thinkstains

[thinkstains]

a decade and change spent hurtling toward what felt like the inevitable, only to spin to a stop in the middle of another city, dazed and blinking against bursts of exhaust-tinged air. how did you  spend all these years thrashing about, feeling like you were watching someone else live your life only to come to

here, of all places

on the winding path of least resistance? no choice but to kick and scream the entire way, or risk losing yourself to the utterly known quantity  you keep almost breaking away from. this is a precarious time, a ruinous exercise in the hopes that it all gets better. you’ll believe it when you see it. but oh, 

when will you see it?

[thinkstains]

the air is fragile

i want so badly to believe in the goodness of people, but reality cuts through naivete a hot knife through  butter

i am learning these unending lessons trespassers in this malaise drenched in sunlight  and contempt

no shortcuts no panaceas just the jagged edge of seasons whirling past

and the feeble salve of time

[thinkstains]

lighter

perhaps, or just hollowing out? feeling less is a process in itself: there are no corners  to turn, only circles. leaves and petals, brittle from trials of spring and summer can only blossom for so long. after the heat and noise dissipate, it begins: a recurring lesson, the discovery of solitude.  what is lost does not leave immediately; those roots must be pried out— recklessly, if you must. creating space for new seasons to wear and shed once again.

[thinkstains]

respite

i.

recently dormant, it is blooming again. everywhere is, to be exact. wind skims skin—tentative, reticent, tender from prolonged shelter. the calloused shell of a year. cracking, bursting, flung clear into space. ii.

the high rises are shining, but the corners are desolate. quiet no longer; disquieting still. signs flipped and windows boarded; rounding the corner, there is a blanket. it’s moving. it’s someone. under the overpass, a neat little row: six tents, grey and bright blue. a whiff of cigarette smoke. a syringe.

iii.

the year was a decade, perhaps even a century, consumed by the knowledge of self. too much, bordering on fermentation. festering, at times. days stifled by speculation, nights eaten by uncertainty. surrounded by time on all sides: the past, bitter and bruising; the present, steadily metastasizing; and the future, looming omnipresent.

iv.

in these fledgling forays, everything has faded slightly.

the sun is too harsh, the wind jarring. the air is a vessel for summer blooms, days-old refuse, and the unmistakeable scent of piss. what’s liberating is also terrifying, and so you force yourself to rediscover what the hell it was you were missing.

existing is like bearing a heavy weight, and being present is noisy. you hope you’ll learn it, the lightness of carrying on. by now, the weeks and months of yearning have wilted. for friendships, like rivers subsiding into whimpers. or perhaps the brittle nostalgia of bygone closeness. regardless, it will have to be swept away.

in these disparate aftermaths, all you are left with is yourself.

[thinkstains]

a city in july

palm trees preschool pidgeon shit plastic surgery parking lots

[thinkstains]

on the gravity of a year, ii.

