faith) because of its beauty rather than its truth, and that’s almost good enough.

Sometimes I don’t know if believing so faintly means I’m less rigid, or if I’m just less disciplined; hoping for veiled, beautiful mysteries, without having to suffer through the sacrifices and demands of religion. Maybe we all need to believe in something with a kind of faith. The world is broken. The world is broken and then made whole from time to time, through astonishing acts of collective courage, and innumerable acts of kindness. I’ve been a witness, I’ve seen the miracles, I’m a believer. This I believe with conviction, and determination; the way pilgrims do. There is a song to be discovered here as well, after all, among us human beings, in the small corner of reality we can fathom.

Space Explorer

My marriage of 13 years ended in January. I still love my ex-husband because it would be impossible not to love someone who was so close to me, for so long. I don’t think I still love him the way a wife loves a husband, but I love him deeply, like family and someone closer, more intimate than family. He has remained himself throughout his hardships, a part of him astoundingly clean, uncynical, and he deserves to breath easy, relax into the years of his life, be happy. I want him to be happy. I still feel the need to share things with him (funny things, interesting things he would enjoy), and I miss being touched by him. I miss waking up next to his warmth, feeling the belly of our cat wrapped around my feet. So, there’s that.

There’s also the usual taking stock of my life and wondering how much of an empty space there will be once I’m gone, and how many people will really miss me.

I have long and cherished and deep and caring friendships, but I wish I had more friends. I wish I had travelled more. I still wish sometimes for a life with more unpredictability. I miss the violent beauty of more intense years, when I was for example a rural teacher in Mexico, in the mountains, and the world would sneak up on me and take my breath away with a moment of light and clouds, and an oak. The same simple beauty sneaks up on me now, in the city, but my routines are more dependable. I find beauty, or let beauty find me, and I am moved by it, but there is something about navigating unfamiliar places that makes us more aware of everything, the endings of our nerves are more open and our heart pounds faster, more frequently. Sometimes I really miss that, and feel the urge to do something else, somewhere new, but I don’t know any more if that’s a creative or a destructive impulse.

I rent a tiny studio apartment that should fit someone a few sizes younger than me, I don’t own a car, I don’t even have a driver’s license. I don’t have a brilliant career. I have no children. But I’m not unhappy. I have lived a life with enough meat in its bones. I don’t regret it. I feel awake. My soul is alive. My soul, in general, breaths easy when I’m alone, reading, painting, navigating my own brain. My soul takes long breaths when I take long walks with good music pounding through my headphones, so I get to see the world with a soundtrack and check how the songs and the fleeting images of the city and its streets, alleyways and parks seem attuned with each other, or dissonant.

Except my soul by itself is not enough. I re-read recently “The Grapes of Wrath” and I’ve been thinking about Casey, the preacher who is no longer a preacher, when he says he couldn’t find his own soul or any revelation while alone in nature. He didn’t receive his revelation in the desert, he received his revelation in jail, amongst his fellow human beings. The soul he needed to find wasn’t locked inside him but connected like a stream to a river with all the other suffering souls of the world. I care about that river of souls as an abstract force that drives us to fight for collective meaning and redemption. But I care even more about the way we bridge the gap between our individual soul and other unique, irreplaceable souls. There’s danger in that space. To let yourself be known by someone new. To try to really know somebody. To care, not just for the faceless destiny of all humans, but for a specific face, a constellation of freckles and tiny scars, a voice that gets deeper or softer when it is touched by longing, or happiness.

It came up on the news that there was an explosion in a highway, and 2 people were killed. Suddenly, I don’t know why, I imagined one of those people was someone in my life I don’t really know yet and would like to know better, not someone already close, but someone at a safe distance from me, who could be closer. I imagined the possibility of those connections suddenly shut down and squandered. I got nervous and only relaxed as I took inventory of the people that stand like unexplored promises at a medium or distant range from my life and confirmed they were okay, their public personas replying to messages in chats, posting stuff on social media. It was a relief to know the space between us was still there, unknown, full of possibility. I wonder though if, even without death, even while we are all alive, we’ll go ahead and waste that space, anyway. Curating our social media posts, building invincible public versions of ourselves, reacting to each other in emojis, being cool. We walk down each other’s streets and stay at the threshold of our houses, talking about our jobs and activities and vacation plans, making clever comments, and we don’t go inside the house, we stay on the side of ourselves that’s fine and uncomplicated, we don’t reveal the messy rooms, the mistakes, and the sadness, we don’t cry in front of each other. A lot of our relations live on that threshold, without crossing it. We have close friends already, to cry with, and to the rest we offer a deferential choreography of steps, dancing around our doorways, never going inside. The truth is, maybe in most cases there’s no bridge and the polite dance is all we’ll ever have. Connections are infrequent, magic gifts. To leave any gift like that unopened seems like an immeasurable waste. The hardest adjustment to Canadian culture is how much people respect each other, and each other’s thresholds, keeping polite distances. Maybe it’s because even in Mexico I always acted like a polite Canadian, making sure I wasn’t going where I wasn’t invited, and I wasn’t staying longer than expected, and I wasn’t getting too close too soon and I wasn’t making anyone uncomfortable. I needed my fellow Mexicans to put their arms around me in an impulse, shorten my name with familiarity (call me Ji, or Jime, instead of Jimena), and hold my hand into their houses. I can’t be like I was any more, in this country. Maybe it’s my turn to be the Mexican, among the Canadians, even though that seems foreign to my own character, and difficult.

I write texts like this one to catalogue my fears and find a route to move across them. Sometimes it works. It takes time, but eventually I’ve changed my life when it needed changing. That’s how I ended in the mountains of Michoacan and that’s how I ended living in a new country, that’s how I fell in love, and that’s how later I found the strength to walk away from my marriage. I used to dream about Africa. I used to think I needed to explore the world. But that isn’t so scary, any longer. What is scary is to cross the distance I carry with me and around me, to jump out from the inertia of the expected social choreographies into unknown, fragile ground. That ground doesn’t exist until you step into the space between you and another person, the results can’t be planned or predicted, the new ground can turn out solid and rich enough to plant a garden, or even a multitude of trees, or the ground can disappear under your shoes and let you fall on your face. You can’t step into that territory without being vulnerable.

And yet, every person is a whole universe. There’s so much to explore. I want to be an astronaut.

Kitsch

Milan Kundera says we all have a kitsch image deeply rooted in us, regardless of how anti-kitsch we are. That’s not a problem in my case because there’s nothing anti-kitsch about me and my private list of deep-rooted kitsch images is very long. The most powerful ones have to do with my family. I can’t help it.

An unmarked house in an unpaved road. Loquat trees, a hearth, the sound of trains, an opossum that lived in the attic and scared our visitors. A grey, yellow-eyed cat. A beetle-green VW. A black gate. An orange hammock.

Falkor, our first dog (rescued from the street, like all our subsequent pets). We never managed to fix his fur, so until the end of his life he fashioned dreadlocks all the way to the ground that sounded like a bunch of brooms sweeping the floor as he walked. I remember more clearly than a million other things the sound Falkor made moving around, with his soft paws, and the dreadlocks brushing the floor. It’s the sound of an unmitigated sweetness, just clean sweetness and nothing else. His face was identical to the dragon in The Neverending Story, and his character was very shy. But Falkor was brave. He was the protagonist of a fight with two bull terriers who came to challenge our home’s territory. Falkor, a tiny white mass of dreadlocks, darted into the street to defend us. He was taking a beating but in a display of courage that stayed in our family legendary records, our grey cat joined Falkor in battle and between the two of them they expelled the attackers.

