I didn’t have the words to tell him the truth. I was running from my father in those ruins. I was looking at those cinderblock bones and imagining the flesh of a different kind of life. Two years later, when I met the older man, he played me some songs by Richie Havens. I became obsessed; I listened to his best-of album hundreds of times. And I wrote, from inside that older man’s world, which would never be my own, Richie Havens, late at night/ Is searching for his dolphins/ while I’m searching for my father.
There are only five hours between my old life and the new; five hours, or eighteen years. It’s time to jump.
I have come back to visit the older man one last time. My birthday is tomorrow; I am now older than he was when he first met me, a month after 9/11. I cannot imagine dating a nineteen-year-old; my whole being balks at the idea. He has been keeping the last of my things in the US in his basement. But he has a new girlfriend now, and she doesn’t like seeing these relics of me in his house. I could tell her: the house is nothing but relics, old sediment that accretes and hides the cockroaches. The books in the bathroom—entirely tiled in black—are the same ones that were there a decade ago, when I first left.
This is the last time I will leave. I have brought two friends with me. Old friends, who understand more than I have said about these sticky men in my life, my lifelong flight. Home, an automatic mantra of these days when I am overwhelmed and at sea. Home—both curse and current of deepest longing. We throw out a lifetime of dust in an hour and a half: boxes of books, written by others and written by me, old copyedited manuscripts, my first unpublished novel that I spent an entire summer editing on the older man’s couch. I learned how to write that summer. I was all alone in a sticky trap, but I was becoming, even then. The woman who got out, who found a place where she could breathe and so learned to speak—she was living inside of that girl, waiting.
I see that girl as we paw through her things, careless in our haste. The older man places himself between me and my friends, as though it is his animal nature, even now, to isolate me from any other support. “Don’t you want to keep this?” he asks, “Are you sure you want to throw this away? You can leave this here, Snoozly.”
I hate when he calls me that. I have always hated it. I took it like medicine.
I look at the stuff of this girl, most I will throw away, and some I will keep. I love her, in that moment, in a way that she could never love herself. I love her for trying. I can even understand her staying. You don’t live here anymore, I tell her, when it’s over, when I am in my friend’s car with the last of the boxes, shaking and crying, I’m taking us home.
Thursday morning, the sun has just poked its shoulders over the mountains. The burning eye is lidded, sleepy. My thesis defense is today. I’m awake. The air is dry, the cars are quiet. Beside me, my partner shifts and rests his hands in the valley between my rib cage and my hip. The garbage truck comes early; the bell peals below our window, close now and then more distant, as the man walks up and down the street. The garbage bell is the first note of the symphony of the day. Soon will come the flute of the knife sharpener, a lonely trill, a descending scale that ends on a minor note, the ghost call of Tenochtitlan’s migratory birds. Then the junk collector truck, with its iconic cry: se compra, colchones, tambores, refrigeradoras, estufas... The gas men with their deep bellows and the drum of tanks rolled over the sidewalk. The brassy tinkle of the sweet wafers and the clown-car toot of bread and pastries.
Five hundred years ago, the lake of the Basin of Mexico was a vibrant expanse, crisscrossed by aqueducts and highways and plots of land built-up over the lake bed. Canoes navigated the canals, through houses and temples and intensive farm-plots and open markets, where you could still buy tamales and atole in the morning, or pulque, or candied squash dripping with honey; bells would ring through the streets and conch shells would sing the hour and the sun, that burning eye, would stare lidless down at the world of their creation. Even then, there would have been people like me. People who escaped to Tenochtitlan, the most beautiful city in the world, to live again.
I head to the university with my friends. A few minutes before we all go into the exam room, I walk to the balcony and look out over the south of the city. The smog has lifted this morning, and the mountains are clear. I feel, as I do every time I see them, a gut punch of relief, a longing and a peace, the knowledge that I am now very far from where I was. My best friend from high school is here with me, and my partner. She who knows me where I came from and he who knows me where I am. I cannot give up that other place, but I have been learning to release my grip. I bring the girl with me when I stand in front of my committee and present the work that has been my passion for the past three years. She knows how to stand, knows how to speak in public. Her father gave her that. There is so much love in the world. We had to go far away, learn to breathe in a different language, just to
