Some hours later, we were in a hot car on a highway which advocated getting lost across every inch of the south. Your stuff, my stuff, it was all together in the back seat, a wash of cool cotton and soon to be neglected swimwear. You were driving, and I was reading a brochure from the car rental place on how not to drink or eat the wrong things in Mexico and totally throw up my guts and die. You talked loudly over the sound of our open windows, telling me how just once you'd like to cruise across an international border with all the wrong stuff in your suitcase. You wanted to have a trunk full of fruit and produce, and a backseat full of rare species of wildlife. Yes, you actually did have full plans to visit all the regional farms at your destination and frankly, you were hoping to carry back armloads of tobacco and alcohol for all your American friends. The customs guards would stop your car, and their dogs would bark at your glove box full of exotic papayas, and you'd smile with quiet pride as you explained for the next two hours that you were just a naive grad student researching a thesis on transcontinental agricultural trends.
Days were already gone to our trip, you mingling with locals in broken Spanish, me in each new town's bar drinking whatever was cheapest that promised not to kill me outright. The sights were largely non-revelatory; the ruins still ruined, the ocean tugging on the shore, the tourists and souvenirs legion. You and I, we talked theoretically of some piece of Mexico that had never seen the naked breasts of a hundred college co-eds. Together we pondered a section of land that had not ONCE felt the touch of Mardi Gras beads in its sand.
"Somewhere there is danger", you told me, your eyes full with the light of religious candles. "Somewhere down here, you step out of your house and breathe the air and it tells you that you should not be there." I suggested that there were plenty of landfills that could offer the same, but we both knew that I understood. Miles away, organs were being stolen from sleeping bodies, and in dirt basements beneath wooden floors, roosters and dogs and men were fighting each other, all breath and instinct and life. There were places here where men and women sipped liquor from chilled glasses in dark limos, and white powder was poured out across antique wood tables in the chapels of old missions. People like you and me, we could stumble into such things and die mysterious deaths, our bodies never touching native soil again.
"You could disappear in a country like this" you told me, but in your words I saw glass cases in museums, our bones propped up like fresh archaeology. There were feathers in our skulls, stone axes in our hands, and an understated educational font above us reading simply: American Tourists. We'd educate children on class trips for years to come.
There was a point at the end of our trip where I was depressed, where we were watching the sun go down on some nameless beach, drinking what felt like authentic booze in some cantina we'd never see again. We'd been down here on a whim, two people brave or stupid enough to just get up from a chair and head in a direction for the sake of all the miles behind us. I still felt the same, the sun would not set differently, and we were still going to die. A waitress offered us some fresh lime and I asked her to marry me in English, but she just refilled my glass. You were saying how maybe we could just keep heading down into South America, we could keep moving and moving and never look back. You were young, and I was drunk, the sun above us so red and round, a mouthful of blood in a sky on fire.
-blh/2006
