The Mexican and Poetry

[catelin]

When I was fifteen, I had a crush on a boy. His name was Antonio. We used to walk together in the Alameda on Sundays, making endless circles around the fountains and through the trees. He would take me to the library that stood at the center of all this on Thursdays and let me check out books with his library card. I would read the poems of Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Salvador Novo. I would read the stories of Carlos Fuentes and imagine Aztecs on motorcycles around every corner as I walked to school. This boy told me that he loved me and I told him that I loved him too, mostly because I was fifteen and he looked like he needed to hear it; and it didn't sound half bad....to be in love. Twenty-two years later, yesterday to be exact, we spoke on the phone. He'd been looking for me, he said. I asked if he was getting divorced, because I told him that I'd imagined when people started snuffling around for faces from the past it's because they're afraid of their futures. He said no. He's married, very happy, and has three children...one of them grown...two almost. He was not shocked that I had never married. He told me that I was always a "free spirit" and that was what drew him to me from the start. I told him that I was even more eccentric now, well on my way to becoming like the crazy American ladies that pack up everything and move to San Miguel de Allende. We exchanged pictures. He looked very much the same. Same eyes. Same hair (minus the super 70s style!). A nineteen-year-old boy behind a 42-year-old man's mask. My grandmother always said it was like that. She said you never forget your young face or the young faces of your friends. He wrote me back and said that I had not changed much. Still with the braids, I see. He reminded me of a day in the mountains and that he'd made a wreath for my hair of tiny yellow flowers. You still remember that? I was amazed at the details he still held in his head. My images of us together are blurred with only a few pieces still clear...drinking cokes from bottles with straws inside them, the smell of elote, looking out over the city one night, the shopkeepers sweeping the streets with brooms and water every morning. We shall have lunch soon, and we will sit together and remember our young smiles.



The Bridge

Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.

Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.

I'll sleep beneath its arches.

Octavio Paz