Falkor died of cancer and now he is buried in one of my most kitsch territories, the mountain we called “Estribo Chico”, in Patzcuaro.

This is the image: It’s a Saturday or a Sunday, my sister and I walk behind the serene silhouette of my dad, through red clay trails, into the forest. My dad is very tall, and slim, he takes long, rhythmic strides (we take many quick short steps to keep up with him). He wears flannel shirts, modest mountain boots, jeans. My dad has very rarely, and only if forced to, worn a tie. He walks like a samurai, he moves economically, in silence. His back is straight, and he carries his arms and hands close to his body. He doesn’t slip, or bump into things, he doesn’t get scratched by branches or thorns. He moves with elegance through the forest. Deep down, the forest is his natural element. He can cut through the mountain outside the trail without getting lost. He can walk for many hours, hike steep climbs without taking a break, without cracking the steady cadence of his breathing. We walk in silence, talk and laugh for a moment and then go back to the silence. I never managed to be like him, I was and still am an ungainly figure in the forest, who gets out of breath, stops, gets distracted. But the goal still is to walk like him, to be a slender, silent figure who lets the forest be present at all times.

The silent image of my dad includes a deep, sweet gaze. I doubt he realizes how kind his eyes can be, because he is indeed an anti-kitsch person with an intelligent, skeptical spirit and a dark, acerbic humor. He only looks in the mirror for practical reasons, to shave and run a comb through his wet hair once or twice and that’s it. But his eyes are at times very sweet, as evidence of a heart that doesn’t realize its own immensity.

I guess deep down, I’ve always tried to walk like him. I remember looking at both our shadows over the sand, on the beach. Two long silhouettes, moving with the hands close to the body and a slight inclination of our torsos to the right, as if we were both walking on an imaginary unevenness.

Among the images that repeat themselves over and over in my dreams, there’s often the protective sensation of the forest.

Dancing to the radio

Art is a key to open a door, look at each other, and find something we recognize. Artists take the things we have inside, the things we cannot grasp, and give them a specific shape in a song, or a story. They give us something we can hold in front of our eyes or against our ears, that repeats our heart from the depths of another heart so we find, with enormous relief, that we’re not alone. We’re lost and then, so grateful to be found. We do this all the time, not as creators of art but as an audience. We find our soulmates when a soul reverberates to the same frequency at the touch of a song, or a movie, or a book we love.

Roberto Bolaño wrote about a woman and a man who stopped being friends. The man discovered they both liked the drawings of Grosz, but while she found them funny, the drawings sank him in depressions that lasted several weeks. He couldn’t keep a friendship with someone who found humor in the same drawings where he found despair. Their souls were attuned differently. Without the drawings those differences would have stayed hidden and incommunicable. More often though, art reveals our hidden similarities, and when it does (when you find someone who loves the same book you love, for the same reasons) the glimpse of that bridge feels like magic. The miracle is not about finding a person like an exact mirror reflecting our taste back to us, the miracle is just finding something that feels like a passage between your brain and another brain, your heart and another heart, a way of sharing a set of coordinates to navigate all of which is navigated in darkness, all of which is unmeasurable and uncatalogued.

I am, first and foremost, an audience for art. There is a song there, whispering our humanity back to us, and we tilt our heads and listen and wonder if the stranger on the subway or the street would tilt their head the same way in front of a mural, or a line of graffiti, or a movie, or a poem, and could we be secretly brothers or sisters then, do we have souls attuned in similar ways to absorb the world and its heartbreak, and its beauty.

Whatever art I do myself, I do it in the spirit advised by Kurt Vonnegut when he instructed us to sing in the shower:

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

I write (and paint) from time to time not to be an artist but just to hear my own voice, so I can absorb the world, let it cycle through my lungs and my brain and my heart, let it come out as a something with my stamp on it and (once in a while, if I’m very lucky) let it reveal something about my own incommunicable corners. I don’t do these things to be great (which is so firmly beyond my skills ), I do them just to be human.  These are letters I write to myself. Moments for a small, poetic license. Acts of freedom, like dancing alone, to the radio.

Soft

In life, you have two choices: you get softer, or harder. Softness is a cat lying on its back, the belly exposed. An animal who used to be wild forgets they can be a predator, or prey, forgets they can wound, or be wounded, and displays an unmitigated trust.

My dad, for example, has softened up with age. I think he always wanted a clean independence, and once he had it, once his life was entirely his and he could spend his days reading and walking in the woods, he relaxed, and all the softness that was inside of him came into the surface and became a gift for my sister and I, his two daughters. It wasn’t a dramatic change, because the softness was always there; it was only a small deepening, but noticeable.

The biggest test for softness is love. You can’t be like a cat exposing their belly until you let your heart be held inside someone else’s fist. I talk and move softly, but maybe haven’t been truly soft like that. I always kept a small distance, even as I got close to another human being, even as I married him and loved him for over a decade. I chose him, maybe, because he already had a distance in him, and it protected us both against being truly soft. We were soft but just to a certain degree, a part of us still vigilant, holding on to bits of our heart without giving them away completely. We gave each other our hearts, without abandonment. And yet, the part of my heart that was given away will always be his, which is to say more accurately a part of my stomach will always be his: the part that aches and worries and fills with acid and anxiety and fills with butterflies and warms with tenderness, a part of the softest part, will always belong to him.

Now, as my heart and my life open again into a wide, unknown space, I just want to be soft, truly brave, at least once. I want to fall into the abyss of a love that can nearly kill me. Because what is the point of living and what is the point of loving if you don’t ever get to tremble in front of a magnificent, bone-breaking storm, and let yourself be drenched, and forget, for a while, that you can wound, or be wounded.

I’ve said this before, to myself, many times. I’ve made speeches and silent proclamations resolving to be brave. Then I went into my life and held a distance or chose a man who held a distance so we could both be together, but on guard. So we’ll see.

Here’s the illustration of a small, wild, soft creature. A marten.

Notes for the log usually kept by a couple of angels

(Chronicle 2 years ago, in Montreal)

Memory is our way to rescue something from the stream of weeks and months. All our days and nights are moving fast, filled with information we forget, and we lose entire blocks of time forever. Sometimes our memory saves pieces of time unconsciously and sometimes we stop and look carefully and touch the outline of a moment because we don’t want our brain to forget it. It’s a decision like the decision of taking a photo: out of the haze of all that is ordinary, an instant acquires distinct contours, and we save it. The problem with my life is that it’s ordinary every day, every month of the year. I find comfort, however, in the angels imagined by Wim Wenders. In the movie "Wings of Desire", a pair of angels tour Berlin (in black and white) and meet at the end of each day to compare notes in their personal logs (they carry tiny notebooks). Being angels, they can look at all of humanity, all the great dramas and tragedies, all the conquests, inventions, triumphs and wars, all the love stories, all the losses, all the art and all the science, and they choose instead to record small events in their notebooks, such as: "a woman closed her umbrella in the rain."

