Tears by the fistfull.
I cried in front of the laundress. In front of the doctor. The taxi driver, waving his hand in front of my covered eyes. I wore sun glasses to hide it and wet them from the inside. It was like seeing through lake water. In the bathroom, I cried reaching for the paper than on a high shelf. Lying on the floor of my bedroom, facing plaster. Over my computer while it played Bob Dylan. Until I couldn’t tell my tears from sweat. For two days I cried like I was ripe fruit -ready to burst under the touch of wind, let alone hands, teeth, or knife.
Even the vacillation of the fan moved something in me.
Outside there are lizards. A garden of them. Lizards that could wrap your wrist like jewellery. Lizards that could fit in the groove of a women’s clavicle. Lizards whose splayed bodies burst red in the tail. A certain breed that dance their torsos up and down before scattering beneath your feet.
Their bodies are compass points. On the brown wall that marks this yard they travel West. When I stand on the porch to brush my teeth I pick them out from the clay. The geckos follow the larger ones. It is harder to find the chameleons. This doesn’t surprise me. I want to know where they are headed. Maybe it’s just to the plantain shoots at the edge of the property. Maybe it’s a smell that pulls them.
One day in Vancouver a Mexican woman told me about the Four Directions. She said Shamans believe South is the path of destruction, the path of rebirth. I told her about a moment of silence I had on a cleft of rock in Guatemala. About vomiting after church in Chiapas. Coming home thin, with so much shed that I didn’t want to eat my mother’s cooking. The world spun between our tongues like marbles. I left that sun bathed hill like a woman who had just learned her own name.
I don’t remember what she said about the West. I don’t think she mentioned the smell of plantain. It must be more than instinct that has carried me this distance. I must be here to do more than spin buckets of tears. Than count geckos. Than brush teeth and spit white paste on green leaves each morning.
There are women I have come here to help. But they are my mothers, escorting me through hospital cues and buying me alarm clocks that break daily. I am like a giant Canadian wound that needs milk. A lost Obroni with a mandate. For hire written across my forehead. Let me help you, please, I need help. I can’t ask without giving. I can’t give without asking. Maybe it’s tied aid. Maybe it’s tied love. Maybe it’s just us, sitting there eating Fufu and groundnut soup, discussing the weather. Maybe it’s just a bottomless pit of humanity beneath all our mistakes and good intentions. Maybe I’m just dead set on diving in it. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop crying; all this fucking humanity, all our grand imperfections, and my own inability to swim, let alone build a dam against this tide.
But then, maybe I am being melodramatic. I grew up with a full belly. I’ve spent many years searching for new sources of hunger.
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