Once, in Tijuana, I wandered the streets searching for the skeleton of a bullhead. I wanted to hang it on my wall and wrap dead flowers around its horns. I walked up and down Avenida Revolución, sweating in the hot Mexican sun. My English thoughts twisting themselves in my brain until I could find their Spanish counterparts. I went to every market. When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I bought a fake Botero painting and decided to go home.
Here is how it happened: I was walking down the sidewalk trying to avoid the pushy men who were trying to sell everything to me: watches, jewelry, sugar skulls painted in bright colors. I was trying to not run into the children, begging me for money, their small hands grabbing at my legs. I was walking down the street and glanced into a store window and it is there that I thought I saw you, standing behind a counter. I stopped moving and the entire Tijuana metropolis shut up. There were no men with their fake gold watches, no children with scars on their faces, no donkeys painted as zebras. I stood there frozen in a daydream, letting the hallucination fully consume me. My entire being became lucent as if someone turned on a light in a pitch-black room. As if the darkness of the last sixteen months ceased to exist.
The idea that you were still alive. The idea that I could reach out and touch you. I almost fainted, cried, laughed, melted into the sidewalk. I have never felt that kind of euphoria: my heart pounding, hands sweating. I lost all sense of myself and the Mexico heat. I let the idea of your life wash the fucked up weight of your death completely off me. I felt okay again.
Suddenly, the man came out from behind the counter. His leg amputated at the knee. He motioned for me to come inside, buy a watch, he said, they are nice, real gold, buy it now, sixty American dollars. His words split open the silence: the weight of the world and the weight of your death suddenly returning to my bones. Everything heavy again. I had no choice but to just keep walking.