Three years ago, living in Bacalar, Mexico, I spent my days wandering like a ghost through the village streets, taking pictures, writing furiously. This mural (creator unknown to me) appeared one day and stopped my heart for several seconds. It was like seeing myself for the first time. The black dog—depression. Her eyes—either abrim with tears or mechanically held open. The mask. Under eyes painted halfheartedly with gold. Adorned with flowers or fungi—left to the viewer to decide.
And her gaze. Still this image haunts me.
I spent those many months in Mexico peeling back my own masks, intently studying the incessant pacing of my black dog, staring with open eyes at the world as it was—not as I wished it could be. I gazed into the strange white space—where that which seemed unfinished might produce something new. A path. A new way of being. My heart shattered daily. In the thrumming heat of the night, I would rage dance in my tiny concrete apartment with shamanic drumming pounding through my headphones.
This was before I built a compost pile for all the things I no longer had use for. When I carried my rot around inside me.
Recently, something that has been composting for three years—for decades, really—has begun germinating. I have no idea what it will look like, what it will be. But it will be mine.
Again, I’m in the jungle, this time in Ecuador. Again, the humidity is pounding into me. I mushroom, and the dark water pulls me. But this time I am laughing, daring the crocodile to tear me apart. Demanding the world bend under my hands. My black dog snarls, grins. Now with lolling tongue, joyfully rolling her fat, grinning shoulders into the roots below my window or else muzzle wet, jacket threadbare, lashing and howling her way up the pitch-dark hill—both at the same time.
Integration is an odd thing. When it finally sinks into you—all the metaphors and images and stories and myths—you get to become a new thing. But not before. Before you are all lamentation and confusion, pain and fruitless searching.
And always, for me, love was at the heart of it. For so long, I’ve been trying to build my stores of love. Me who believed for so long that it wasn’t god that was dead but love. And in me remained only duty, mechanical wind, and a slack-jawed darkness.
So much of what I learned that frayed and shrank love is evacuating, fragments of knowledge fleeing this house afire. Facts, schools of thought, Wittgenstein’s proclamations on aesthetics, how to declinate the Latin endings for “puer” and “puella.”
I am just sensation, awareness, biological tug. There is all space inside me. Just a watcher. A listener. Something that moves. Something which is breathed. Something that tires, that wends through this close matrix of sensation and marvels. It has no desire to write. It wants nothing to do with words. Words are just strange symbols, hanging uselessly in air, in space, on the ghosts of dead trees, these hieroglyphs for a world that once made sense, that once existed. That world doesn’t exist anymore.
Once this destroyed me.
Now, I’m delighted by the world and I’m learning how to show it. I love so much, so much, it is overwhelming at times. If I went around expressing how much joy and appreciation and love I have pouring through me, I’m afraid I’d break. I am outwardly reserved and thoughtful and critical, yes, after all, the world falls to pieces more and more each day, but also, I’m also emerging from a howling darkness and may always see everything shot through with shadow.
I wasn’t going to post this week—I missed last week as I’ve been processing and wading through a place where 95% humidity is the norm—but I suppose perhaps I do still have something to offer. It is not tidy. The point is occult. This is simply evidence of my continual devotion. My love for all the ways I have changed and all the ways I will continue to.
And with that, a poem. Which I wrote in the jungles of Bacalar when I believed I was dying, when I feared the dark water and what swam in it, when my heart was breaking.
Always change. Always devotion. Trust in that.
Casa Del Cocodrilo The leaden apron of humidity presses me into the world. Mouth open, breathing the damp—like you, here and not here. Heavy and invisible my heart my heart my heart es atrapada en la casa de cocodrilo. Set me free, push this raft into the lagoon, set it on fire, let the light burn the damp off and watch me dance out in the darkening water as the end of our world draws my smoke up into its sky-mouth. An overripe papaya slipping its stem, crashing unseen into the foliage below, seeds and juice and sweetness going back to where she came, to grow again and again in between her thighs, where the heart can return, only to be smashed and rotten again, Over and over. Oh! how I wish this cycle would halt! I can take no more smashing! Tell me I was right and wrong at the same time. The both/and resounds like a tail slap on water under rippling sky. Each mural I see tells the story of me: death, black dogs, a woman with an eye ratcheted open by metallic prongs, color color color, and death. Always death. Aqua, anaranjado, fuchsia, palm green, every-green, dust, dusk, dark muddy blood, and I took them all in, eyes open, mouth open, the held breath and the leap into the lagoon, your groan like a dagger, like a kiss, the most violent kiss. A kiss of the eye, of ravening mouth, the rolling over and over in water, the hunger for air. The world is ending, and all we do is wander these sugar-printed roads in confusion and agony, no more than a momentary sequined fluttering of light, and then after, the years haunting flooded basements in search of the barest flicker returning. Oh, I am destroyed, overflowed, the shattered toilet set out by the roadside that I walked by only this morning clutching a papaya, my hands on fire. The howling of a thousand witches wailing their inferno through my palms, I knew laying them onto you was a risk, the risk of hooking into something that would ascend into the sky, leaving me somewhere in between, atrapada y lamentándose. Mi culpa, mi culpa, and when you kissed me, a miraculous jolt of sorpresa, something I didn’t see coming—hunger. Fooled again I opened my mouth to sweetness, desolada, the stars edges sharp. Where does trust appear, how does it return? Must I watch it come and go like this forever, bound, running over, overflowing with all this too much too much too much? Where does this death urge spring? Here. Here in my heart. Always. Here in my heart. This is why I can love you here in this grotto with roots running in my teeth, and also why we are all doomed. I wade out into the blinding light, into shallow waters, afraid of the crocodile finding me, knowing it was I who sought him out, swam into his lair, death-rolled around in the rocks and reeds of his rooms like a mad woman. Fui yo quien submitted to his painful kiss. Mi error, mi error. No soy una bruja, sino una mujer. My heart the meat, the papaya, slipped, crashed, and rotting in the scaly belly of a spirit I am no match for.