she says i'm just a friendsix months later, and also my 27th birthday. i find myself back here, a place she recently referred to as the realm of lost identity. for months, i have called it love. cannibal thoughts, consuming desire, unshakeable anxiety, competitive and self-excoriating reflection, makeshift solutions, devoted paranoia, the hunt for emotional highs, disciplined reactions, ambitious declarations, silent searchings, frenetic journaling, strange romance, nightly nightmares...love. the surprising thing is, this still feels new. i am still worshipful of this wondrous person i am trying to understand, and increasingly more of my life, my identity, is lost at her altar. peppermint -- i still can't bear to name her here because i am writing, as always, our fiction -- told me tonight that she wants us to take a break. i said i understood, and of my incredibly unproductive but fellowship-funded summer, i do understand more than i have admitted to her. i unknotted my friendship bracelet purchased for a dollar in a mexican zocalo, which objectively (and regardless of the undue gravity of the following) replaced a ring she took off, in order to wash a sink-full of dishes tonight and all i could think about were the tiny tricolored lunches i packed for her as often as i could in tupperware she ridiculed me for coveting all summer long. we all learn from childhood to love people in our individual ways, and my love can be as shamefully modest as it is proud, as myopic as it is grandiose. this summer crawled by at such a slow pace that the act of retracing our earliest steps has been nearly imperceptible. for the record, these are my impressions of our much-anticipated summer vacation together. i appear in her account as just a "friend," and my general pain at this callous handle has gradually grown to a pointed realization that she is writing, still, for her ex-lover, while i write...for you. obsidian eyeballs of flattened Aztec birds clackety wooden animals nodding their heads pudgy fingers at my hipbones and short annoying men deliberately in my way handsome young men speaking a shy service-industry Spanish sweet-faced girls slowing down their words for me bathrooms with drains in the floor and everything wet with the shower sleep that never gets the kinks out of my back patient sitting and watching by a window of a speeding bus, wind buffetting my face and torso, felt even in sleep salty briney bubbly foamy gush up my nose speeding me ahead, arms stroking until my knuckles clumsily graze a sandy rocky ocean bed and pebbles collect in my chest peppermint sitting on the terrace, back facing me through a screened door, quiet and simple declaration, "i'm excited about the school year starting." i rush out to kiss her on the head because i know what that is for her to say... dark streets, graffiti writers crouched down, a small trash fire starting in the middle of an intersection, a crowd of shadowy forms gathering sheet-sized banner with a woman bearing arms and a baby saying that rebellion is justified when the world longs to be free. letters formed out of rice bags sewn together to spell, fuero ulises cool walls made entirely of marble, gold on the ceiling, cacti growing impossibly straight (like green churros), the sun of a Merchant Ivory history, me hoping that a world-wise security guard will stop talking to us dropping to the curb of a shaded side of a sunlit Oaxaca street to look at digicam photos. sitting next to her, feeling like the unfamiliar is colonized by her casual company mexico city a second time, the feeling of just having missed a tense scene in the zocalo, hammer and sickle flag the size of my bedroom footprint flying above the square the grandeur i wanted to see in Hotel Isabel's tall ceilings, glass brick floors, narrow balconies, neon sign by myself in the metro, feeling free enough to put on my headphones and mouth my music, thinking that some spared double-takes means i'm blending in, which is what i love about cities and is all i've ever wanted walk to frida's house -- the anxiety and reluctance of following a timetable -- with inadequate maps and a finger stuck in a page. thinking frida alternately frivolous, sad, and fearsome as the sole source of the great love that we now associate with her and diego, mexico, avant-gardists, and marxists. i want to understand, harmonize with what i see; bring my friends' loves to this place of endurance, courage, honesty, daring, life but sterility, and where she died a small black and white snapshot in the bottom right corner of a wooden case with a glass top mounted waist-high shows them kissing in a shaft of sunlight, against an everyday background -- this house, maybe. his big hands surround her, squeeze her forearms without clenching, but what i see is her face, closed eyes, upturned with such a dynamic quality of light that i can read her passion for him, or for this kiss...it's an undated photograph so there's no way of reading her history, her miseries, her forgiveness, or her willing oblivion here next to this are reproductions of hand-written letters: my dear heart, my dear little boy, your little girl, the love of my life -- salutations that rip from time as much significance as they can, no wasted thoughts, a desire and affection that feeds on itself, a momentum that feels recklessly out of control on the way back to the hotel, i think about how much i miss her alongside the act of missing her, only with less exactitude and clarity than the conception. i am only bold when i have something to give her, and i had decided to love her again without calculation for many hours, days afterwards, i think about writing her love letters. my peppermint wants the peace that makes possible adventure; thinks about freedom more than the average person; wants desperately (and more than i do, even) to be seen for who she is; wants a charismatic fantasy to chase; wants to see for herself; wants you to act first, go first; wants to win by a fraction. we wrestle without knowing why. may the chase keep you in love with me, and may our lucha be libre. | 
