Category: Life

Mientes mucho

My mind often returns to August of last year, to that beach in Kamakura. I remember it was mid-afternoon. I was sitting alone on the cold sand, feeling time within me like an organ of my body, like a second heart, heated, and fast. That entire day I had been alone, on autopilot, but there, by the the ocean, I found myself shifting back into a realer, more organic state, and I thought of my life, how it had developed into this foreign animal I knew to belong to me, but did not recognize, nor control, a life powered by something other than me, something more innocent and magnetic, and free.

Life possesses its own momentum, I think, a type of gravity generated by the soul. Like the survival instinct, but more human, more mundane too; less about danger and more about memory, and desire, and the muscular, spiritual pull in the body that comes with the existence of beauty, the appearance of pain. I don’t always feel it but when I do its effect is tidal, and immediate, like an electric current. I think of that instance, a few years ago, in Washington D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Memorial airport, waiting in a shuttle bus on the tarmac wet with rain, and pausing, suddenly, to think: I’m living. I’m here, and I’m alive. It was a forceful, and tender, and gently, momentarily paralyzing thought, like passing by a garden for the millionth time and noticing, for the very first time, the row of tiny flowers lining the path.

There’s a difficult, intractable, callous, evergreen part of me that my mother often calls my “nature.” I love, and require, this solidity but I wish I could change the angle of it, give it substance instead of just density. I wish I could carry resilience like a physical object. I wish I could swing it like a sledgehammer.

I think a lot about my character, how it sees, and reflects, and pursues the world. I think a lot about possibility, and emotion, and owning up to my bullshit. I think a lot about how for years I dejectedly but willingly described myself as a neurotic girl, and then a neurotic woman, just because my father called me that once. I think a lot about what it means to judge, to separate, to reject, to forgive, to value, to cherish, and how love intersects with these, individually, and in a sequence, and all at once.

Instances of peace are close to my soul. They slow time down, prolong my life for just a few more seconds, and the pretenses of calculation — how to be, and say, and act, and to what degree — which have so sustained my identity slip away, and I am not afraid, for once, of excess, or hesitation. I return to the beach at Kamakura, alone, entirely responsible for my own life. No need for excuses; no need for lies. I go through my photographs of the trip, the snapshots of white-petaled flowers with rosette cores, the plain and dignified mountainside vistas, the gray roads, their subtle, gold-toned luminosity in the summer evening. I go through images of the sea, its mirada vidriosa (“glassy stare”) and of my face, which some have called “heart-shaped,” on those impulsive, rare instances that I turned the camera around to capture my tired but smiling expression, framed by iron and blue.

松 / 待つ

I take the night train from Narita to Umejima. I sit in the second of three seats facing a window, knees together, my head resting against the backpack in my lap. Every so often I check its pockets, confirming that I still carry three items: a square passport, a cantaloupe orange debit card, and the tiny notebook containing the only photograph I have of my parents together. Though cold to the touch, the weight of the photograph is familiar and comforting, like a nebulous, gentle memory of childhood not yet rendered bitter by time.

The woman next to me sleeps; occasionally her cheek falls against my shoulder, like a honeybee settling on a flower. The vertex of her summer’s evening has bent and met with mine, and her face is so meaningless but will remain in my memory like the smell of brine. Though I travel — and live, to a certain extent — alone, her touch on me is close, immediate, and dolefully, doggedly human.

Rilke said, once: Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

It has always been easy, and enjoyable, to be painfully, perversely hard on myself. I have pined for men who would not love me, and women who could not; for a release from shame, and a return to it; for thorny roses, phone calls, cool midnights, total respect, physical power, emotional intimacy. And I know it is wrong, to beat myself up over what I do not have, but I don’t know how to avoid, or correct, or suppress these feelings, which are half-man and half-beast, and which follow me even when I have left the labyrinth.

Maybe I am at my best when I am by myself. It doesn’t matter if I am a good person or just a good liar — there is no one to impress. I make it from point A to point B and point C; I feel proud of small accomplishments like counting out exact change in Japanese yen, or crossing the street in the dark, or noticing the beauty of a whole, red moon, partially obscured by apartment blocks.

On the train, the sensory hearts of the world are sliced away; no taste, no fragrance here. I don’t feel much of anything beyond the eternal, neutral desire to live, to complete a journey to its natural end. When I see my reflection in the window opposite me, the gentleness it rouses in my breast is both narcissism and pride, in my soft and tame face, which which may not be beautiful but is mine, in my alertness in an illusory world of ghosts, in my independence, which was not easily won. I am thousands of miles away from anyone who knows my name. I feel unknown, and tender, and pure, like nude, luminous snow. The world is easy, translucent, cooked down to its tendons; I am a twelve-ribbed twenty-year-old who treasures her life, whose soul is trembling, cracking, and spilling, like egg yolk.

