He’d come here as a young man with a woman he thought he might marry. Or, he’d thought he would marry her some years before, when they had been together in Mexico City. She was a poet, too, flighty and dark haired. All the boys loved her. She read and the room swayed. He watched her from afar for a few months, and then one night he took her for coffee. They began sleeping together. In the dark her body was like a streak of moonlight reflected on a moving stream. They went to readings together, and they read poems together, and he thought, after a few months, that he was going to marry her, and that his life would be like this forever. It wasn’t that he was naïve, he doesn’t think. He was an optimist, eternally, even in such a forsaken country, even amongst such diminished and cynical crowds.

One spring afternoon she told him that she needed to be on her own. That she loved him and that she would continue to see him and sleep with him and read poetry to him but that she needed to be on her own. “So what changes?” he asked. She shrugged. “So we’re just changing the definition,” he said, “all we’re changing is that we’re no longer together, by definition, even though, by action, nothing changes.” Again, she shrugged.

He thought: ok. I can handle this.

He was wrong. Apparently definitions are everything, even to a progressive, enlightened man like himself. Even poets with deep azure eyes and good jaw lines need the superficial reassurance of words. Even he needed the illusion of feeling like he was the only man, in the entire world, that she could love (which, reasonable as he was, he knew wasn’t actually true; but still, what a nice thing to think).

So they saw one another less, but the conversations were still beautiful. The sex was still passionate. Literally nothing had changed. Except the definition. “What’s different?” he asked her one evening over coffee. It was an outdoors café, a table under an awning that was held aloft by elaborate, latticed steel work. “I think about you less when we’re apart. There’s not a hole in my stomach anymore when I go three days without seeing you.” He thought about this. “That’s called moderation,” he finally said, “it’s what happens.” She sipped her coffee as if nothing was wrong. “Is it?”

There was a hole in his stomach, but he couldn’t decide if it was from missing her, or if it was from feeling like someone who had once loved him no longer loved him. The two things, he had to remind himself, were distinctly different.

Eventually, he couldn’t handle the new definition of things. He had to stop seeing her. So he went to France for a year, where he wrote dreary poems and smoked a lot of cigarettes and slept with women who were too skinny. That whole year seems unreal to him, now. Like a brief interlude in a dream. Or, not even an interlude, but something intimated in a dream, a presence or feeling in a dream, something that is never more than a shadow. A whole year of his life feels like that, now.

So it was, he came back to Mexico City and re-engaged with his old life, which had changed imperceptibly. Some of his friends were now in jail or had taken careers that forced them to give up writing poetry, or forced them to write less poetry (which really isn’t all that different from writing no poetry). He was now amongst the older crowd at the cafes. Everything seemed strangely in shambles to him, but like he was the only person who noticed that things were in shambles. Like everyone else thought these dilapidated circumstances weren’t dilapidated at all.

She’d gone to Buenos Aires with a man, a lesser poet than he was, a less attractive man than he was. “To do what?” he asked the friend who told him. “How the fuck should I know? Probably to smoke and to drink and to dance and to fuck. What do people normally do together?” the friend said.

Six months later she was back and he’d begun teaching a class at the University and was dating the woman he would actually marry. One night they went out for wine and then, on a whim, he took her to the flower market and they walked amongst the hundreds of stalls selling flowers and they drank wine from paper cups.

Two weeks later, then, he drove with her into the mountains, and to this town. It was less of a tourist trap then. There weren’t any Americans. The café menus weren’t printed in English then. The artist colonies were still adobe shanties with no air conditioning and only rudimentary tools. The artists weren’t making a living off their art back then. There was no money in it.

“Your new poetry is very good,” she told him. So what? he thought. What does that matter at all? The artists in the village made beautiful pottery and beautiful amber jewelry. So what?

They ate dinner on a terrace overlooking the valley of scrub and low, desert trees. They watched the mountains change color. Night fell and they went dancing. It was hot, she was sweating profusely, their hands kept slipping apart, they were drunk and then very drunk, and they were laughing, and he thought about the time in his life when he’d thought he would marry her, and it made him unaccountably, deeply sad that he knew, now, that he would not marry her, and that this simple fact - really just of definition - prevented him from being able to fully enjoy dancing with her, and instead imbued the whole evening with an impenetrable patina of sorrow and loss. And he thought that if only he were not such a literal man he could appreciate dancing with her despite knowing full well that there would come a time in their lives when they would both dance with other people.

They made love on their small, hard bed, and he cried, and he sobbed, and he was ashamed but there was nothing he could do to stop it, so he just kept crying. She held him and kissed his forehead, but what could she possibly say? She wasn’t embarrassed for him. She didn’t think less of him. She just felt pity that some people became so attached to things.

The problem, he thought, many years later, while walking in his garden, is that what he loved most about her - her fluidity, her independence, her honesty, her anti-institutional beliefs - also made it impossible for her to lie to him in the firm, solid way his heart needed.

It explained, he decided, why he was so afraid of death, and why she wasn’t.

For her, it was always a question of ownership.