notdeflectingmischief

[notdeflectingmischief]

Two weeks ago I was at Jemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakech and Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria” appeared in my head:

When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone.

I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away.

If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out “I am an orphan.”

And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

It must have been over half my lifetime ago that I first encountered my poem. It came to me in its entirety while I sat on the outskirts of the square, watching some boys balance an empty water bottle upside-down on the cap of another empty water bottle and use that as a goal for soccer. There were circles of people, and steady low drumming, and glowing orb toys that someone kept throwing into the air so that it lit up the sky very briefly before falling back to Earth and no doubt being sold to a tourist. The orange juice vendors I purchased from, though I’d been so stridently warned about food poisoning, and so nervous about my upcoming international flight, that I didn’t dare try the street food. Sadder things, too, filled the square, like the snake charmers and the monkeys with chains around their necks.

When that poem came to me, it turned out I had misremembered it. I had thought the last line was “and here I am, at the center of all beauty,” not that the speaker was declaring himself the center of all beauty. There’s a hubris to claiming yourself as the center instead of at the margins or simply another sharp, shining point in the constellation. Still, the melodrama appeals—the center of all beauty, at a time when we are constantly told to center everything but ourselves. Wherever you go, there you are, and if you’re beautiful, won’t you always bring that beauty with you?

It’s irritating when people talk too much about their love of travel and make travel a synonym for curiosity and discovery when some of the least interesting and most incurious people I know love to tick countries off a checklist. Travel is curiosity on easy mode—of course it’s simple to be curious when there is novelty; it would be challenging not to be changed. In recent years, as I’ve started traveling more and more, I find the most illuminating part not necessarily the novelty itself but the clarification and sharpening of what I actually like: bike tours more than museums, the Hagia Sofia more than European architecture, that day floating in the Aegean off the coast of Turkey with a friend I’d met ten years ago who was getting married half a lifetime away. Traveling becomes more enjoyable when I consider it an evacuation of discernment and aesthetics rather than an act that demands awe and wonder; focus too much on the latter and my eyes grow tired and defended; I become tired because I know that you want me to gape. I become the child who retreats, who played in the schoolyard all alone, who hates dolls and games and hates everything that they feel is foisted onto them and supposed to make them happy.

In the square, I didn’t need to gape. I seemed to fragment then and for a moment, thinking of the O’Hara poem, watching those glowing toys, hearing the heartbeat of the drum, it felt like I was speaking to myself from long ago. In particular I spoke to the girl who made a list of countries she’d like to visit, a list I’ve since lost but I’m sure included many of the places I’ve been to, and most than likely, Morocco itself. And I thought: you never trusted me, ever ever ever, at every moment you thought that I couldn’t give you what you wanted, but didn’t I take you here, in the end?

[notdeflectingmischief]

Mexico City is famous for its taco trucks, but what I didn’t expect were the little candy shacks on every corner, similar to the ones in New York City, except instead of Skittles and Trident gum they had Carlos V Chocolate and Pelon and a particular sweet that used to be very familiar, back when I lived only 17 miles from the Mexican border: de la Rosas.

de la Rosas, small and circular, made of a crumbly beige marzipan-and-peanut paste and wrapped in clear cellophane with a single red rose on the front, were sold by the general store underneath the campus newspaper office. I could use my student account instead of cash or credit to pay at that store, and so would buy and eat them during those marathon 12-hour days spent in production. I can see myself now, sitting at one of the low tables, dissatisfied with everything I was editing. I’d have been wearing large glasses whose frames were decorated with intricate, curving vines of light green and gold. Strangers always complimented me on and then I’d immediately reveal that the glasses were fake, purchased at a thrift store, and that in fact I wore them over the contacts I actually did need. I’d have been surrounded by any combination of the following: de la Rosa wrappers, tangerine peels perfuming the air around me, cups of rice pudding with cinnamon also from a store on campus where I could use my student account, an empty bowl of Shin Ramen (black packaging, the spicy shrimp flavor) and at least two empty bags of Skittles (original or occasionally sour, but never the tropical berry flavors).

I don’t eat like that anymore, though I can’t say I eat much better. But just as I can conjure up that image so easily, so can those who were there at the time. Hobie still brings me Skittles as a treat; for my birthday this year, Ruda gave me a bucket-sized bag and I noted that it was the 10-year anniversary of when she had given me a bag of that exact size because she had lost a bet.

I don’t live in that town 17 miles from the Mexican border anymore, and the last time I had de la Rosas was at least nine years ago, when Margaret still lived in New York and we would go to a since-moved taco place on St. Marks that had an enormous California flag and 50-cent de la Rosas at the cash register. It’s not that the sweets are impossible to find here, but rather that they slipped out of my consciousness and patterns of habit the same way other things, including those fake glasses, did.

In Mexico City, they were accessible again, and I was with Margaret and Jane, both of whom had known me since college, and I kept buying and eating them. I ate them partly because of the pure pleasure of their “excesivo calories” and the way the paste immediately broke in my mouth and coated my tongue, but also partly to play a role. No, I was not going to buy a box to take back to NYC with me. Finding them was part of the fun. “Keep your eyes peeled for de la Rosas,” I’d say each time we left the hotel and each time we started walking back toward the hotel. Finding them, and eating them in company, in front of others who understood its symbolism, made me slip into an old self, creating a sense of continuity over these 14 years, even if the role reinforced a version of myself that I no longer am and that I can’t and won’t carry back across the border.

***

A few years ago, Arina told me that she associated me with rice pudding. This startled me and I felt the beginnings of a sense of restlessness, a desire to update her vision of who I was into someone who at least occasionally ate a vegetable. When telling Allison this story, I asked her if there was something she had once been known for that was no longer part of her life. Allison apparently used to make a lot of risotto and I have never connected her to risotto once in the near-decade we’ve been friends.

What is that restlessness that I felt with Arina? I think it is the desire for accuracy, for the ones I love to see me as I am now rather than as I was then, but underneath that is a motor of something darker, something like shame. I don’t mind continuity, as long as there is that update. I can’t look at anything I made even a few months ago and so I don’t want to remember who I was two presidents ago, not because the food habits were so stomach-destroying, but because why make all this effort to become better if you’ll be trapped in memory as a worse version?

***

Margaret and Jane insisted on buying me a coin purse decorated with a de la Rosa insignia. At first I insisted that I don’t use coin purses, but they reminded me that I could use it for storing my earrings when traveling, and putting them in there is of course more elegant than throwing them in a half-closed Ziplock bag. “I’m so glad you bought this for me,” I texted them yesterday after I returned home from Mexico City. I like looking at it. It reminds me of this weekend but it also reminds me of that worse version who ate the “gigante marzipan” all the time.

Arina liked that worse version. M and A and R and H liked that worse version and they like the version now. That worse version—which to me is any version more than two weeks ago—has never lacked for friends. It’s always been I who disavowed her the most.