Dispatches from Mexico, Part Two (or, “Some Beautiful Kind of Circle”)
I found a batch of letters my grandma wrote to me a long time ago, when she was alive. She wrote with a shaky hand. She had five years left. Nobody knew it then. You never know it until there’s something to know. That’s the cruelty of it all. That’s the joy of it all, too.
I look down at that unsteady cursive on the page between my fingers, think of Grandma at a kitchen table, sunlight streaming down on her and out from her. The words stumbling across the paper tell me quotidian things from those quotidian times. Then the wobbly words say, I think of you every day. I stop, I think of her thinking of me. That’s some beautiful kind of circle.
Las Vegas, Nevada; December 2021
I’m in Oaxaca, Mexico as October cusps over into November, and on that one night out of the year marigold petals lead the dead back home. On that one night out of the year, the city is afire with life, laughter, painted skeleton faces, colorful streamers, carnival chaos crowds, the shouts of children. Invisible music washes down the streets and alleys, out open windows, through the hairs on the back of your neck. It’s funny how you celebrate the dead by living. You celebrate them out of the ground and out of the sky. That’s some beautiful kind of circle.
Some people think the past is gone, but those people don’t know anything. The past is always hanging around. This thought strikes me in the desert outside Vegas in that darkest sinkhole of night, the one that opens up the instant before dawn. I can’t sleep, I’m walking through the scrub and damp desert dirt, just far enough from the city lights that it seems the dogged darkness is pulling starlight back from the brink of extinction. That ancient light from a star that birthed it a million years ago. The past blazing down all around us. Grandma’s quivery cursive, hanging around. I absently run a hand through my own graying hair, something sweeps out of the ground or out of the sky, through the hair on the back of my neck. I think of you every day. I walk toward the place where I have faith the sun is going to rise. That’s some beautiful kind of circle.
