The black mountains of Oaxaca

How beautiful were the black mountains of Oaxaca

In November

Hidden by night and surrounded entirely by desert. I felt that there was no world outside the desert. No ocean or Antarctica or China, just desert and the cities of Mexico ahead

What died and was buried in those mountains of ash

What names, what souls

Folded gently into those crooked rocks

Cold as bone

What secrets I keep from my lover

I look over at him and he looks at the road, intent on driving on the highway, it’s faster than he’s accustomed to. He is tense, his face his chest his hands, he is cold too.

He seems like a stranger to me. Everyone is a stranger to me here, even the people I know, the people I remember. It’s my birthday, he bought me dinner. I’m thinking about someone else. He knows what it means when I’m quiet. But because it’s my birthday he sings for me: piensa en mi, llora por mi, no llora por el.

It’s moments like these I wake up. There was a memory here, so ancient, so old. I am the same as those Oaxaca mountains. I am a soul folded many times over. I remember lives that were sacrificed in the name of love.

I met my lover again

I sacrificed him again

And maybe I will again in the next life

Maybe a part of me will become cynical and cold, because in this life I burned too much. I couldn’t control my anger.

The road seems just a strange and dark and wandering and meaningless path

The unfulfilled dreams of men stretch out across eternity, they burn for me and I burn too, for something else entirely

My lover is a violent man. He reinvented himself: kanaan-kak. All those ‘ka’ sounds sound like the sharp teeth of dogs.

I don’t mind saying this story a hundred times. I find it beautiful and fascinating. In my mind we are so much friendlier now than before. So many years passed, so much lessons have been learned. A long time ago, his name was Nakome. I have good and bad memories with him. He is like picking up pieces of glass mirror, always confusing but interesting and complicated in a cool way, sometimes in a unbearable way.

But the other one, I can’t bear to speak about. When it comes to him my mouth and heart and mind shuts down as if I was dead and buried. Not because I am unhappy, but because I simply can’t. I don’t know how. Because I shouldn’t, I just shouldn’t. He’s always dead when I reach for him and yet always refusing to die when I walk away. He says things to my soul that I need to hear, that my body doesn’t understand. My mind doesn’t understand.

They tell me to write my own story. That I have power. These people are idiots. Something brought me here and something forces me to leave. Nothing is chosen. The people did not choose to suffer for the past five hundred years. 

I am so frustrated. I came back for him and lost him again. I pretend I don’t know why but it’s obvious, it’s always been obvious, I never wanted to believe it. Between us is the brokenness of the entire world, the suffering of all the people, the poverty, the violence, which he refuses to renounce for me. He is consumed by it to the point where he no longer exists. What killed him in the first place. I can hear him without words. What does western psychiatry understand about the things I’ve seen in my life, on these streets, in these uncertain walls? And I know he is right. I do not see because I do not wish to see. 

It is not something that can be fixed with any amount of reaching for each other. It would take a world between us to solve.