I groped through my pockets. Not a single apple, no pocket knife, I

4 January 2007

Bajo,

Perhaps leaving my luggage at the airport was impulsive, but you
napping through midnight is unforgivable. I might have been later had
the bus driver not liked sour patch kids, and I was not as motivated
to start it here.

It is the productive aspect of us that does not embody the "stance".
We want this in so far as we can control it. Let us not be the
projects we so ridiculously desire, though I believe product is not
what we will end with anyway.

I want you to recall the night you fell in the snow, the walk to an
introduction of where you would spend some time out of boredom. My
walk in someone's tight grip, a man is lost, in search of an address.
Detached interest in a loft, for my focus remained at the bar.

Recall the morning Bajo, messed and unchanged. Both in separate early
morning paths, your hat different than mine. This morning is important
because both my focus and yours arrived, they came to us. The
intention was to complete what was done.

My brother will return today and I fear the tension will remain for
sometime, unfairly and misdirected because it is our mother who I
desire a distance from. I must remember that regardless of her
opinion, in this family "there is no alliance, for there is no war."
But as you know it is hard to convince a Cuban mother of this, when a
mother is all she's ever been, even before the birthday.

She demands agreement, demands definition, demands we be a team
undefeated. I don't want to play with her anymore, and I have never
spoken to my mother with so much vocabulary, so much volume, and still
she attempts a hug, and I feel thirteen walking into an airport.

So I, naturally, and somewhat forcefully ask The Mason to assist me in
building a perfect wall, when she doesn't realize that space is more
than a moment and I make plans with to do lists to spend next December
in my very small apartment, reading, writing to Noah, walking to the
mountains with you and creating scenario's to speak to myself in, I
should have always been an actress Magara thinks.

Classes have yet to commence though I can already taste these streets
with out him, and everything is perfection in the absence: fearless
entrances, early morning wakings to my library, yoga on the porch
(while the neighbor is away), sitting while broccoli steams, tea and
my red ukulele, breakfast and music in a backpack while walks to the
woods with my camera can be accomplished before the sun rises, for
there is no one keeping me in bed, no one to keep me up late.

How was that tight of grip permitted, that kind of direction from
someone who could have died any morning he woke, if it were not for
distraction, I might have been following a ghost all that time.

So, eat more apples she says, and take notice of the poison potential,
but do not fear it she says. Then she gives me a white goldl ring with
a pearl on it, this is the most beautiful gift I have ever received in
a dream and she keeps handing me delicious reds and in contrast to the
pearl their red is darker, like a burgundy. So eat more apples she
says and do not put so much sugar in your coffee? somehow she has
learned how to speak English since she has died, but I still cannot
write her letters in Spanish.

Bajo, when it is you come with me to Greenpoint, I will show you where
she hid the water, and where she chalked the stoops with me.


-Cari