somehow, growth is not strong enough a word. it was more abrupt than that; sometimes violent, always unexpected. this was annexation—forced expansion. as if change was physically ripping through you at unprecedented speed, except the uncharted territory was yourself. you were the newness being discovered, except you’ve been here all along, buried somewhere by layers of misplaced longing and regret, mistakenly convinced that you were too late to a journey that had not even started. the best kind of disorienting is when you wake up and realize after all of your twenty-two and a half years of life, there’s still so much more ahead. it used to be terrifying. still is, except it’s not all-consuming, at least not anymore. with terror comes anticipation—maybe even optimism, an anxious desire to know what follows the waning year. an incomprehensibly strange year, split threefold. it began on the gulf, sprawled out across alternatively sun-scorched and rainwashed concrete, weighed down by several tons of self-consciousness and existential dread. meandered across the wilderness of west texas and into the spring snow of new mexico, and then all the way back, starry-eyed and heartsick and fit to burst with renewed hope. (and a diploma, somehow.) spent the summer marinating in the humid nothingness of the suburban midwest, eager to be free but practically flailing from loneliness. detached, isolated, hurtling into the unknown again. and then autumn came careening in. this was yet another new city: another place where you knew no one, another abrupt displacement masquerading as a fresh start. except maybe this time it actually was, bookended by legal jargon and asian-american kinship and lonely weekends and apartment-floor-gatherings. the first taste of suit-and-tie receptions, the fear of pretense and small talk tempered by half a glass of wine and the sudden warmth of self-discovery. by art museums and crowded beaches and twinkling streetlights, makeshift refuges made from shopping carts and dimly lit bus stops, stark silhouettes against the watercolor wash of sunsets and palm trees. night walks past red carpet film premieres on the way home from class, still dazed by the sheer novelty of everything still accumulating around you; the strange hollowness of a midnight walk home from the library, head swimming with contradictory pride and loneliness. a long semester of even longer phone calls to friends in disparate cities. blinding mornings in too-bright sunlight, crisp nights gripped by a deep longing for companionship, all filtered through the surreal sensation of watching your life play out in front of you. except it’s you out there, really living it, grappling with everything being thrown at you, knowing you might not get back what you give but there’s just no other way you can function and so you just go with it. you take things as they come, or you at least try.  of a sudden atypical affection, building to such a frenzy that it all came rushing out, spilling forth in an empty courtyard; the nauseous regret that followed, fearing you’d destroyed a dynamic far more precious than the romance you wanted, even though a part of you always knew it wouldn’t be with this particular subject. of the impossibly benign aftermath, where everything returned to normal, even as the entire library transformed into a war bunker, heads buried in books, preparing feverishly for the relentless torrent of deadlines and exams that would not let up until holiday lights and radio classics threatened to swallow the (snow-less) city whole. of independence and longing, fusing into a veritable, inextricable mess.   and strangely, even as exams melted night into day, weekends and weekdays converging until time became a menacing measurement of the next deadline, there was room for a little more trial and error. awkward firsts became awkward seconds, and the urgency to find something, someone—well, it dwindled. into a reluctant realization that perhaps this was all too much too soon, and even with the temptation to settle, that you physically could not. that you love yourself enough to want better, perhaps even the best, and that once you regained the energy to keep looking, you would remember to look out for you. after everything you’ve put yourself through, you at least owe yourself that. and so, on the cusp of yet another year, you log yet another entry about growth and uncertainty. about the entropy of self-discovery and the inevitability of change. things that sound overwrought but are so incredibly difficult in the moment, and so bittersweet upon later reflection. cumbersome but necessary, ever-elusive in this neverending introspection. this hasn’t nearly captured it all, but that’s the point—nothing can ever be all-encompassing. none of us are put-together enough to know everything. we weren’t built to understand ourselves perfectly, or to predict the path our lives will take, even in the near future—we don’t know how it ends, at least not now. and that’s probably for the best.

[thinkstains]

(October 3, 2014)

el tren de la muerte

inspired by “Young Carlos”, an article by Alexandra Starr from the Sept. 8 edition of New York Magazine.

i. I wanted to fly like those scarlet macaos we used to chase through the trees— instead, I jumped onto the train as fast as I could and watched as the slower ones hit the tracks, recognizing the same eyes, the same faces I had just walked with, breathed with, shattering into red and then nothing. I closed my eyes and imagined that they  had flown away, red feathers bright  against the rusty grey of railings and box cars.

el tren de la muerte, we called it. I didn’t die that day. I kept wondering later if I should have. (I should have.)

ii. the border was different. there was a quiet in the air that I had never stood under in Honduras, a quiet that simmered between tensed bodies and bated breath, a quiet that crept under my skin, wormed its way  into my head, reminded me that I had to get out— I had to keep going.

iii. when I finally did get off of the bus, the maras took all I had— the paper bills hidden beneath crumpled water bottles, a single change of clothes, the oranges I was saving for the rest of the week—everything, except the tiny tallado that my mother had pressed into my palm at the station. they were gone and I stood alone, my pockets emptied.

weeks later I stood with my forehead pressed against the dirty walls of a back room, the silence almost as heavy, as uncomfortable as it had been at the border.

for ten long seconds, I thought the gangs had gotten me at last— perhaps I would finally die over money I didn’t have, alone and so far from home.

