X,

The nostalgia here is overwhelming me, but I suspect you might appreciate it. I feel that this whole place exists, already, in memory. What I mean is, all these people come here with their cameras and their expectations, with their ritual procession from ride to ride, never lingering to savor anything, always moving from one experience to the next simply for the sake of owning that experience, so that someday, they can look back and say they’ve done Disney, etc. It’s like this place functions as a sort of present-memory, if that makes any sense to you. It’s like you can see these people showing off the pictures, looking back on them and romanticizing this idyllic period of filial unity and joy even as they’re taking the pictures. It’s the synergy of the memory and the moment. It freaks me out, to be honest. It’s creating memories that never actually happened because they were too busy manipulating the future appearance of the moment. I fear I’m losing my train of thought here, X. You were always better at directness, I always drift into the abstract.

These fucking people, X. They’re immense and they move in herds like livestock or something. Sometimes I’ll look up and I’ll see a phalanx of people coming right for me, and I’m honestly terrified I’m about to be trampled. They move with a goddamned purpose. Again, it’s that whole memory-moment synthesis. They’ve got to maximize their time, build as accurate a facsimile of experience as they can. You need to see it with your own eyes, X.

I’m suffering a serious bout of displacement. I feel like I’m existing on this border between two places, between here and between home. I hear about home sometimes in the news, and it’s never good. And yet it makes me miss the place terribly. It makes me feel like somehow I’ve failed all of you and failed myself, because I’m not there to endure all of this. I know a lot of people here who feel the same way, that they’re deserters. We’re grateful, of course, grateful but wracked with guilt. We have no homes anymore, most of us here. But for the few of us from San Rafael, it’s worse. I’ll sit in bed and yearn for the festival of Guadalupe, for the girls with their flowers and for the sound of the whole city singing. I’ll yearn for how I saw the craft market when I was a girl, back when it seemed like such a mystical place, almost like anything could happen there, lost amongst the withered old Indians and the acres of blankets. It was like visiting a dream, and it’s so different from how I feel about the craft market now, how we all feel, how cheap and sad it seems. It’s difficult to reconcile how I felt as a girl with how I feel now, because I have two distinct memories of the place. I don’t think I’ll ever feel that same kind of wonder and awe again, and that overwhelms me with sadness. I see that same joy in some of the kids here, and for a few moments it makes me not hate the place.

Do you remember the night we all went dancing at that place in Casa del Perro Azul? The night when Tomas paid off the bartender and the band to keep the place open until dawn? It was one of those mercilessly hot nights, the band was playing in their boxers by the end of the night, clothes were scattered all over the place. I remember looking at our table, and there were shoes thrown messily everywhere, jackets and hats and shirts, stockings and earrings, empty bottles, packs of cigarettes everywhere. It was so beautifully, so perfectly, chaotic. And then we walked home as the sky came to life, all of us singing and still drinking, smoking cigarettes and laughing. I remember seeing you and Tomas walking ahead of everyone, arms around each other’s shoulders, your heads resting together, making a toast to poetry, and to the pursuit of beauty, and you were both laughing like wonderful madmen, waking up all the houses we walked past so that the women came outside to watch us. You carried me the last kilometer on your back because I had such horrible blisters. I was seventeen then, X, and Tomas was alive, and you were still writing such lovely poetry, and the city was still a place where you could laugh and sing.

It’s strange to think we were once younger than we are now, and will soon be older, and then much older, that we’ll never move through our city like that, so young and in love with what lies invisibly ahead, laughing and singing and smoking cigarettes into the dawn.

I haven’t had a cigarette since I’ve been here. I miss home even though it is falling apart. I yearn for it as much as I yearn for anything. I don’t think any of the people here, those that are running from ride to ride, grimly taking photos, knows anything about San Rafael, or could even imaging that I am from there. What could it mean to them?

I miss dancing with you, X. I hope you’re safe. I send all of my love to you.


~


X,

There are days I get so lonely here that I don’t know how I’m ever going to feel anything else again. I don’t know how I’ll ever feel joy or pain. I look at my life and fear that there will only ever be this awful, all encompassing loneliness. I ask myself how life can be any other way. We are so alone out here, in a world we cannot begin to understand. Stranded between two voids, is how I think of it. We are here and someday we will all die. And I don’t know what comes then.

On these days, I look at everyone in the park, all the families and the children, and I think to myself: someday, everyone in here will die. And all their memories, all their sorrows and hopes and dreams will be wiped away as if by rain. I feel so fucking alone then, X. How can anything matter in the face of that void? What can we possibly hold onto?

I think of those afternoons when I would visit you in your apartment, your shitty, dreary apartment. I was so wide eyed when I visited, so in love with the place. It was entirely yours. I remember your mattress on the floor, your books stacked everywhere like little cities of literature. Oh, X, I was so young then, so hopelessly innocent. And you would let me sit there and try to read your books while you worked on some poem or other.

I asked you once why you wrote. Do you remember? It was such a half assed question, wasn’t it? How could you ever answer such a basic, enormous question as why you are who you are. But I asked it, and you sat for a very long time thinking. The light was so terrible in there. You had only that one, small window, and it faced north and east, so all you ever got was a frail, sad light.

Finally, you looked at me very seriously. ‘Well, I’m very lonely,’ you said. ‘I’m very afraid of dying.’ Then you thought again for a while. ‘I guess I thought that writing would save me.’ From what, I asked. From what! Such foolishness. Why did you ever take me so seriously? You smiled then, a very sad smile. ‘I don’t really know. From death, I guess, from loneliness and from fear. I guess I thought you could be saved from those things. I told myself, if you can just write a perfect sentence, or maybe a perfect poem, or even a perfect story, there’d be some salvation.’

So were you, I asked. Were you saved?

You smiled the same sad smile. ‘No. No, it doesn’t save you.’ I thought that was the end of it. I felt very close to you then. It was probably the least lonely I’ve been in my life. ‘It doesn’t save you. But when you’re in the middle of it, of writing. And I mean really in the middle of it, so that you’ve completely given yourself up to what you’re writing, there is sometimes a clearing. A forgetfulness, I guess. But it’s more than that. There’s just you and the writing, but it doesn’t come from within you. It comes from someplace mysterious and vast. I guess the only word I can use for it, really, is to call it divine. And for that minute, or five minutes, or however long it is, you feel like there’s something bigger than yourself, some immense unity that you can only glimpse obliquely or only guess at. And you forget to be lonely or afraid then.’ Your sad, beautiful smile. It’s why so many women fall for you, X. You’re so honest in your sadness. It’s heartbreaking.

‘It passes, of course,' you said. 'But you know that you can find it again. You spend all your time trying to find it again.’