Dispatches: A big kiss
This is what I hate about happy children.
When I leave my sister’s house in DC, they ask my nephew if he wants to hug me goodbye. “A kiss,” he says. I’m pleased. I reach to hold him in my arms and he plants a huge kiss right on my lips. I move very carefully. I won’t make him feel as though there’s something wrong with an innocent expression of love. But this is what I hate about happy children—their love, their freedom in giving it. My sister has done everything right, but I came into her house twisted. Perhaps it’s for the best that I’m leaving.
The trip back to Mexico is, if possible, even worse than the one in. I got the flu and Covid vaccinations right before I left and the effects start hitting me as we land in San Salvador. Shivering, wincing past a sore throat, I wrap myself in blankets and drag myself onto the connecting flight to Mexico City. Isma is picking me up, but it’s his first time driving to the airport, and he gets lost for an hour while I stand by the pick-up lane, light-headed with exhaustion and mRNA-induced illness. Still, being back with him is always a joy. We drive to our old neighborhood in Coyoacan and eat empanadas. He pees beside a bush while I’m buying the food and when I get back to the car an enraged shop owner is suggesting in his sing-song Chilango accent that he get Isma some toilet paper if he needs to go again. Isma shouts a reply in his best Chilango (“Cámara, amigo!”) and we book it out of there, laughing.
I chose Mexico City, perhaps my first real choice of a home as an adult free from abuse. I love its dirty streets, its accents, its food—though after three years of living in Oaxaca, it’s everything but Mexican food that I miss about it (seriously, Mexico City tortillas are terrible). I made friends and music here. I fooled around and then I fell in love and then I learned to build something with the person I loved.
I enjoy coming back to the city, but it’s different now, because we chose to leave and it is clear to me that I can’t come back, not to live permanently. Sometimes you slip from one stage of your life into another so quietly you’re not sure where the boundary line was. In my case, though, I suppose that the boundary was pretty clearly marked: Covid-19 pandemic, 2020. I had a novel coming out—then my whole tour got canceled, the city shut down, and Isma and I started fighting like prize cocks in a bloody pen. The apartment was too small for two paranoid artists who never left, and no one knew how contagious the virus was or who to believe. I was an early adopter of isolation, which certainly made it harder (though safer). Our perfect apartment became a cage; its minor defects—the lack of light, the cramped kitchen, the amateur electrical circuitry—were amplified into nightmares. We had to get out. So we found a trucker who had shipped papayas in from the coast and didn’t have a load for his return. We got our stuff strapped down in the back amid dried papaya pulp, I sat on the driver’s bed while Isma sat up front, and off we went, down the coast of Oaxaca, to a new home.
I haven’t regretted it, though life here is so different and strange that I feel as though I’ve stepped through the back of the wardrobe, into the the looking-glass, fallen beneath the clear surface of a lake. I always did want to travel to another world. Abject confusion and feelings of extreme displacement were always going to be part of that price.
Isn’t it funny, though, how in modern novels the ones who go into the other world always end up becoming princes and warriors and witches and saving everyone from ruin? I can hardly tie a knot; a couple of ant bites make my foot swell like a berry; I still can’t speak the language—no one is going to be nominating me for street-sweeper, let alone long-lost princess. In this portal story, I build my house and I have my dogs. I shake big yellow spiders from my underwear because you should never kill spiders if you can avoid it—the old stories say so, and I believe them now. When the earth rumbles, I listen. I am blessed, but I am no more special than anyone else in this land of my adoptive home.
But Mexico City, my first land beyond the looking-glass. It feels like a relief after DC, this former federal district that does not bear down upon me with memories and the ghosts of obligations that I have rejected. Isma and I eat orange-flavored pan de muerto, my favorite. We drink milkshakes. I don’t enjoy it as much as I could because as soon as the effects of the vaccine wear off, the effects of my niece and nephew’s colds hit me like a lead blanket (Covid test negative). I have to do a 24-hour urine study, which let me tell you is an awkward thing to ask your friends who have been kind of enough to let you crash on their couch. For a day, I am a little gremlin in their hearth, storing a jug of urine in their fridge and blowing my nose until I’m sure I must be dehydrated from so much snot production. In fact, I’ve peed enough to make the jug uncomfortably heavy on the metro the next morning. We buy breakfast before our descent into the earth: one perfect Mexico City tamal de rajas sandwiched between a hunk of toasty white bread. (Did I say that Mexico City food was bad? The guajolota is a delicacy for the ages.) Overcrowded metro, urine in a jug, and tortas de tamal: what could be more Chilango than that?
I start to remember who I am. DC pulls away from me in layers; I let myself go soft. There’s a reason why I fled thousands of miles south of the border. Physical distance is no substitute for the emotional work, but it sure does help. Whoever I am in this place, in this language, I am not the one who suffered back there. This is what I have to remember about my niece and nephew: that place hasn’t haunted them and our shared mother tongue hasn’t drawn blood. They love because that’s all they’ve known. It’s taken me so much time and work, but Mexico City was where I started to learn how to make a real home for myself. I kissed it on the lips and I let go of the shame.
Hello fabulous friends and subscribers! This is the second free post of the month. I am writing this on Día de Muertos here in Mexico, so here is a preview of next week’s newsletter:
That’s the altar Isma made for our home. More pictures and the whole story for paid subscribers only next week, so if you were on the fence…
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