So I, just a regular office worker, go out into the world and walk on the streets and under the sky and find salvation in notes for a log I invent for myself. And when I do, I imagine I’m the distant cousin of those angels and my tiny regular life manages however to touch the outline of something that deserves to be written down in a notebook and saved, somehow.

These are my notes for today’s log:

I walked in the forest among copper trees against a gray sky. I saw an older man approach a tree, carefully open a ziploc bag, and slowly place on the ground nuts for the squirrels in a tidy line. I didn’t know if they were gifts for any squirrel and all squirrels, or for a specific squirrel the man visits regularly, always at the foot of the same tree, on the same spot of the road. I saw a toddler in a blue snow suit walk clumsily and pick up a maple leaf, marveled. He immediately gifted it to his mother, who thanked him. I saw a man and a woman embrace for a long time in complete stillness and silence, and I couldn't guess if that was just love or if it was also sadness. I saw a man close his eyes with pleasure inside a hair salon, while a woman washed his hair. I saw from the street, through a window, a young clerk in a grocery store, his mouth and nose were covered by a mask, but his eyes laughed, amused, looking at something or listening to something hidden from me, beyond the contours of the window, and his young face was illuminated and full of beauty.

Lastly: a cat approached me on the street and let me pet it.

I carry your hearts with me

Mexico is abstract (Toronto is concrete). My heart is occupied always by both the abstract and the concrete. The abstract lives mostly in my mind: a collection of specific details I hold in my memory the way we hold precious objects and photographs in a box. When I go to Mexico all I do is collect moments for the box: The silhouette of my dad in front of me as we walk into the forest, under the stars, at 5 in the morning. He wears a baseball cap backwards and in the dark his silhouette makes me think of a very tall kid. In the small, contained wilderness of our walk, away from the city and without the sun, the night sky is really the sky. There’s a constellation I can’t name, next to a crescent moon. And Venus right before sunrise, very bright. The hoot of an owl, soft, like the trill of a cat. The branches of trees taking shape against the morning. The first sun rays touching only the top of the trees. The birds waking up. The side of the mountain covered with encinos (tall, sprawling, generous and crooked trees laden with air plants and lichen). The side of the mountain covered with pine trees. The side of the mountain covered with eucalyptus trees (conqueror kind imported from Australia by some beaurocrat; a relentless species that makes the soil toxic and won't let anything else grow, with trees so tall and skinny the ladscape looks empty, or wrong). The cows, always mellow and sleepy, moving next to us between the trees, or sometimes standing on an opposite hill like figurines you could pick in between your fingers and put inside your pocket. The mountain changing the scale of the world. The cathedral towers looking like toys from the top of the mountain. The towers as they look from the street, in the old part of the city. The Plaza de Armas next to the Cathedral, the Jardin de las Rosas next to the Music School. Pink stone gardens and plazas next to pink stone buildings, filled with age, and beauty, and my dad sitting next to me in these places on a bench or a chair, with the legs stretched out, both of us in silence under the shadow and comfort of the jacaranda trees, watching the city breathe and move around us. People sitting quietly (I scan them and count how many are not looking at their cell phone and look instead at the piece of morning or afternoon as it unfolds in front of them, which is how everyone used to sit when we had only books or newspapers to distract us). Little kids chaising slightly older siblings. Young men and women selling home-made brownies or cookies, candies, hand-crafts, aproaching people gently, acceping their refusals with a smile.

The vitality and good humor of the vendors in street markets: a loud group in the early morning, whistling or singing or announcing their avocados or bothering the guy in the next stall. A group of good mathematicians: keeping the count of the half of a kilo and quarter of a kilo and the bunch of parsley and two heads of garlic as they grab the produce and weight it and drop it inside my dad’s shopping bag skillfully and with enormous speed, to give without pause an exact total to pay in the end. My dad buying a precise number of lemons or mangos and smiling behind the mask. My dad arranging the vegetables and fruits inside his satchel and climbing on his bike for the ride back home.

The way my dad moves around the world, powered by his own legs, walking into the forest or biking through the city, without a car.

My dad talking about the universe while we eat huchepos sitting in the kitchen. The way my dad listens more than he talks, but can spend long stretches of conversation talking about big misteries and the human attempts to come up with an answer. My dad’s wicked smile after making a very dark joke. My dad saying goodnight with a kiss on the cheek, the same as when I was little.

Patzcuaro’s lake from the top of the Estribo Grande. The lake constantly shrinking while the Estribo Grande, the mountain, stays mostly the same. Walking to the top with my mom and seeing a small fire on the fields at the bottom. The watchman explaining, worried: “the fire is going through a nursery of young trees, older trees can survive the fire, but all the young trees will die”. The way my mom worries about the young trees too, and about the stray dogs we pass on the street. The way people leave little buckets with water tied to a poll or a tree, so the stray dogs can drink (the many ways this country is brutal and yet, the way everyday life is filled with innumerable little kindnesses like that). The feel of my mom and my sister’s hands, which are tiny and kind of square and full of warmth and perfect to hold in one’s hands. Our eagerness to give each other something while we are together, so the other one may think of us later and may have a way to hold us through the distance. My mom knitting a hat for Jason until late at night. My sister rummaging through her earrings to give me a pair (two ceramic birds, painted blue). My sister exploding in laughter. The way my sister and I look at each other for a split moment of recognition, before we both burst in cackles. The way she always leans her whole body forward when she laughs. The dark humor she got from my dad. The way we both laugh backwards, a kind of inverse laughter which makes us sound as if we were gasping for air. Both my mom and sister’s faces full of empathy, suffering for the troubles of the characters in a movie. My mom’s chicken soup, and sopa de fideos, and home made salsas, and chiles rellenos. The way my mom will stay awake until late at night cooking labor intensive dishes like chiles rellenos, for the people she loves.

I know I get to be there only a little. The last week I start counting the days I have left, and I start feeling sad. So I look and listen and feel intently, cutting the outline of the good moments with precision so I may save them in the box. I do this lovingly, careful to leave out the violence, absorbing only partially the enormous injustice, the brutality of our inequalities, romanticizing or filtering out the depth of our darkness. Mexicans are a sunny, wonderfully loud people, I say to myself, look at us sing and joke and whistle and paint our houses in bright miss-matching colours. Strangers look at you in the eye and smile, I say to myself, we are a people full of warmth. There’s a sign hanging in a neighborhood in Patzcuaro announcing if you’re caught committing a crime, no matter how petty (the list includes graffiti or vandalizing cars) you won’t be surrendered to the authorities but lynched on the spot. People don’t seem to know what to do with the violence any longer: the men that turn up as bodies in the canal, the women that simply disappear. I leave this out of the box, but I know I'm lying to myself. A man walks in front of me on the street very early in the morning, wearing long sleeves and a wide hat and a cape tucked into his shirt, and all the surfaces of his skin except for the face and hands are covered in fabric, as in a makeshift diver's suit, or a very humble version of a fencing uniform. This is how you dress when you work very long hours under the sun. In Mexico, everywhere, all the time, you see people fighting a hard fight for survival. This man and his clothes don’t make the cut for preciousness or beauty but still, in all their weight, have a place inside the box.

James Baldwin said: “As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” No ounce of beauty is wasted for me in Mexico: I register and collect it thoroughly, in great detail. I love Mexico and my family through the distance, through those details. That’s one way I fight against space and time.

