Resist

Unsustainable Distance

I want to write being me. I don’t want to say a word being “that person”. I can’t, I shouldn’t; the pain is greater than my conscience which pretends to hold everything in. Including creating a space for the mystery with the hope that this is real- which is why I end up writing this. I feel as if i cannot write in between the lines. I prefer for the interpretive tone to find shape and meaning to all this which at first was written to be read by me, not to fall in an endless dialectal game.

I hurts not being close. Being so far, now more than ever. Instead of feeling relieved for being away, I feel sad and vulnerable.  The daily agnosia has allowed us to live in a country, a planet which makes us reassess the meaning of things in order to remind us we’re alive. In portuguese the word “Acordei” means to awaken and that is what happens to me when I wake up away from my country: I remember how far away I am, in another place, and that soon it will be one of my family members birthday’s or that Mexico is 7 hours behind and my friends are barely going to bed. This reality is stronger than others. This is what my dreams are made of, juggling on top of a board where my brothers placed me, yet there comes a time where i can no longer keep remembering that dream. Where that puff of smoke suffocates me, contaminating the chemical synapses and I realize where I am:  far away from where I was born, trying not to see the death toll of each day.

I never thought there would be a relationship between distance and pain. I now see the growing anguish the further away i feel.  The more I remember what I’ve lived the closer I am to myself and my foot trembles in search of words. Even if I was seeing the street where i used to play football as a child or asleep on the bus on my way back from school at 3 o’clock, or having cynical, innocent conversations, laughing with my friends or holding hands with other children during recess in kindergarden, now I feel further away than ever. Age does its thing, as does my memory, which chooses what’s worth.  My memories give me nostalgia of instances that left me and that constantly remind me who I was. Yet this patrimony never really disappears : It becomes my identity in the end. Why is it then the person I am today demands space, a place next to what has given me an opportunity to be? Why is it when I see so much violence I feel as if its perpetrated my memories or my identity, or me. Each death seems to have stolen the freedom of my memory, against the horizon where its been headed from the beginning.

Nevertheless I’m still gazing at a photograph that never existed of a terracotta rooftop of the house where my father was born, in Tierra Caliente, Michoacan. Huetamos its called.  Behind the last church tower, there were clouds carrying frogs that would plummet to the ground all around the town. There were caymans in the Balsas River and we would have orange juice for breakfast in the town market next to a street stand selling iguanas. My grandfather, a doctor, had a pharmacy.  Sometimes I can still smell the tamales with bars of raw brown sugar wrapped in banana leafs all of us “Huachitos” used to eat them. That’s how they refer to children there.

There was a small tree that grew in between the cracks on my grandmothers rooftop. It might still be there.  it was tree that never offered shade, perhaps because there was nothing to provide shade to. I feel as if only a few of us saw that tree, maybe two or three people. I can draw it from memory and i can still loose myself in the microscopic fauna that inhabited it just like we used to do it when we were four years old.

I would like to find something within that memory, a solution, a phrase, an image, a sound, to find a way to change things. If I find it I’m not sure I’ll be able to explain it.

But there is something I can explain: Freedom is the personal search for a common good.

At least that search makes me feel free and i don’t want to stray from that path.