The big questions arrived with eerie periodicity, carried by strangers, lonely people in lonely cities, in disconcerting interactions I tried to skid swiftly over or dodge entirely.
A young man with a too-large frame and a too-young face, his manner bright and peering like a high sun, trying to spot something in my demeanour that would reveal me. We walked around, introduced by a friend, I took advantage of his weirdness to get beneath the city's thick skin, trying both to go through him and avoid him as he grew ever warmer, ever more entitled to my thoughts, asking every ten minutes: Qué te llama la atención?
Another young man, in another city, both ambitious and invested heavily in the material, both seemingly indifferent to the terrors in their environment, both accustomed to howling dogs and isolation, to little birds dying without wounds. He is grave and watchful as tries to orient me — a confusing stranger from so far away, another body in his unfinished house, in his solitary life — demanding with a fanatical intensity: Qué esperabas de México?
And a young woman in a bar in a winding, gridless city, bursting with energy, the first to dance, up on stage, pelvis against the guitarist's thigh, a public execution of inhibition, long hair whipping, jeans sneakers sweater backpack, like a lost student of Delhi University, perhaps not even drunk, but fervent, fevered, after something. Taking a pause once she'd got everyone else up, glaring at sitting me, she jabs a finger into my chest and yells over the drums and amps: Qué significa esto para tí?
I know what kind of answer she wants — what kind of answer they all want — and I refuse. To her, the bringer of the biggest question, I am especially obtuse. She rolls her eyes in disgust at my utter lack of life, gets up and goes back on stage to dance. I know that girl. I probably was that girl. So full of feeling, so stuffed with the significance of everything, so convinced she is alone in seeing into the deep.
My answers, unspoken, were these: What I notice is private, what I expected I have forgotten, and what this means, I don't know, we will see.
A young man with a too-large frame and a too-young face, his manner bright and peering like a high sun, trying to spot something in my demeanour that would reveal me. We walked around, introduced by a friend, I took advantage of his weirdness to get beneath the city's thick skin, trying both to go through him and avoid him as he grew ever warmer, ever more entitled to my thoughts, asking every ten minutes: Qué te llama la atención?
Another young man, in another city, both ambitious and invested heavily in the material, both seemingly indifferent to the terrors in their environment, both accustomed to howling dogs and isolation, to little birds dying without wounds. He is grave and watchful as tries to orient me — a confusing stranger from so far away, another body in his unfinished house, in his solitary life — demanding with a fanatical intensity: Qué esperabas de México?
And a young woman in a bar in a winding, gridless city, bursting with energy, the first to dance, up on stage, pelvis against the guitarist's thigh, a public execution of inhibition, long hair whipping, jeans sneakers sweater backpack, like a lost student of Delhi University, perhaps not even drunk, but fervent, fevered, after something. Taking a pause once she'd got everyone else up, glaring at sitting me, she jabs a finger into my chest and yells over the drums and amps: Qué significa esto para tí?
I know what kind of answer she wants — what kind of answer they all want — and I refuse. To her, the bringer of the biggest question, I am especially obtuse. She rolls her eyes in disgust at my utter lack of life, gets up and goes back on stage to dance. I know that girl. I probably was that girl. So full of feeling, so stuffed with the significance of everything, so convinced she is alone in seeing into the deep.
My answers, unspoken, were these: What I notice is private, what I expected I have forgotten, and what this means, I don't know, we will see.
