Many years later, when her bones had thinned and her skin hung loose, after weeks of crying and mourning for that which would never be again, she would open a shoe box filled with pages of scribble, chicken scratch, unable to read a single word.
He taught himself to write with his left hand, albeit in a script legible only to him, soon after meeting his second wife. It was a thing born of necessity, for she loved to fall asleep with her head in his lap, always on his right side, always with his right hand in her own, and in those moments he needed to write yet could not bring himself to disturb their posturing. So he learned to write with his off hand, spending twice as long to write half as much, slowly carving away at the novels that welled against the walls of his arteries when he watched her sleep. Novels of beauty, as natural as her own in those moments, like the face of a storm in the distance, or the first hints of river washing across the dried slab of a soon to be waterfall after the first rains. Novels of heartbreak that had not yet come, promised by the change of seasons, the change of hearts, or at the very least, by a death and the life left behind. Novels that would never be. Novels that already were.
Many years later, when her bones had thinned and her skin hung loose, after weeks of crying and mourning for that which would never be again, she would open a shoe box filled with pages of scribble, chicken scratch, unable to read a single word.
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He stared at the sunset, where the edge of the ocean lipped gold, where the gold burned the sky from orange to purple and pink. He thought of how it must look in the eyes of another, imagined the kind of mark watching a sunset from start to finish might leave on a man’s soul. A profound thing perhaps, a scar burned across the heart, a beautiful scar, the kind that sounds defiant in the quietest moments, and burns bright in the darkest of times. Or maybe just a seed, a seed that will never grow, but one whose presence still alters the soil into which it is sewn, however subtle. As the last ashes of day scattered and the first stars were lit, his heart bore no scar, his soul received no seed, not even a whisper to be later forgotten, for his mind was preoccupied with scars and seeds and never once considered the sun. Their muscles were pulled taught with the memory of the previous day. It had taken two hours and twenty men to pull Don Ignacio from his bedroom to the doctor’s table for autopsy, and two more hours to drag him back to his widow for the burial preparations. The doctor found nothing out of the ordinary save for the bullet’s trajectory, which seemed to have turned abruptly to spare the Don’s heart, though not his life. The doctor noted the oddity but also noted that low caliber ammunition often changed course in the body, glancing off bone or cartilage. The Don’s wife, upon hearing the news, thought it a miracle, believing a man pure of heart could not be shot through the chest. This was the truth that entered the public domain, medical opinions aside. Just as one can trace a life from death back to birth such that every event contained therein would seem dependent on the previous and contributing to the next, as though if any one event were removed or altered said life would come to a similarly altered or altogether different end, one can trace the history of the world and things greater still back through time, through the myriad residents of today, both modern and unchanged ancient, native and mixed and old world pure, and further still into the very elements and the clash of elements from which those elements sprang, until the history of existence itself is tabernacled in a chain of causes and effects, in a series of stories leading back from today through to ancestral arrivals on shores still much the same as now though then framing continents much changed in their course forwards and back again, back to atavistic beginnings forgotten for lack of witness and document, back to primal birthings of tides and talc and life, and back to the void from which said life sprang… back, back, back. In doing so, when histories are rendered in this way and viewed through such retrospection, they can appear deliberate, intended, illustrated perfectly in the progression of evolution and the illusion of an intelligent design that it projects, the products of which (evolution and history both) appearing as though engineered and designed with intelligence and conscious thought given to the ultimate purpose the things were intended to serve, when these products are instead simply possibilities become concrete, one among many becoming one alone, things produced by crossing each hurdle as they come, things forged by sharpening themselves against themselves and against a world pitted to unmake them, things that have become what they were to be because that was all they could be, things built to sustain themselves, their only purpose, until that purpose becomes not enough, and then no more, and those things with it.
Here in the states we put so much emphasis on those left behind, by which I mean those left shattered in the wake of tragedy, their lives collapsing around the hole that was their daughter, or their son. We assert their right to closure as obvious, as something which they are owed and promised by some misplaced sense of decency we impose on the world around us. But such decency is false, as is the promise that comes with it. The world owes us nothing. Our lives are drawn on borrowed time.
Perhaps not here, or at least, not enough to shape the way we conceptualize the aftermath of tragedy, but certainly elsewhere, in hovels of the world too meager to earn our attention, such fallacies are made all too clear. The unfulfilled promise of justice as it pertains to Latin America and the ubiquitous acts of tragedy that plague the continent is something we cannot imagine. We know nothing of the disappeared. Nothing of the dirty wars, or the mass graves of anonymous remains, femurs not matching the fibulas next to them. We are all too lucky, entitled, unquestionably certain of the justice we’re due, and all the more certain of the world’s duty to give it to us. But painting Latin America as a land of despair is far from accurate, nor is it anywhere near my intention. In fact, if I was confined to general terms I would characterize Latin America as the opposite. As a land of hope, and resilience, in the face of things we would bow before in defeat. We cry end times whenever the economy dips below our comfort level; they assert a brighter tomorrow in the face of crushing uncertainty, a people unafraid to dream beyond the nightmare they’re too often wrangled within. And considering the gross infiltration of Christian imagery and ideals across the continent they have every reason to see the four horseman in the dictatorships, neoliberal economic enslavement, environmental racism, and pervasive misogynistic practices that have come with the conflation of worlds, of ideas, with the miscegenation of people and of culture that is the history of Latin America. But they do not. Have not for 500 years. The fact that a sense of hope is dominant when by all accounts a sense of despair seems justified and even appropriate is testimony to this resilience of soul. Of spirit. And of people. The world owes us nothing, but we owe ourselves much. We owe each other more. And looking South, we still have much to learn on the matter. The myth is that love is forever. That love spans lifetimes and lingers long after we’ve returned to the soil and sod. The truth is that love is as fleeting as the moments that contain it, moments that carry eternities cradled between bodies and breasts, moments that stretch into eternities like the forevers found two between mirrors. No words. Just time. Like the night between the stars. Each moment a lifetime, a sandcastle, a house of cards, an ellipsis in prose. Each moment a flash of color, swallowed by a swell of gray. A smile. A kiss. A season. A song. Each moment a heart, stayed, still, between beats, flayed naked in sacrifice. If the myth is that love is forever, that's ok, because I believe whole heartedly in myths. If the truth is that love is ephemeral, that's cool too, for I haven't found a reality I was born to yet that is not worth transcending. © Dylan Amaro-McIntyre, 2013 |
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March 2015
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