The colored leaves / Have hidden the paths / On the autumn mountain. / How can I find my girl, / Wandering on ways I do not know?

The clouds rise off the mountains like smoke. Crows sit on telephone wires; they open their wings like Aphrodite scarring the foam. I walk through the neighborhood, in the yellow heat before the typhoon, in my sweaty tee, in running shoes trembling like orange blossoms.

Rivers travel from canyon to ocean, belly-up and boneless, in the receding bitterness of spring. They are loyal, constant; but when they arrive at the coast, at the lion’s mane ultramarine waves, do they hesitate, as I have? Do they ever think — no — I want to go back, I want —

Heaven help us. We move forward.

My mother is like a falcon lost in private flight. “Es que no hay pozo más grande,” she, in tears, said to me. “There is no deeper well.” Too much of her body is underwater. Too much of her body feels what her mind denies. It’s because of love; isn’t it all? It’s the fault of the lament, honor, and debt of love. I want to prove to her that she is worthwhile without love, that I could live forever without it, its delicate almond-shaped leaves falling, its direction as clear as exhaust ascending. I won’t be manipulated by love. I won’t be dragged by it.

When it rains here, the trains and the trees move like prophets chosen by brown-eyed angels; like their souls are crystalline, and pure, honeyed, and unafraid. I want to know that same gentle, complete peace — but I’m still distracted, by new days, new desires, their shapes when they settle inside me, round and heavy as peaches, their smell dissolving into the air, pulling me out of sleep like Athena bursting through the pate.

My body, twenty years old, can sit still, be quiet when supposed to, polite, good; but it doesn’t know how to hold my mother in its arms. My body, twenty years old, knows it’s time to go. Goodbye — no — I want to go back — I want — oh, heaven. Help me. Look at this body of mine, this river reaching the ocean and thinking of the gorge where it was born, look at me, in the middle of the fire, holding to my mother. Look at these, the wounds of intimacy; I don’t cry anymore, but God, how they still stink like oil, how they cling like anchors. In time, I know, I will grow accustomed to this. Repetition, I know, is the only real cure for suffering. Repetition, I know. Repetition, I know.

The clouds rise off the mountains like smoke. Crows sit on telephone wires; they open their wings like Aphrodite scarring the foam. I walk through the neighborhood, in the yellow heat before the typhoon, in my sweaty tee, in running shoes trembling like orange blossoms.

Fuera menos penado si no fuera

1. SAGRADO: The storms here fill me with a blend of exhilaration and fear that crystallizes heavy and clammy over my thoughts, resting on my heart like unfamiliar cities, or unattainable love. But the air inside Briana’s car is warm, and I feel so safe, as though I am being taken by the hand and led through the delicate, gentle motions of a dance. Her minivan chugs steady and unfailing towards a horizon of ash, along the highway into the darkening apex of an evening saturated in slate and violet, and clouds move through the sky like seawater over calves, and subdued, languid rain falls, and falls, and falls.

2. SANGRIENTO: Pain is a place, and it has my mother’s eyes.  The air hums low, and the tunnels are aglow, lined with round neon lights like fragrant yellow roses.

3. SACIADO: I am sitting sandwiched in the backseat of a mustard sedan; the roads are lined first with a carmine and currant sunset, and then a viscous, starless night. The Bulgarian lily, the shadow in the water, the ache in my belly, the hour between, the low blow I, in an inevitable moment of weakness, have forgiven — in other words, the woman I love — she sits beside me. I want to take her by the shoulders. I want to put the world away, or at least reduce it until it exists only as an inchoate blur of roseate and saffron hair, framed in the dark by the passing of golden sodium vapor lamps and tricolor headlights. I want to tell her I’ve been asking God for someone like her ever since the dove left the ship for the shore.

El rayo que no cesa

Spring blooms in my stomach like infatuation, decadent, heady, and fatuous. Spring makes the tips of my fingers tremble like newborn roses. Spring dribbles down my chin in milk-warm, orange-pink stripes; it fills me up like cream soda, like honey. Soft, smooth, so sweet, overripe, dissolved in blood, sweat, in floral oils: Spring leaves stains on the front of my blouse, on my sheets, on the doorknob to my bedroom.

Spring is a season of love. Love: what does an aflame Persephone, stripping wheat for grain, cracking mussel for pearl, what does she do when breaking hearts? What does a bitter Artemis, skinning boar for meat, killing boy for pride, what does she do when breaking hearts? I am weaker and uglier than any Grecian girl but look at me, at the red on my hands, down my chest, where I have crushed and regrown, crushed and regrown my own heart, again, again — you cannot tell me I am not more bloodied than they.