The Present and The Future

What would you do at the end of the world? Would you stop everything you’re doing to enjoy the last of its beauty, or would you try to save that beauty, somehow? I knew a while ago a man that is a birder, which means he goes into different pockets of wild nature and waits in silence, for birds. If we lose against climate change and face the end of this natural world, I just want to be him, go into whatever wilderness is left, and watch the birds.

While this world faces a rapid succession of destructions, and the planet is flooding and burning, would you take the present, the forests that are still there, the mountains that are still there, the life that is still possible, and sit in the middle of it all to let the waves of what remains fill you and move you? If life as we know it in this planet is in a train moving fast towards a cliff, would you then try to enjoy the view through the window or would you try to stop the train? Would you sacrifice the present to try and save the future, or would you abandon the future to enjoy the beauty that survives in the present before it is gone completely?

I’m a dreamer, always been, so I’m trying to stop the train. I know I can’t do it alone, so I joined a group that organizes to build power for regular people like me, who want to put the brakes on the engine. Sometimes, as I find myself busier and busier, I ache for the present and I just want it to stretch in front of me, free and delicious, light and carefree, unburdened and unlabeled, unspoiled by a prognosis. But as romantic as I’ve always been, as much as I’ve always preferred escaping and daydreaming, I want to face the world and this moment with clear eyes, and the shadow of the future looms in all the corners and all the details of the present. The beauty left in the present exists as an endangered beauty.

I need however to make enough room for the present because while we don’t know if this world will end, I know with certainty I will end, one day, and while the time of history is long, my time to breath and love and look at the mountains and the stars is very short. When I daydream (which I can’t stop doing), I wish I was Eve the vampire from the movie “Only lovers left alive” (if you haven’t you should watch it now, and probably stop reading this). She has eternity. She also has a lover, Adam, a vampire like her, and they’ve been alive for centuries. She loves books, he loves music, he loves science, she does, too, they touch a plant and can recite the Latin name with their eyes closed, they touch the wood in a guitar and can tell the make, the year it was built. They’ve been alive too long and have accumulated extraordinary amounts of knowledge. Now they have retreated from the world. They look at us humans, at the end of this civilization, polluting the water and our blood, heating the planet, making it ugly, not learning our lesson until it’s too late, and they call us “zombies”. Have they started the water wars yet, or are they still fighting over oil? he says, to her. Detroit, she says on the ruins of the deserted city, will raise again. “Detroit has water. When the cities in the South are burning, Detroit will bloom”. He looks at this world and it makes him suicidal because we, the zombies, make him suicidal. She, from the wisdom of her long life, reminds him that the world has collapsed before. Their time is very long. My time is short. I don’t have the comfort they find in their eternity, knowing that the world has been ruined and shaken before. I have no choice but to care about this specific world, while I see a patch of the ocean burst into flames. We are the people of this era, and only get one period of history for ourselves. They get to be sad, and we get to be terrified, as it is our world that is ending and we don’t get to see the next one, if the next one also includes humans, or mammals, or living beings with brains like our brains. She loves him and is trying to give him reasons to keep living. There is a star like a diamond, she says, that is constantly emitting the sound of a gigantic gong. The universe is vast and filled with astonishing beauty. I wish that was enough for me too, but the stars and all their wonders are too far away, and my universe is small: it’s made of the people I love (and the cat I love), who connect me to the people and the animals of this tiny planet, since our fate is linked to their fate. Adam and Eve, the two beautiful vampires, are just witnesses wandering through this world at night without belonging to this world. They belong to a world that stretches from the middle ages to the unfathomable edges of the future, they get to find comfort in the sound of a gigantic gong somewhere in the universe, because they don’t measure time through a beating heart. We only have a few decades of this 21st century world (if we´re lucky), a narrow window of years and a heart that beats quickly, relentlessly worn out, pushing both against the speed of our wreckage, and the speed of time.

Kaia

Male, gray, short-haired, “tabby” wrote the veterinarian on the paper form. “Kaia” said my husband and I let him choose the name. He was born because a cat escaped from a house and returned pregnant. We found out that there were kittens for the choosing and took a train to the house and went down a basement where the kittens had to negotiate their tiny living amongst a couple of massive dogs and other adult cats. The owner thought the best was a cute white one with blue eyes. We disagreed. We wanted a female and looked at the gray, black and white kittens trying to guess, and Kaia (who was still nameless at the time) came out to say hi and tried to climb my leg. He seemed to have gigantic ears. He looked like he was probably male, but he was already ours and we didn’t mind.

We took a taxi to the train and a train back to the city and our new kitten felt too small and weightless inside our brand new carrier. He was scared and didn’t like the ride back home. We got back to our building and Jason went across the street to buy litter and I stayed in the lobby, sitting on the floor. I unzipped the top of the carrier just enough to put a finger through and pet Kaia’s head. He liked it, and relaxed, and started to purr.

It felt important to have a cat of our own, for the first time. For several years we lived in a tiny basement with a small window and we couldn’t afford any other living being, not even a plant (not enough light). Once, our landlord went away on vacation and asked us to take care of his fish: a beta in a glass bowl. Jason was happy. He learned about beta fish online and worried about room temperatures and food amounts. He put the fishbowl on the ledge of our single tiny window and tried hard to make a connection. He would tap on the glass and get his face close to the fish and get excited if it seemed to change color or look back at him

A few years ago, we were finally able to live in a normal size apartment with normal size windows and we made sure, immediately, to get lots of plants. Jason took care of them lovingly, the same way he worried about the fish. It’s great to have a window, and to have the view of a tree. It’s easy to find a bit of comfort there, looking at the leaves move against the light. Toronto is an expensive city. Many people live in basements. Normal size windows can be a luxury. They felt like a luxury to us, a little victory of our own.

Three years ago we decided to get our cat. Seems like many young and youngish couples these days don’t have kids, and have cats, or dogs. We love children, we would love to have children. My parents had my sister and me in their early twenties; what an unthinkable thing to do now. We live with the ghost of precariousness. I’m scared of climate change. I take walks in parks full of beautiful toddlers and marvel at the courage and the hope of their parents. They seem so sure that there will be a planet and a future; they are so full of faith.

So we didn’t get a baby yet but we got Kaia with the gigantic ears. He would fit his whole body inside one of Jason’s shoes. He would climb and sleep through the night on Jason’s pillow, above Jason’s head. He was playful and destructive and full of energy and a handful. He killed some of our best plants. Ruined our couch. People promised he would quiet down after getting fixed and a bit older. He just got chubby and remained a handful.

Jason likes to keep a glass of water next to the bed when he sleeps. Kaia likes to push things over a ledge with his paw and see them shatter, so Jason has been violently awoken several times, completely wet.

Kaia waits patiently for me to wake up on my own. I open my eyes and see him standing there, looking at me, just waiting. If he wants to wake Jason he dives into his legs under the covers like a fox diving into the snow. Kaia is sweet to me and rough with Jason but I think Jason is his favorite.

Kaia likes to hide behind things and jump when you go by. He jumps with the front legs stretched out and taps you gently without using his claws. If he guesses that I’m walking towards the bedroom, he races to get there first and hides behind the laundry basket and wiggles his bum ready to attack. He gets me half of the time. The other half, it kills me to see the top of his ears hiding there, sure that he’ll surprise me.

