I went to Mexico for the first time a few months before I finally broke things off with the older man. After eight years, the pressure of his presence, once so comforting in its familiarity, weighted down my very organs. I felt as though I were facedown on a glue trap. If I stayed I knew where I would end: the self-hypnotizing handmaiden to a demagogue. Agnostic white savior or latter-day black messiah did not make as much of a difference to the fundamental dynamic as I had imagined at nineteen. I went to Mexico with my sister, and I began to breathe again. We spent our days climbing ruins. We climbed the baths of Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Texcoco, who would take to the waters in the rocky hills above his mist-shrouded city and contemplate the death of all of his glory: Annochipa tlalpac. Zan achica ye nican / Tel ca chalchihuitl no xamani no teocuitlatl in tlapani no quetzalli potztequi / Annochipa tlalpac. Zan achica ye nican. (Not forever on this earth, only here for a little while/ Even jade shatters, even gold cracks, even quetzal plumes fall to pieces/ Not forever on this earth, only here for a little while)
A little stone frog squatted on the edge of one bathing pool, a worn-down stump where his face used to be. We climbed over the terraced hillside, the earth fragile and crumbly with the ash of a recent slash-and-burn. I imagined these baths the way they would have looked to Nezahualcoyotl, volcanic stone whitewashed and decorated green and blue, running with clear waters that would have reflected the thousand colors of the day and night. I imagined the farmland surrounding them, the terraced maize fields much like the ones we hiked through in our tourist’s sandals. The maize would push up from the lunar black and gray, green stalks covered with a fine down, diamond-studded in the morning fog and green as jade when the sun blinks its eye. The rains would end, and ears golden, sapphire and onyx would be struck from stalks, hung in garlands in storerooms and local temples. And those selfsame stalks, old and brown now, would fall to the earth in a great burning, to be reborn, like Quetzalcoatl, with the morning star. I did not know any of that then. I was busy dying, as it turned out, in preparation.
We would drag our dusty feet back into the city that night, eat the cheapest food we could find in La Condesa (not very cheap) and collapse in our hostel bed. Every night I was assailed by terrors. I could barely feel my body. I could barely think. I dreamed of rat mazes, endless turns and dead ends and no possible escape until I awoke, heart pounding. And yet I was cradled in the unknown speech of this place, the languages that I did not know and whose very mystery cleared my throat of words I no longer believed. Among the old bones of civilizations lost to the earth, that old skin of an ancient crocodile, the hard knot in the wet rag of what had been my heart eased just a little. I thought to myself—a voice from the other end of the wormhole, my own self screaming back in time, a signal flare—I could live here.
I was seventeen the first time I left home for a place unfamiliar to me. It rolled me over and raised my head. I did not know then what was air and what was earth, only that I longed to breathe.
My father and I traveled to Nigeria to dedicate a new temple in a coastal city. My father had been instrumental in bringing the teachings of our religion to West Africa, and when we arrived, I realized that while he had been an important person in the small cult world of Washington, DC, in Nigeria he was someone much bigger. They had photos of him everywhere. They wanted his blessing, his words. As his daughter, the holy aura extended to me, an uncomfortable, sticky glow. Dad wanted me to reflect well upon him. I was required to sing religious songs (mostly American classics tackily redone with spiritual lyrics) twice a day during the services. I met some other teens. One, Tope, was particularly fun to be around. I escaped my minder—an earnestly religious woman in her forties whom I perceived as trying far too hard to be jolly and good-natured, and who was, I am now sure, merely trying to do her job corralling a confused and rebellious American girl. I told her that I needed to use the bathroom and escaped through the window while she waited patiently outside the door. Tope and I bought ice pops from a local vendor and walked around the giant compound. The main temple was mostly finished, but the parishioners had planned a monumental complex to honor the spiritual teachings that my father had helped bring to this country. We walked among the concrete block foundations of various outbuildings, much as I would walk among the ruins of ancient temples years later in Mexico: imagining what they would be, imagining what they had been. Bones exist not of themselves but as representations of potential, past or future. They are a being reduced to its bleached essence. But it is flesh, so briefly animated, that makes those bones dance, resplendent in gold and jade. It is hope, and then death.
Tope told me that he had always dreamed of a girl like me; the girls here, he said, weren’t spiritual enough for him. I must chant my prayers every day; I