I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable—

but it never came. all of the pressure disappeared, and down I went, tumbling onto the floor in a state of dazed relief. by some mad stroke of luck my captor had recognized my traveling companion, and I was free.

my pockets were even emptier than before, but I didn’t feel half as bad about it, then.

iv. on the day I turned seventeen I woke to see the flames rising up the side of the bridge, the silhouette of a body barely visible, smoke mixing with the pungent smell of burning flesh— my eyes watered until I was blinded by smoke and tears, tears  and smoke, choking on the dawn. and then—la migra!—came the panicked cry from my left— I didn’t even turn to see them coming. I ran until I could not, and then I walked, walked until I could not.

v. I arrived in the desert half a year after  I left Honduras, and once again, I walked. I walked until I could not, until the sand and the road and the blinding sun  exploded, melted, bent, diverged— until I could almost feel my father beside me, a hand around my shoulder, like he had always been there with my mother and I, like he had never been.

the yellow lines should have been straight. I knew this, but still they twisted, turned, distorted by the heat, the lack of water, and the images that were beginning to leak into my thoughts, winding and whirling like sand across asphalt. the wind blew towards me the smell of things long dead, things left unburied in the Arizona summer.

for a moment I thought that I, too, would be left unburied, dead or not really, in the Arizona sun.

the steady humming of the white van came twenty days in, and I welcomed it despite the menacing green band that snaked its way around its exterior.

BORDER PATROL, it read. I did not have to know English to know what that meant.

vi. I had never met mi abuela before, but here I was, at the window of a Bronx apartment, looking down at yet another city street. “you remind me of your father,” she said, looking up at me,  and I wondered, briefly, if that was supposed to be a good thing. I supposed she was right; we had the same face, except that I  didn’t reek of alcohol, and I didn’t have a family to abandon.

but then I thought of my mother back home and how it had been seven and a half months since I had last seen her—since I had last heard her voice— and suddenly I felt very sick.

vii. the noise in this city is so different. the garbled languages converged as they slipped through my ears, rolling off my tongue as if I had been born to straddle the line between English and Spanish,  American and not.

when I opened the letter, the words snaked into lines, straight and neat and perfect. I stood in the courthouse later, clutching the letter with shaking hands, pretending that it didn’t feel like I was all the way back in San Pedro Sula, like the time they shot my friend right on the crosswalk, like the week I hid in my aunt’s house to hide from the cartels, like the time the bullet pierced my knee and—

the courtroom was cold like the hieleras they put me in after that sweltering walk through the desert.

six months, the judge told me. six months, and I could be back home— (could I still call it that?) waiting for a stray bullet.

[thinkstains]

incandescent

round the cul-de-sac slowly almost drifting through late afternoon sunlight, but fading, a little didn’t bother with sunscreen— too sad to care

hard to understand this isolation

new houses are being built empty plots and scaffolding dust and cornfields. quiet, shallow blue ponds undulating

want to wade into the water  and never surface

want to speed the decay and burrow deep enough

to vanish completely

[thinkstains]

(Jan 14, 2018)

city.

i. you imagine yourself as smog, sometimes. nothing but particles of waste, gathered high above a city teeming with people and more waste, rising to meet you, to join you. suspended like fog, invisible enough to linger, heavy enough to be seen, to be measured, judged and weighed, though perhaps not to the specificity you’ve oft imagined yourself under.

you wonder if the reality—the ignorance—is comforting, or deflating.

