And yet, I have landed. I try not to think about what I have come here to do. It’s an old trick: some decisions, however necessary, must be left to the edges of your thoughts until you have already jumped; then, they can be grieved.
I think of Mexico instead—evening downpours, the morning trash bell, atole and tamales for breakfast, the old sun, the burning eye. But everyone else wants to get off the plane; my past pushes me forward. It’s different every time I go back, but this feeling of being two in one, a snake required at regular intervals to slide back into a dry and raspy skin—this is the same.
It is—a kind of—home.
* * *
I was nineteen years old, about to go on my third date with an older man. He had convinced me to give him my email address at a political rally that I was covering for my university newspaper. He had said, “Do you want to have your most interesting interview of the night?” I was feeling both overwhelmed and beautiful. He was too old for me, thirty-six, but I told myself I didn’t care. At least he was interesting. He had a kind of totalizing presence that comforted me with its familiarity, even though I halfheartedly bit back. The grooves were already there; his genius had just been to find them and make himself at home. We went to the restaurants that he wanted, listened to the seventies bands that he liked, and he lectured me on the big-name leaders of the US political left that had been neglected in my Washington DC private school education: Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Eric Foner, Howard Zinn. A bunch of white men, but when I called him on it, he said, reprovingly, that no white man was more anti-racist than he was. Didn’t he love black women?
That afternoon, before the older man picked me up from in front of my dorm, my mother called me.
“I just wanted you to know that your father has decided to leave E—.”
“What do you mean, leave? As in, he no longer believes in our religion?”
“He’s had a series of revelations. And he’s decided that while it has many good elements, it isn’t the true path.”
“So, he just, what, raised us to believe in this not-true path for the last nineteen years, and now he’s like, whoops, my mistake? Was he planning to tell me this?”
“I’m sure your father wants to talk to you about his next steps. He is using his spiritual tools to create a new path.”
“He’s starting his own religion?”
“It isn’t a religion. It’s a spiritual path to higher consciousness.”
I must have said something. I must have said goodbye. The words of my childhood had softened and then rotted in my mouth. I had been struggling with my faith for the last year; I had left the holy book on my shelf where it seemed to glow with the toxic shame of my inadequacy, of my obstinate need to judge its contents and find them not just unbelievable, but offensive. Dad had told me that I was just too spiritually underdeveloped, that the brilliance of the text would make itself clear to me as I surrendered myself to God and our spiritual leader.
The god and spiritual leader that he had apparently decided were a big lie about two weeks ago. Only now had my mother bothered to tell me. Dad had been the highest-ranking Spiritual Aide in the region when we were growing up. He would wake us up at five in the morning every weekday for prayer services before school. He would criticize our spiritual development, our inability to fully practice the doctrine.
I told the older man on our date. I made it a joke. “Can you believe that my mom called just to casually inform me that my dad left his cult—the one he raised us in—to found his own? So, I guess I’ve lost my religion?”
He told me that he was agnostic. I liked the sound of that. I didn’t want to hear another word about my spiritual goddamn development for the rest of my life, I decided it that very night. We went to some East Village concert, in some bar where they ought to have ID’d me but the older man convinced the bouncer I had left mine behind. He was charming, practiced, persuasive in his conviction to get whatever he wanted. It was a familiar dynamic, but more pleasant: what he wanted was to show me his world. As long as it was nothing like my own, I would take it, hold it until my hands bled and I forgot why I clung so tightly in the first place. I knew only that I had to hold on, or I would have to face myself, a kind of death.
* * *
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.