It’s fun to get to know him and realize how much he is like other cats and how much he does things no other cat would do. If you live in a big city you get to see the squirrels and the racoons and the birds but maybe your only real relationship to any non-human living being is your pet. And if you have a pet you realize there’s not a massive difference between their heart and our heart, their brain and our brain. We are more intelligent and complex, but they are full of curiosity and playfulness and have a complexity of their own. They have quirks. They give affection, get stressed. They are individual and irreplaceable. And we are aware of this because we get to live with them and know them, but it’s also true of tigers and foxes and crows and wolves and martens and oaters and whales. It’s true of cows and pigs.

I used to teach in small villages in Mexico, far from everything. The people in those communities are not surrounded by concrete and buildings, but mountains, and trees. It’s an incommensurable luxury. They open their windows to the forest. There’s a deep injustice in the lack of resources: the way electricity, medical care, education, infrastructure, roads, food security, security from violence, are far and hard to come by. But there’s luxury in the sheer amount of beauty. They live in beautiful places, in patches of un-ruined nature. So I was there and loved walking those mountains and will remember forever those landscapes, but it wasn’t until we got Kaia that I understood better how rich the planet is: full of creatures of all sizes that have individuality and curiosity, that play and give affection and feel pain and are irreplaceable, just like us. If Kaia dies, I’ll be heartbroken. There is also a heartbreak for all the other, Kaia-like wild creatures disappearing quickly from our world. I believe dying is a natural thing, for us, and for all the other living beings in this planet, it’s the unnatural part that gets me, the size and velocity of the killing, the mass extinctions in the oceans and the forests and the jungles. The chickens and the pigs living their whole lives in tiny cages without sunlight, overfed and full of hormones, their value measured only in pounds and squeezed with brutal efficiency. We got lucky living in this planet among so many other sentient beings. We got to exist among incalculable complexity and beauty. It feels good to come home to Kaia. He always comes to the door. When something scares him, he hides behind Jason’s legs with a gesture I recognize in little children and in myself when I was little. It feels good to protect him. I also want to protect the other, nameless animals and what is left of their world, which is our world. I want to make good on the faith of the young parents with young children and I want those toddlers to enjoy their planet just as much as I have been able to enjoy mine. The devastation is so swift and powerful, and the timelines are now so urgent and closing on us so quickly that just recycling and being a vegetarian, while corporations keep on plowing through, is a form of climate change denial. We are left with this impossible task because if we want to save the world (and it's the whole world on the line) we can’t just change ourselves, we have to change the world (a tired thing to say, yes, and a difficult thing to do, also). And while I write this Kaia probably sleeps and when he does you can pet him and he will stretch his front legs and purr in his sleep, and the squirrels are fat and happy and multiplying and the luscious leaves of summer tremble on the trees, and the world still exists.

Nostalgia

I wrote a while ago (in Spanish) that some emotions are domestic, while other emotions are wild. It’s not a matter of intensity, it’s a matter of whether you can let the emotions loose in a room and still survive them. I wrote back then that nostalgia belongs to the category of wild emotions. It’s a tiger. I wrote back then that the way to survive a wild emotion is to keep it in a carefully locked cage. You put a dam around the water or else you are drowned, and a wave crushes all your bones. From time to time the tiger gets out, the levee breaks, and everything is blue and salty and rainy for a while. And for a while, the people, the places you miss, are also very beautiful, with the kind of beauty that breaks your heart.

That kind of beauty is a form of truth, revealed to us by our love for somewhere, or someone. The streets of Montreal or Barcelona are pretty, to me, but the streets of Mexico, the memory of them, could make me cry. Because I don’t know Montreal’s truth, and I don’t love Montreal, but I know Mexico, and little corners of Mexico also know me, and I understand their beauty, and that beauty was mine, and it colored my memories, so it colors who I am. There’s the plain street in the working-class neighborhood where my mom lives, for example. There is nothing pretty about the houses, which were built without an architect and painted in a pale pink, or a bright green, not because it was a good design decision, but because it was someone’s favorite color. There’s the beauty of painting your house your favorite color, regardless of whether the color looks “good”, or “matches” anything. There’s the beauty in all the little official and unofficial commerce, that grows wild and without permits or regulations. Every other house offers something you may buy. It may be just a cardboard box filled with cheap candy, for the kids in the neighborhood. If you know the street, you get all kinds of food treasures: every day after 6 pm for example and only during the elotes season(I must call them elotes because they have nothing to do with the yellow sweet things people in Canada call “corn”), you can go to a specific house on the street, and buy an elote covered with crema, cheese and salsa valentina. There’s the beauty in the deliciousness of that treat. There’s the bigger beauty in the ability of Mexicans to invent ways to survive, which is the reason why working class neighborhoods are filled with people selling handmade tortillas, peeled mangos on a stick, offering haircuts, mending your old dresses, your old shoes. In a different street, in Morelia, around 7 pm you can go into a house through the metal door of a garage and get freshly baked sweet bread (its better to say in Spanish: pan dulce), and bolillos. I have no words to describe the beauty of a freshly baked bolillo, still warm. There’s the beauty of the hand painted signs for the little neighborhood stores, usually named after a person you love (a mom, a daughter), “Abarrotes Jaqueline”, “Tortillería Esmeralda”, but there are also more specific names like “La goma loca (the crazy eraser)” for a store that sells school supplies. There’s the beauty of the rickety sounds of rickety trucks that go round and round selling things, buying things. In a world overwhelmed by technology and sophistication and social media and smartphones,  I feel hopeful witnessing the stubborn anachronism of these trucks, using the scratchy recording of a song to sell their fruit, their bread,  or the recording of a child reciting metal appliances you may have in your house, and they may buy. The world is moving fast on someone else’s big agendas, so I find comfort in the old worlds that resist, the worlds that belong just to the people in a neighborhood. There’s the constant sound of children playing, moving across the street like a murmuration of birds, chasing a ball, chasing each other. There´s the beauty of the mountains beyond the flat roofs and water tanks and electric wires, that bloom in a sudden green once the rain season starts. There´s the beauty in the way everything everywhere turns green, as soon as the rain season starts, and there’s the smell of dust finally tamed by the rain. This is a modest, unoriginal street, like a million others in Mexico, not even very old, or very quaint. But I know its beauty, and that beauty breaks my heart when my nostalgia escapes the cage. I write about this street I miss, instead of the people I miss, because I don’t want to get too sad.

To write about the people without aching too much I must go about them indirectly. Describe my mom’s chicken soup, instead of my mom, the mountain my dad climbs every morning, instead of my dad, the way the world looks from the roof of the house where my sister lives and where we can sit and drink sweet nescafé in hot milk, instead of my sister. To love someone who is far away demands a degree of sadness. You must make your peace with the sadness, somehow, which is like making peace with a tiger.