ii. yeah, it’s a city, alright. but there’s nothing romantic about this place, nothing romantic about these days you’ve just about dragged yourself through. once, you read stories about the children killed in bleak open air, maimed bodies at street corners and public parks, bloodstains scrubbed clean and replaced with wilted wreaths, tears at funerals drying without closure. once, you were fascinated by the contrast: you sought the difference, not brave enough to do anything but bored enough to believe the city was where you belonged. it was a dream before you were too tired to dream, the destination of misplaced ideals, and yet—

it still is.

there’s nothing romantic about the place you’re in right now. but somehow, it remains. somehow, it is everything you longed for. and probably a whole lot more.

iii. it hasn’t rained in months. it’s been much longer than that for snow. it’s dry as bone. so why do you feel as though you are treading water, head barely above the surface?

iv.  maybe it would be nice to be a city. to hold a place in someone’s head, maybe even their heart. to be remembered for something, even if that something isn’t exactly good. controversial. confusing, disputed, but with enough depth to be interesting. fascinating, odd, to the extent that those who encounter you wonder who you came to be, want to listen to the noise you make, the stories you tell; unknown, to the extent that people seek to find out more, with the knowledge that change is imminent and inevitable but the future will be better. 

worth it. worth the adjustment, and the sometimes-awkward interim, the lapses, the breakdown of coherence and order that usually accompanies development, in some way or another.

it wouldn’t be half bad to be a city.

v. it’s probably not all that pretty, you tell yourself, but in the end, it really is. congested streets, congested lungs and all, it’s pretty damn beautiful.

eight years ago, you stood at a crosswalk beneath highways still in construction, marveling at the sheer magnitude of life rushing past you, not quite realizing that you were moving in tandem until you were thrown half a world away. 

quite improbably, you landed here once more. you came back. and maybe it will happen again.

vi.  vacant bed. (roommate went home for the holidays.) dry silence punctured only by the water boiling. curtains drawn halfway open. empty takeout containers. dust.

oddly enough, there are plenty of opportunities to find quiet.

it isn’t exactly found, you realize. you’re kind of saddled with it. it grows with you, into you, so close and so heavy that you start to feel afraid. afraid of returning to it once again, after the labor of bright lights and loud voices; afraid of losing it to the tedium of pretense, the coarse noise of everywhere else.

it’s become one with that loneliness, the albatross around your neck, the one thing you know you have no control over but think incessantly about anyway.

vii. lunch, sometime past one in the afternoon. he’s leaning against the bookshelf, head propped up lazily with one arm, legs tangled with yours. he’s studying you with an air of nonchalance that you only discovered was feigned in retrospect. (there is really no such thing as casual observation.)

“do you want to have kids?” 

“no,” you answer. you barely think about this; you’ve known for years how you feel about being a parent, and you tell him that, too: “i’d be a terrible mother, so i’d rather not put some potential kid through that.”

funnily enough (though not at the time), the lunches don’t continue after that. but sometimes, the memory of that question, that feigned casualness, pays another visit. how selfish you are, you berate yourself, refusing to sacrifice your city dreams, your noble goals and lofty ideals for something as beautiful and good as life; it’s not like you live in some desolate time where bringing another life into existence endangers both it and all that surrounds it.

but then again, you think, the only thing you have ever known is this pursuit of the city. you are much better at city dreams than planning someone else’s future. how selfish of anyone to assume they would be good at it, to think they must bring forth more life when there is so much of it that already exists, unseen and often unwanted.

no, you’ll stick to these city dreams, even if you’re not quite sure what they are anymore.

[thinkstains]

we’re all trying to blot out an existence here, pushing the limits and seeing which borders bend and give. spent the autumns chasing the dying heat of summer; spent the springs in pursuit of an escape. summer’s here, and now leaving’s imperative.

in the meantime, the years flip and turn. onwards we scatter, to disparate corners of the earth. when—if—we return, we’ll remember little of our exploits here. 

maybe some of the tears. torrential downpours. once, a hurricane.

but by then we’ll have found other places to live and love. and the rainwashed concrete will dry again.

