the habit of being

J is writing, so I must also write, but I feel as though I have lost my history. My writing is my history, and more of myself than my limbs or my heart, and i have made many poems which were not poetry and have lost them all. Our things were taken from us in Playa del Ray, everything but the clothing we were wearing and my wallet-planner. Everything including my journal. It leaves me feeling stranded in my present, without a past or a guide. It would stop hurting if only I could stop believing that those words were beautiful somehow, the only beauty I have and the most central flavor. It is almost as if i have lost the first part of my journey, a fate i might have wished for, given some of the traumas therein, but still I mourn if for the frantically desperate cries for help as well as the images, captured then in the only way they could be, for the first time. I am afraid to recreate them. Ever i want to start over, and leaving it all behind would seem to be my game these days, yet I see I am not sincere in it, for i still have great love for myself and the art that I have made, all modesty and delf-deprication set aside. To myself I talk selfishly of egocentric things, and I must learn to let my creations blow away as sand, to be the better for having made them, not to worship them as objects of desire or deities of my mortality.

We sit in the grass of a church yard, and J has stopped writing and started exercising. A Peruvian woman stopped by and asked if we spoke Spanish, then had a rather disjointed conversation with us in English. She assumed J to be a minister and me to be his wife, and we told her otherwise though it may as well be true. Lately I look at him and am astonished, for I can see him as I first did, in flashes, his face calm and soft and foreign. We sleep in uncomfortable places and I am forever waking him up and smooshing him and stealing all the blankets. I wonder how he is seeing me these days, though I am afraid to bring it up. His eyes are sometimes very far away. We live without spectacle yet as celebrities holding out many signs, and people are kind to us. I rather like being poor. but suspect I wouldn’t have the same experience had I not a cause. Not that I am certain what my causes are, but I do sense them, and view my journey as somewhat of a pilgrimage to the extrimities, a walk outward and inward, in sync and out of tune simultaneously.

We are headed East through Arizona, as the new sign shall say. I am looking toward Santa Fe, but I suspect a stop in Pheonix. or a small desert town would be lovely.