March is a month of assassination in a season of love and you look like gold and almond liquor, you look like the knife, thumb pressed to the blunt edge, peeling a navel orange over a white kitchen counter. Even the evening, with its eyes and mouth of butter yellow, its touchable hipbones of violet and orange, cannot compare. I start with spring, goddesses, dream, March, lilies, birds, and now you; I find that there are many, many reasons to love. My mother and brother, their tender, green-golden voices like roses opening in the morning. Spring spreading like light through a room. A heart. My writing, the closest I’ll get to seeing my own soul, swelling, bleeding like a stuck pig, blending with the saltwater, the flowers, the perfume of your flaxen hair.

Love: I am the glutton God could not account for, and I dream of love like a wave approaches the shore. Dreams: cast in marble and moonlit blue, a nighttime poison, a nighttime blossom, enclosing the hint of fragrance in clothes, bodies, lips, that hint of fragrance that must always accompany love.

Many reasons to love but —

There is an ache in my body wide as the moon and old as angels, sweetened by spring, bared by your face, your warmth. It is called please. Please.

Spring’s sun is mute, and the oceans still and cool to the touch; but when I stand under and beside them, my fear held in my bare arms like a bouquet of trembling lilies, the wells in my heart fill with the first rains of the year and the birds of prey come down to the water, and fold their wings, and lower their heads to drink.

— you are the only reason.

WHAT KIND OF PERSON

What kind of atom string, wrapped around what kind of carbon core, what kind of beating brain and nebulous heart, what kind of moral code, what kind of mantelpiece photograph, what kind of flower in the desert, what kind of desert in flower, what kind of person are you?

I’m the kind that can’t be taken anywhere, not with all the tankfuls of gas, not with all the love letters. I should have been a vegetable garden, this life, drinking in sugars from the soil; instead I am the kind that won’t call her mother back, the kind of Persephone that has to teach herself to love pomegranate. This life, I should have been a tankful, a letter, siphoned out and measured, sent somewhere; instead I am the kind that keeps her eyes open, and hides her burning hands.

You’re just a nasty person, he says, and I laugh and answer, easily, painlessly, did you just find that out now? What kind of promise, what kind of practice, what kind of purpose?

What kind of death, the kind that dries out, sweet-smelling, on the windowsill or the kind that is taken out back, and pressed into the surface of the river, what kind of morning in bed, what kind of alarm, those four bars of a love song, or your mother crying, what kind of kind, kindness, what kind of person are you?

I’m the kind that has been yelling come here. I’m the kind in warm clothes, at the side of the lake. I should have been the first, the second, the third; I should have been the third, the second, the first. This life, I should have been the kind of person that is a room: open the door, set down your bags, come here, come here. Instead I am the kind whose hands are still burning.

Laundry List

  1. This is my sense of self-worth: A dog in the wintertime, skinny, sitting squat on the side of a country road. A dog, alone, cold, still and wide-eyed as the snow comes down.
  2. This is my pride: An arrow, honed for hunting. An arrow, sharp, laying underneath the last layer of skin, straight, alert, at the juncture where shoulder meets heart. A hierarchy of needs, and desire is in a crown.
  3. This is my capacity for love: A stone, small, flat, entirely colorless but infinitely textured. Just touch alone, the weight and temperature of it in the valley of your hand, is enough. No eyes or mouth, no music; the line of your fingers against a stone in the dark of a windowless room.
  4. This is my self-awareness: A morning like a mirror, clear, over the fields of a careful farmer’s sunflowers. The view from the school bus, head heavy with the truth that is all pain.
  5. This is my weakness: A frame of wood made to look like gold, and a series of ill-fitting paintings of paradise.
  6. This is my courage: A wind, a coat, butter cake wrapped in tinfoil. A painting of paradise.
  7. This is my ability to adapt: An opening to the ocean, occasional rain stippling the surface, and underneath a dove-gray blue whale, mid-song.
  8. This is my ability to trust:
  9. This is my sense of self-hatred: Hitting the tar road at seventy miles per hour, hands on the wheel like guns pointed at dogs; hitting the water at eighty miles per hour. Crawling up the rocks, driving home. Getting up in the morning. Doing it again, again, again.

Fine & Crude

During the ceremony of Mahākāla, Lama spreads his fingers slowly and makes a circular motion with his hands, finishing the movement by resting the pads of his thumbs against his forefingers. I’m reminded the film I watched last year, alone in my college dorm room, about Japanese funeral rituals; I remember Daigo, the young protagonist, how he’d traced a dead man’s face, so slowly, with his palms, in a still room, before covering him with a sheet. Watching Daigo on the screen, his hands, I’d been filled with a strange, gentle sweetness in the pit of my chest. Now I feel that same sweetness in my heart, light, but physical, insistent but impersonal, and I recognize it as purest love, so small, quick, instantaneous, so close to unbearable, catching me off guard and then lingering for years after as rarefied memory in the depths of every bone. Lama’s hands, Daigo’s hands; the red, blue, green and yellow divine, the white body, under the sheet. Hands, hands; moving, circling, with that infinite and unconditional tenderness that men reserve only for their gods and their dead.

