The Art of Healing, Pt. II
L was changed after Mexico.
Something about the shitty cell reception allowed her own vibration to increase. It warmed her and rose to a dull hum in her ears.
Damn, Mexico was loud. Music was everywhere; love songs blaring from the shops in El Centro and on mindless repeat in every restaurant; Spanish classics blurted from an ancient trumpet by a leathery man with round cheeks. Sound followed you with every footstep, mixing the heavy breeze from the Gulf with the constant weight of diesel and dust.
It was intoxicating.
Simple pleasures; Tecaté beers with notes with amber, not thin and heartless like their American counterparts. A cheap bottle of mezcal to swing around your new group of friends. Thick tobacco on the tongue of a cat call: “Ah! Que linda…”
I raised my light green eyes to meet his in mutual acknowledgement. Yes, I am woman, you are man, and in the natural order of things, we would…
It was all so palpably out in the open. No need to hide your small, swelling frame. This is not the place for modesty. You, here, on rapturous display and in full force. You must give everything it is that you’ve got because the world around is unforgiving. And tomorrow is a distant place.
Nothing made sense but night.
The days were long, and nights came suddenly. When the moon is out, one must find a place to dance. Warmed with tequila, L roamed the streets, fumbling through Spanish like someone trying to see in the dark; feeling for familiar words, stubbing a toe trying to conjugate a verb in past tense.
No, she was bound to speak only in the present.
But on the lips of others – oh, the delicious intercourse of oral expression. It was a Spanish L had never heard before – soft, round words sagging with sweat. She heard it for days after returning, that Spanish tongue. It was everywhere. Coming from the mouths of Asian undergrads, Middle Eastern deli clerks and WASPY stroller pushers in Back Bay. She even tried to respond to a waiter in kind. He looked puzzled and continued in English.
Of course the Spanish hadn’t followed L back to Boston. She was hearing things. Her ear had momentarily been trained to a different tune, a deeper tune, and had to now readjust to the harsh nasal assertions of downtown Boston.
Maybe it all only felt like paradise because she left; or could leave, unlike so many there. I suppose even Utopia darkens when one is confined. Having settled back into her routine, she had to ask herself, had Mexico even happened? If not for the sunburnt skin and stream of photos, she’d have thought not.
Sometimes, to move on, you have to actually move. Move through space. Move across the surface of the Earth. Move physically elsewhere. Move your body. Make it sweat. Make it taste new food; new people; the salt water of a new sea.
Make it learn a new fucking language.