The world is always many worlds, depending on your mood, your history, because the world is partially a creation of each beholder’s eyes. For some people the streets of Montreal or Barcelona are as beautiful as the streets of Mexico are to me, and the beauty of those other cities escapes me because it’s beyond my history and out of my depth. I knew only the surface of Montreal, while I know the heart and the soul of Mexico, or some of its many hearts, some of its many souls, the ones that nurtured me, and were (are) truly mine. Nostalgia is tough but it reveals a kind of beauty that maybe is lost on the ones who don’t have to miss people, or a place. Distance doesn’t make these places or people blurry; it makes them crisp, filled with detail and clarity. Our brain polishes the colors, the smells, the temperature of the air, the way things look in the morning, in the afternoon, when it rains, when it’s cold, when the sun burns the back of our necks at noon, the slight slant in someone’s walk, the rhythm and changes in their voice when they are worried, when they are happy. Our nostalgia works like a magnifying glass over the places and the people we miss, and, infused as they are already by our love for them, we see them under a romantic light. They may never be as beautiful as they are to us, looking at them through a forced distance and our sore heart. We don’t have time to get frustrated by the problems and the dangers and the ugly parts of the places we miss, so we are constantly overwhelmed just by their beauty, the same way we are swept away by the beauty of an unpolluted dream.

Out into the world

My dad used to call the kitchen table, “the projects’ table”, because I would go on and on about things I wanted to do (and was temporarily certain I would do). The ideas and enthusiasm would eventually fizzle out, but they would be immediately replaced by new ideas and new enthusiasms. Nothing got done. It was all an exercise in dreaming, which is why my dad would smile listening to me and say, whether or not we were sitting in the kitchen, “this is another one for the projects’ table”, and we both knew that table was a black hole that took ideas in and never let them back out as something real or concrete. During my university years, I had a different “projects table”, this time shared with Haydee, a very dear friend of mine. We were going to take secondhand clothes and de-construct them and put them together in new ways and turn them into something cool and sell them. I don’t think we ever finished a single piece of clothing, but we dreamt and made plans with honest eagerness. I was going to sell screen printed t-shirts, I even got a secondhand small printing table that was forever abandoned in the back of a closet and never used. What I lack in discipline I make up in imagination, which means I live in the “projects’ table”, and I am, in my heart of hearts, a dreamer. Dreaming is the curse and consequence of a big imagination, and my imagination has always run deeper and wider than my life.

I’m good with hard deadlines and thrive within structures already built for me, but the problem is when I’m left in the wild to my own devices. Still, somehow, without going about them in a straight line, but through slower, meandering lines, I have managed to do things, finish things, imagine projects and then actually work on them, and it feels good. Sometimes the triumphs are very small and still, they feel worthy of celebration. Sometimes the triumph is just finishing a couple of drawings, started long ago and then abandoned, and then rescued from the limbo of the “projects table” and brought back to life and out into the world.

Traveling

The text below is a translation into English of something I wrote in Spanish last fall.

A single tree is never just one tree but a multitude of trees. Specially in the north, where seasons bring multiple violent changes. During the fall, a tree is a different tree from one week to the next, from one day to the next depending on the light and the colours of the sky, from one minute to the next depending of the wind. I come as often as I can to this park, and I see the trees change ceaselessly. A week ago, a group of almost naked and very tall trees, with just some yellow delicate leaves at the top, started moving back and forward pushed by a single wave of wind. There was enough silence to hear the air passing through the leaves, looking at the leaves moving softly against the sky. I wanted to take a video, but a loud group of young people passed near me and then the wind stopped. The leaves were still, and those were now different trees. Trees are a multitude of moments that end, start, and end again. My dad goes out for a walk on the same mountain every morning. He knows too that the mountain is a multitude of mountains, during the rainy season, or the dry season, under the January skies, or among October’s flowers, before sunrise under the light of the moon, or under the stars. If you can go back often to the same piece of the world, you learn that you can travel on the same spot, through time, and that a forest is a multitude of forests, just as the sky is a multitude of skies.

I write this on a bench, in a grey afternoon. It’s the end of the fall (the fall is also a multitude of falls). This one now, near the end of October, is a lot more monochromatic and the trees show their bones and the leaves still standing are almost all variations of copper. It’s cold and I write in a hurry because after a while my fingers start to hurt out of the pockets in my jacket. Its 5:30 and the sun will be gone in 40 minutes, but the sky is so full of clouds that all seems right now to be sinking in a sort of twilight. And against this twilight shine bright, almost fluorescent, the yellow patches of trees that tremble, irreplaceable, just for today, and just for me, in this moment.

Love/Marriage

By marriage I don’t mean the legal contract that usually starts with a white dress and a shiny ceremony. By marriage I mean if there’s a leak in the sink, you both have to deal with it, same as one’s insomnia or depression, same as late bills and debt, or the thrill of spending a bit of savings. I believe what I call marriage exists whether you’re officially married or not. I call it marriage, here, but I just mean the closeness of people who get hit the same ways, at the same time, by the constant waves of the world, and look at their bare, naked selves, under a light that is sometimes poetic and soft, and sometimes raw. When I say raw I mean someone else knows all your shadows, and there’s no distance or careful filter to disguise them, and you know the other person the same way, darkness and all, and you love the other person and their beauty, but at times you don’t like the other person, and you make a conscious decision to accept them and by that I mean you decide to accept it all.

There are things about my husband nobody else knows and it makes me happy that I get to know them. Specially the tiniest of things, the weird little things. I like confirming with him and being reassured no one else knows. He is full of disarming gestures, a myriad of them, so he disarms me, all the time. I can be bursting with anger and he’ll do unknowingly something disarming, and I’ll feel myself melting, right away. It’s a superpower of his, that he doesn’t know he has, over me. I could list all the many disarming gestures and describe the weird little hidden things, but I won’t, because it’s delicious, to me, to be the only one who knows. It took time to know him the way I know him. What I call a marriage doesn’t immediately start with love, it’s built in all its depth over time. After years of being together, there’s a separate language for the two of us, noises that have meaning without being words, inside jokes never fully told and immediately understood (I’ll write here, just for him: cook, where’s my lunch, where’s my dinner? and you’ll be puzzled but he’ll know what I mean). The language of married people has many shortcuts, much is communicated by a word or a phrase or a look with no context, the context is unnecessary and unspoken, is part of your memory and your muscle memory but you need a history together, first.

Intimacy has clear boundaries and is for the people inside, not to be shared with the people outside of it. Maybe that’s why we all see others’ public relationships and marriages as smooth. We get the Instagram version of a marriage and get the glowing tributes to the spouse and nobody says openly how difficult it all can be. I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about it, because it would betray intimacy, and intimacy can only be built, from person to person, but can’t be shared the way we share something like a post, in a blog.

You marry more than the person you marry: you marry all the years they were alive before they met you, their memories, their family history, the shadow of old generations. You marry entire oceans of time. You marry a brain chemistry that can be a great or a lousy match for your own brain chemistry. You marry the things subconsciously learned through childhood, the beautiful things and the ugly things. You marry the way the world has knocked the other person and the ways they learned to navigate the punches so they could survive. And they marry you, and marry your own long crooked history, too.

If we’re complicated humans, with complicated stories and families, it’s safe to assume we have complicated marriages as well. I’m sure that there are many people out there who are perfectly healthy and balanced and marry other people who are also perfectly healthy and balanced and are perfectly matched in every way, so perhaps their marriages are on the inside just as smooth as they look on the outside. I believe, however, that it’s okay to have a marriage that’s not entirely smooth.