Billy puts his arm around me. It’s so dark I can’t see two feet in front of me. His car, the surrounding mountains, the sound of crickets, the stars: these things define the space around me now. I’m shaking, not so much that it’s immediately perceptible, but enough to know that I’m not prepared for this. I am neither the many-armed god nor the body with closed eyes, not angelic or animalistic, and Billy’s hand is at the base of my spine, moving up my back to the strap of my bra.

I don’t want to be touched, but I do. I don’t want to be touched, but I do. I want to be touched with reverence, with emotion. I want to be touched like I’m wound into your heart, like I’m a wound of your heart. I think about it all the time. Solid, and warm, chemical, touch like talc, touch like titanium. Hands, hands; moving, circling. A typical person goes through three-hundred-and-fifty thoughts a minute, and I’m thinking sudden rain, fingers, magic, name the closest stars, name the five kingdoms, name the boy I loved wholly once upon a time, crop rotation, touch, fluids in the brain, touch, blood, touch, touch, romantic by nature, skeptic by choice, touch. I want to be touched like none of it ever matters.

Hands, hands; moving, circling, with that infinite and unconditional tenderness that men reserve only for their gods and their dead. I am neither, and Billy’s swallowing hard, and his hand is squeezing my shoulder.

When I was a child, I went to an exhibition at a local museum that I’ve never really been able to forget. Picture this: A thick, black curtain, a dark corridor, a door that, when opened, leads to a wide, high room, so large that I cannot remember where it ended or began. The room has white walls, and it is filled with prisms, of every shape and size, hanging from the ceiling, reflecting light, producing color. I stretch out my small hands; I do not touch. I walk through it, slowly, but fast enough that the whole thing is over than less than fifteen minutes. I’m telling you this because I’m trying to distract from the truth of the matter, which is: I want to be touched, but I never wanted Billy to touch me.

Vivid, luminous, and clear

Cymbals and then a green gong, and Lama’s voice at the end of each verse is low and full; his is the sound a mountain would make, if mountains sang. The day after, at lunch, I tell him how nice it was and he smiles a little and says really? and I think of how secretive magic can be, even to its owner.

Some mornings I walk into sun, others into fog. Lama holds one of my hands between both of his own and I wonder if he sees the blessing that it lays in my heart, that umber organ growing clearer and clearer with each day. Such a simple gesture, but it’ll feed me for another year. Lama, alone in America after lifetimes in the white-crowned Himalayas with their familiar, flowering fields and faces — is he fed too?

Golden Buddha with his lapis lazuli curls, open palm turned out, facing me, facing a world. Anxiety’s ax has long been cleaved into my shoulder blade, but it has rained twice since I’ve come here and though I am no freer, I feel cleaner; underneath the ax, the silver of my blood shines, again.

SALT DIARY

Your eyes are ink; I write in black iris. Your hands are flowers; I write on black iris.

There’s a nest of swallows under the eaves (Spanish: golondrina, wings spread thin as leaves, cleaved from the woodlands and cleaned by sea air). Far-off: a cruise-liner, blurred and milky on the surface of the water. The inside of my mouth is soaked in salt, swollen like a fig.

A few years ago, I remember a storm, on this beach, in this house. I lay on the mattress, quiet as the lights went out, like one of mythology’s silky sacrificed girlies. Later, my mother called me to her, and told me to look (Spanish: mira); I remember sticking my head out the window, where she had pointed, and turning my face up. 

I will never leave you behind and I will never let you go, someone tells me in a dream, with such a blend of effortless tenderness and thespian heroism that I can feel that sugary, fibrous love on me, on my body, for weeks after. I wonder if I’ve resigned myself to living like this: conjuring up warm but invisible lovers and other false idols, breathing the sweetness of their rose and amber touch and lips, always the miel (English: honey) rather than the hielo (English: ice).

Even when I lived across this ocean, across the full flesh of these waters, my old heart still could not help but struggle to keep you down. You, with your ultramarine torso and fingers, of all my possible ghosts. The eyes and hands I write with and on; they are your hands and eyes. Though I may, and I will, leave, the shape of you will never be displaced, only rearranged. That’s the last tragedy of first love: it is solid and tactile, infinite, exquisite, but angled so I know that it never loses its teeth.