the habit of being

I suddenly can’t remember anything to write about.

. . .

I’ve now been reading my yogi book for what must be hours, waiting for J to return from his grocery excursion. The truckstop is forever teeming with tattooed men, but I don’t see much. Behind me, there are counters for a Chinese food restaurant and a pizza place, both run by the same Flying J attendants. Jeans are 2 for $19.99 and New Mexico tee-shirts are 3 for $10. Shelves are being restocked. New showers are constantly becoming ready.

Last night, as I thought over my experience with the St. John’s choir, I was reminded of a similar experience previously recorded in the stolen journal #1. When J and I were living under the overpass in El Paso, only a day or two after I twisted my ankle in the Arby’s parking lot, we went on a day-long trip to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico…

We crossed a long bridge and kissed at the international border, over the center of the Rio Grande. In Mexico, we acquired a map of the city with a walking tour, and proceeded to follow it unexactly, with J excited reading Spanish words from the sides of buildings and me occationally correcting his pronunciation. He would gleefully exclaim “Hola!” to the natives as we passed, and find himself quite lost if they gave any more than a hello in return. The city was crowded, with narrow and quickly filling streets; J likened it to a flat Manhattan, complete with street vendors and taxi drivers who speak little English. We ate cheap tacos and paid a dollar for a ten cent ice cream cone due to the language barrier. We wandered through marketplaces where the Sellers of Things followed us around and were constantly offering up their wares. These places were packed with sombreros and saint candles and many colors and small trinkets which all seemed to blend together into a big flash of dancing commodities - an orchestra whose conductor swung his arms through the air in a lust for cash but was all the same cheerful and unfatiqued by the effort.

Most vivid of all my Mexican memories is that of the Mission of Guadalupe, a very old church and one of Juarez’ most notable tourist sites. We passed through the thick wooden doors and sat in a pew toward the back, looking forward to the altar and worshippers. In that place there existed a choir, simple and rustic and airy. Old Mexican women sat at the front pews with shawls, chanting their Hail Marys and caressing their beads. Their voices flowed in and out of unison, a medley of unpretentious devotion, a ship that seemed to sail about the room giving light to its features, gently setting anchor in each woman and continuing along its path. J laid his hand on my thigh in that place, in the same manner as in the St John’s choir room, as if acknowleging the beauty that was around us. The words of the Spanish prayer and the Latin symphony are both humble, addressed to a deity in supplication.

. . .

A driver just walked by and, seeing me writing this, asked “homework?” with a trail of warm laughter. “No,” I replied, with a similar giggle, to the old man. It has been nearly two months since I left my university, my assignments, and the much greater portion of my possessions behind in the Village, to go on this pilgrimage for love, as I thought of it at the time. My family, back in Georgia, is most likely still desperately seeking me, as I desperately seek the love I came for, and I wonder who has the most hope. I am seeing the country, complete with little alienated moments in the sun, hopefully learning a lesson about life, if not about love and despair and what it means to cling to something beyond all logic and all else. I am going to be nineteen in a month now, and my future is completely unknown to me. I’m getting anxious about J, who has been gone now for ages.

I saw a man sitting in a cafe in Santa Fe, dressed raggedly and surrounded with legal pads, yellow paper covered in pen, words and words. I wondered what he was writing, if his experience was anything like mine. He waved at us walking by, and it seemed that we must understand each other on some basic level. I longed for the one notebook I had managed to fill on my own.