My favorite love story is the “Before” movie trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight). It captures the magic of connecting, which is the core of love. The first two movies are about love but not about marriage (most romantic movies are about love, and not marriage, which is more prickly and less rosy). The first two movies are about the moments when you sink into another person like into a dream, and then the romance of dreaming about those moments, refusing to let them go. A single night in Vienna, a couple of hours through the streets of Paris, even filled as they are with great long conversations, are not big enough units of time, and the shadow of the conflicts between these two people is easily overwhelmed by the miracle of their connection; a connection between two who start to know each other, but don’t have time to know each other well (darkness and all). I like that the storytellers were brave enough to show us not only the love, but the marriage, in the third movie. Jesse and Celine are both healthy and balanced people who seem indeed perfectly matched for each other and yet, don’t have a perfect, smooth marriage. Love can exist just as a dream. Marriage is weighted down by reality. It’s heavier than love, more solid and substantial.

When I was in High School I was very shy and very much in love with a classmate I never had the courage to approach, who always had other girlfriends, and to whom I was a sort of silent shadowy presence just out of the corner of his eye. It was all very pathetic (for me) and very intense nonetheless. My feelings were real but the anchor for the feelings was invented. That love was a city I imagined with precision and detail, made of air, not a single solid brick in it, not a solitary person walking those streets, except for me. I never got to really know him, so I loved the dream of him, a set of detailed fantasies about him. I have no clue if the dream was similar to the real person but I don’t think they had that much in common in the end. And yet, the feelings were powerful and caused me pain and kept me awake. Love can also be a solitary journey, that involves the other person just as an image, like a landscape or a painting or a piece of music, a person seems full of poetry for a moment, or a group of moments, and it can be enough to sustain a distant, dream-like love, and even a violent, intense love.

Marriage can be painful too, it also keeps me awake, sometimes, but I can’t wave it away or daydream an easier dream because its embroiled with all my days and nights, my weeks and months, my plans and memory, past, present, future, space, brain and heart. It’s a city, a world, made of real stones and skin and blood and bones.

My husband and I are not a perfect match. I’ll give you one example. I’m an introvert. I’m no longer as shy as I used to be, but I crave my loneliness, and often need spaces where I can be left alone. I find restoration and a necessary peace in those spaces and I can’t really be well or function, without them. My husband could not be more of an extrovert if he tried. He craves other people and other people’s company and attention, and he can’t really be well, or function, without them. Nothing has meaning unless he can share it, so he often walks into the room where I am to read me the thing he is reading or make me watch the T.V. show he is watching. I love that about him, I love that he needs to share things with me, but I don’t like having to choose between my need to be left alone and his need to be paid attention to, so we irritate each other, and constantly misread each other’s intentions. Even as I write this, I’ve stopped multiple times so my husband could tell me about the similarities between Irish and Caribbean cultures, the meaning of a great punk song’s lyrics, the cruel reception Justin Timberlake got during the S.A.R.S. rock concert in the early 2000’s (accompanied by a photo of a very sad looking Justin on stage) and how Keith Richards intervened to scold the crowd, at some point. I want nothing but to keep on writing and he wants nothing but to keep on sharing more stories with me. I hear him talk and my eyes go back to the page and the keyboard trying to finish a thought left hanging, so he has to double check I’m not tuning him out and makes me repeat what he just said, and sometimes I was listening and sometimes I wasn’t and I fail the test. I would be better matched with someone who was less of an extrovert, someone who could enjoy quiet spaces from time to time, the way I do, to replenish ourselves and organize our thoughts and return to each other renewed and restored. He would be better matched with someone who was less of an introvert, someone who didn’t need to be left alone sometimes and didn’t make him feel those times like an interruption, and someone who didn’t retreat back into her head so he didn’t have to test if she listened. So what do you do? What if this extroverted man had also a way of being that never made you feel self-conscious, or judged, and you got to be, perhaps for the first time with a romantic partner, entirely yourself? What if the way he sees the world was not moved by material things and a public image but the simple ordinary beauty of it all, and came home to tell you about a scene on the sidewalk, the behavior of a pigeon, or a child, the sudden blooming of a tree, or a great random conversation with a random person in the store where he works? What if he was a disarming combination of toughness and childlike awe? What if he was always himself, never concerned with a manufactured image or a display of status or the performance of success? What if he was kind, and consistently loved by those who know him, and universally liked by corner store clerks and neighbors and casual acquaintances, and what if he was universally liked by casual acquaintances not the way we are usually liked, exchanging pleasantries and politeness with each other, but getting free servings of food from the places where he buys lunch and getting organic, genuine exchanges and laughter from all the people in our building? What if he had soft, delicious skin, and delicious lips? And could cook delicious, spicy meals? What if he could always make you laugh?

I’m still giving you the Instagram version of our harmonies and disharmonies. We have deeper conflicts, bigger storms, that are protected by the walls of intimacy and can’t be shared in a blog. I like that our love has fought through the storms and is still breathing. Our love hasn’t been easy. But if I had to choose a word for love I wouldn’t want “easy”, I’d rather choose “strong”, and I’d choose “joyful”, too. Laughter can sustain love much better than a placid lack of conflict, if you ask me.

We’ve been married for more than 10 years (no children, one cat). I’m certain that marriage can be a deep expression of love. I’m also certain that love and marriage can exist independently. I find even, that sometimes, you need to reshape the boundaries of marriage, shake and move what marriage means, so love can be saved in the end. I believe love is often made better by marriage (not the legal contract which can be there, or not,  but the intimacy, the shared secret language and inside jokes, and the decision to accept the full, weighty reality of another imperfect human being). But love at times can be strained by marriage, and even killed by marriage, and may need from time to time a space to breath. You can reshape the boundaries of marriage, put things in pause for a while, let it constrain and then expand again. If love dies, it just dies, and there’s nothing left to do after that. It’s love, not marriage, that needs to be fought for, and saved.

And if this love, which has been like a fire burning the side of a mountain, becomes one day a single ember resisting the wind, and then the ember dies, and love dies, we’ll be brave and honest enough to step away, from our love, and our marriage. We choose each other freely, still, because we don’t want a future without each other, yet. Love keeps on breathing and burning and, among a myriad of other gestures, my husband can still disarm me with his smile.