[thinkstains]

hangover

everything off axis. think of you and hours i wasted on people not you

ashes in my throat. confessions i’ll never make

all familiar a night spent spinning peculiar tilt

a memory of eyes.  meeting, then spilling  goodbye feigned casual

jolt and lurch. that shame bubbling under parched skin, dry tongue

wants and needs fused bygone heat. the speed of discovery, desire

all transitory

[thinkstains]

city, ii.

i.

living in the past is a particular skill, one honed by a regret so acute that it straddles the line between longing and hatred. for yourself, or for the imperfect people you thought you could love, you’re not sure—either way, they live on in memory, framed by the city you loved and hated just as fiercely. 

if you’re honest, though, you could never hate the city. 

it’s been literally sweltering and figuratively freezing and thoroughly unpredictable and entirely stereotypical and still the only place you could ever fathom calling home. and despite your best efforts to find a living, breathing vessel for the affection that you’re sure might burst out of you at any moment, the city is all you’ve ever loved.

ii. you can’t tell if this urgency is innate or acquired; either way, you can’t separate from it now, and it’s useless to try. nothing is on time in this godforsaken place, just like every other godforsaken place you’ve convinced yourself to live in, and there you are, checking the time as you cross the street, at the bus stop, waiting for the next train, leaving the dorms in daylight or no light at all, crossing campus bathed in the yellow glow of dim streetlights, window-side on the top floor of the library, staring down at the dark stillness beneath—

one day you’ll live on your own terms. one day you’ll stop hoping for the good in this city to find you. one day you’ll stop scraping by. at least that’s what you tell yourself.

iii. losing him was difficult. thinking you found him was shattering.

you threw yourself halfway across the world, expecting to collide with the novel and different and emerge from the dull grey static, shiny and immaculate and coveted. but self-loathing is visible in the worst of ways, and he saw right through you and your stupid naive city dreams. you spent the winter and then the spring with your back to the pavement, wishing you could slip through the concrete and never emerge again, and the city bore witness, deathly silent and deafeningly unforgiving.

and yet. when you returned from your year in the wild, the city was there, too; it embraced you with open arms, with relentless heat and violent rain and the people you finally realized you needed and missed and loved. 

really loved.

iv. a week in spring began first as a reprieve from the terrifying weight of dread and doubt, shape-shifted into a reminder of everything you’d deprived yourself of, locked in your lonely city towers surrounded by people you could have relied on, could have loved more fiercely, and then—it rescued you.

sitting front seat, watching his hands on the steering wheel, traversing the empty darkness of highway towns and vacant desert and sudden snow, something shifted.

how is it that you overanalyze everything in your life so relentlessly, that you overprepare for the most inconsequential things, and yet. all these years and you never pieced it together. and now, all too late, you feel that clarity without warning, painful and sharp and fast. everything is hurtling towards you at full speed and you just want this drive home to stretch on forever.

for the first time in your life, you don’t want to return to the city. you want to exist in this alternate universe with him forever, see him at all hours of the day for the rest of time, blissfully separate from all of the problems you thought you could solve, far away from the magnetic pull of smog and skyline—

v. the city is home, and as always, you return. 

maybe you’ll see him again, long after all of this is over, and be able to tell him. that you wished you’d never left. that you’d wished you’d realized sooner. but before then there will be thousands of miles in between, thousands more hours spent chasing disparate lives, disparate aftermaths. you’ll both be enveloped in the embrace of disparate cities, disparate friends, disparate lovers. life will churn on, and so will the city. the clarity with which you saw him—that genuine, innocent yearning—will fade into soft shadow, infinitely rosier than that of the last recipient of your regrets, forever enjoined with the city you didn’t quite know how to love but still returned to.

maybe it would have worked in another life. maybe this city would have worked, too.

vi. you are leaving the coast for another. leaving this city for another. this whirlwind of change and discovery leaves no room for pause, no time to exhale; all options point forward, and all you can do is pick one and run forth. in the dying sunlight of a city on the gulf, you wonder what the western sunrise will bring. you set down your regret and your nostalgia and your heartache, at least momentarily, and you brace yourself for a return—

to self-discovery, all over again. to a new city, eternally.

[thinkstains]

the malaise of a clammy urban morning is distinctive. what little pride you gained from an early rise is wiped away with the sweat generated by a short walk across campus. 

this temperature is unpleasant in the most distracting of ways. in class, your mind wanders, so you skip it. out of class, discipline is even more difficult to grasp. you’re not living in the past anymore; you’ve finally been able to detach from all of that absurdity, finally—and now the future taunts you, though not harshly enough to force you backward. 

what lies ahead is less murky than it was four weeks ago, though that’s not saying too much. the only certainty you have is that wherever you end up in six months, the weather will be better. you suppose that will have to do for now.

[thinkstains]

and so ends another semester, leaving all but one more in this humid oasis of tree and brick, sequestered from the sterile halls of the world’s largest medical center by neatly trimmed hedges and polished ornamental gates and several tons of naive ambition.

the first evening of december is an exceptionally warm one, perfect for evening walks and recollections. the darkness has a way of evoking nostalgia before you even leave. how many regrets have rattled around this place? how many tears have filled these fountains? for all the brightness that the people here exude, the hollowness within feels all-consuming, and it surfaces in the night, in the disquieting stillness of a day nearing its end.

but there really is no end, is there? just as night recedes into day, so will your time here. everything in transition, perpetually in motion. this is just another place that will lead to another.

[thinkstains]

a letter, long overdue

the last month of the year is upon us. it took the past twelve for me to recover, and maybe i’m not there yet. but almost. you used to loom large in every single day, even though what we had held no substance. for you, at least.

i would stand at the subway platform and dread that i’d bump into you. i would pass some boutique i knew you would frequent and feel a confusing mix of fondness and repulsion. i would walk for hours at night, wincing whenever i passed some karaoke lounge, some bar we never went. (you brought up the idea, but then you turned me down.) and every time i passed two people with their hands intertwined, my mind could only conjure you.

we never got there, but it was close. and it was the closeness that cut deep: i thought that finally i had found someone, that i was not as invisible as i had somehow made myself. in a city where i knew no one, i thought i had found you.

you were many things to me, but ultimately i realized you were never kind. deception makes for a pretty blade, and you wielded it exceptionally well—but it does not slice cleanly. it leaves a mark. an ugly, jagged, messy one. and one day you will meet someone who knows how to use it even more callously than you.

a year on, i am almost free of you. sometimes you make your return in my thoughts, but they are still mine, and mine only. how fortunate it is that i didn’t give you anything except for my time, that you did not change me or persuade me to stay in a place where adopting a facade is easier than telling the truth, where the kind of contribution i’d like to make is impossible.

this heart is all mine, and i am saving it. not to give away, but to share. not to be owned, but to be trusted. not to be collected, but to be cherished.

not for you, but for someone a thousand times better than you’ll ever be.

[thinkstains]

detachment is a place to be avoided. it is wanting everything to be different but doing nothing. 

it is not ideology. just dangerous.

[thinkstains]

you wanted to be one of those people who radiated contentment, a happiness beyond success. you wished you could learn how to deceive convincingly, project that image anyway. but the thing you pride yourself most on is honesty, even if that translates into invisibility, the kind that compels you to hurl yourself halfway across the world and back again.

these years have been recurring lessons: you cannot be reinvented by simply removing yourself. you will not wake up in an unfamiliar place and discover that you are different. but somehow, when you return, you will feel it, at first in random flashbacks, and then it will pour forth, the recognition that you have lived this. you made these choices and you are here again and you have changed, even if it’s nearly impossible to identify just what you lived that did this.

it was you. you did this to you; you did this for you.