Sister

I was born in October and she was born the following year, in November. Family lore says I wasn’t happy and pushed my baby sister from the top of a dresser once, scratched her face another time. Family lore also says she used to comfort the people carrying her in their arms: a baby or a toddler doing to the adults the gentle thing adults had done to her, she would tap their back and make soothing sounds (“ah-ah-ah-ah”). My first memory of the two of us is also my first memory: we walk holding hands into the orchard of walnut trees at the back of the house where we lived. My parents were renting the house, and it had this orchard which belonged to the landlord, so we weren’t allowed to take any nuts from the trees, only nuts that had fallen on the ground. My sister and I used to go and collect the fallen nuts in a little basket. In my memory the trees are enormous and there are no clouds, but the light is a form of rain, partially blurring the leaves. Young workers sit on the branches and one of them shouts “the girls are here, shake the trees so they get more nuts!”. The memory is especially clear the moment the branches start to move. I remember the sound made by the trees moving all at once: the sound of a fast river, or a million insects, the sound of their millions of wings, and I remember how the trees moved, pushed back and forward, while the grass and our clothes, in the windless morning, didn’t move at all. The memory stops there. I don’t remember picking the nuts, or eating them. I remember walking with the tiny hand of my sister clutching my hand, and I remember the light, the beauty of the trees and the workers, making sure we got more nuts for our basket. I don’t think I have many memories of my early childhood where I’m alone, my sister is with me in all of them. Another memory: we no longer live in Chihuahua, we live in Patzcuaro, Michoacán, is very early and a mild earthquake is shaking the house. My sister and I discover that jumping on the bed is more fun if the house is also kind of jumping, so we are jumping and laughing in a red and a blue onesie (I always got the blue version, my sister always got the red version, of the dress or pajama or toy which was identical in everything else). My dad is looking at us from the bedroom door and in my memory at least he is not alarmed, or angry, maybe a little amused, and lets us jump for a few seconds before taking us outside, to be safe. We didn't know those were tremors reaching our town from the earthquake that devastated Mexico City and killed thousands of people. There is no sense of dread or tragedy in my early years. My childhood was mostly a universe imagined along with my sister. We lived in lonely streets, with no neighbors, so there were no other children in our weekends or our afternoons. Our house was modest, but the doors for the garage at the end of the patio were big so we pretended those were the doors of our castle; we were princesses of course and, since we didn’t have the rest of the building, all our dramas happened at the palace’s gates.  My dad’s old, green VW beetle was our spaceship, we sat inside the parked car for hours, visiting planets in other galaxies, managing to come across alien princes or human warriors in all of them. We pretended to camp in the jungle and played Jorge Reyes records while dancing around imaginary fires in the living room (with the doors closed, so no one could see). We pretended we knew how to speak English and had long conversations in made up sounds we couldn’t understand but felt good in our mouths. We had our own version of wrestling matches,  we decided each match should start with solemn bows and a made up chant (three long bows, singing “saaaalaam”) then we had to pin our opponent for ten seconds, if you win three times in a row you are champion of the world, if you win ten times in a row you are champion of the universe, and the game was called “salami” (because of the chant), and invariably things would devolve into some form of violence and we made each other cry.  

My dad wished for a couple of sons, or at least a single son, and got two dainty girls instead, not even remotely athletic. He remained hopeful for a while and got us a basketball, then a football, then a volleyball, and took us to the yard to play but we could never throw or catch, and the balls were quickly abandoned in a closet. He took us walking in the forest and this we kept doing with him for a very long time.  My mom got us watercolor sets and taught us to paint.

Everything in this world is random and unjust. The biggest miracle, the best lucky break of all, was this childhood, with the small hand of my sister constantly in my hand.

How much of who we are is decided when we are little? Everything happened along with my sister back then: whatever made me curious, whatever seemed scary, or beautiful, my dreams, the delicious pain of gasping for air when you can’t stop laughing, my temper tantrums and all of my weeping, every time I was caught in a lie, or was found after escaping the house, every time I was punished, made to stand in silence facing the wall, everything that seemed wonderful, like a trip to the movies in Morelia once or twice a year and then, a visit to a big supermarket where you could maybe, maybe not, get a new toy, and a meal in a pizza restaurant (Royal Pizza), or more often, a stop at the “tortas” stand close to the train station, where my sister and I always ordered a fried wieners torta and never something else. We both clung to my mom’s hands and were tiny appendices flying along her very long skirt, one girl on the right, the other girl on the left. We both tried to keep pace along the towering figure of my dad, so tall, with his very long steps, who would sometimes hold your hand and sometimes not, and we both found ourselves once or twice looking up and realizing in panic we had been following the wrong adult down the street.

We didn’t have a separate bedroom, or even a separate bed. There was no need really, for any distance between us. The quiet breath of the other would help us along to fall sleep.

We used to be very similar. My grandma and even my mom had trouble distinguishing between our voices on the phone. I would sometimes be stopped in the middle of the street in Patzcuaro by a stranger who had confused me with my sister. Sometimes the stranger would talk for a while before realizing I was a different person. We had similar tastes in art, in music, and movies (still do). We were constantly in each other’s dreams (still are, sometimes).

And yet, I don’t have her gregariousness, and I’m often shy. She always had a natural talent for drawing and painting and her hand moved easy; I like drawing too, but I do it painfully and all my childhood art, next to hers, looked a little stiff. She is an amazing public speaker and I tend to panic in front of an audience. She got the feminine figure of my mom, and I got the long and boyish silhouette of my father. She was born with a full head of hair and I was born entirely bald, and her hair continued to be fuller and thicker for the rest of our lives.

 Out of all the qualities she has, and I don’t, I like her resolve in chaotic moments the best. When we were kids a big rat got inside our house. I locked myself in the kitchen and cried, suddenly sad about the rat dying. My sister and father killed it and I was upset, but also relieved that someone else had gone through the tough business of killing it (a business I secretly needed, since my empathy for the rat wasn't big enough to let it live in our house). My sister was immediately there in the action, chasing the rat with a broom or a stick. I forgot to say: she is more elegant, and her hair is always perfect (while mine is curly and unruly), but when a crisis comes running in the form of a rodent or anything else, she is always steady and unfussed. I am the one locked in the kitchen while she is the one chasing the rat.

Some years later our dog had to get a shot of medicine for some urgent reason. He was a lovely mutt picked from the street (like all our pets), a big and strong mix of Dalmatian and Doberman. His name was Joe. He was scared and didn’t let anyone near him, in his panic he tried to bite someone, the vet or maybe my mom. The vet didn't dare to try anymore. My sister took the syringe and a deep breath, a breath like the one you take before plunging in water, or doctors take before cutting the skin with a scalpel, the breath right before facing what needs to be faced; a gesture I’ve seen in her frequently, and seems to me uniquely hers. She approached Joe and gave him the needle with a firm hand and enormous self-possession, while I stayed somewhere in the back, marveled. I’ve seen that self-possession in moments of emergency many times, and many times I felt like the little sister, although I’m the older one.

For college, I went to Mexico City and my sister stayed in Morelia. Looking back, I did a lot of the going away, and she did a lot of the staying, and the kilometers between us got longer and longer, different cities in high school, different states in college, different countries now.

During my university years in Mexico City sometimes my sister would visit me for a few weeks. I rented a room the size of a bathroom with a cot barely wide enough to fit a skinny person who doesn't move at all but somehow, we would sleep there together. We spent all our free time at the movies, we would watch up to 3 movies in a single evening, chasing the best titles over different theatres in different neighborhoods. We didn’t know what a luxury it was to hang out for entire weeks, so freely, because we didn’t know we would soon be very busy, each one consumed by the schedules and problems of her own life.

Our childhood created an interwoven set of memories for the two of us, so close together in age (so close together in time), in our lonely streets, without neighbors. Over the years we accumulated different memories, became more and more our own distinct selves. She remained religious, like my mom. I became agnostic, like my dad. She was an excellent Biology student (graduated with honors) that went on to have almost immediately a brilliant career in Diffusion of Science. I changed majors constantly, lived my life in zig zag patterns. I perfected the art of leaving while she perfected the art of staying. I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed more, or if she’d left more, to go with me where I was going. If we had been able to live more of our adult lives the same way we lived our childhood, tightly close to one another, inventing together the games we played, inventing together the worlds for those games.

It’s inevitable to inhabit in the end your own world, a world you build by yourself. But even now, living so far from each other, divided by thousands of miles and a couple of national borders, when I see a good landscape or a beautiful building or dance anything worth dancing, I ache for my sister the way an amputee aches for a limb because her hand still feels like a natural extension of my hand.