Gabrielacobos’s Weblog

“‘Being sacrificed in the underworld actually means being reborn in the real world.’

It was just disease that desamated their populaiton… Talking about the astronomical system: they, the first to recognize Venus – the morning star and the night star. We  now recognize Venus is the same at night and day.”

– undated, unremembered journal entry accidentally found a few weeks ago. Still, can’t stop thinking about it…

Jonathan bought me a complete collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Reading them makes me sad, not because of the content but because I wish she hadn’t died so young.

I’ve grown closer with a couple of girls from work. We scramble once a month to find time to have dinner together, to see each other in new environments. Another girl just started not too long ago, and already I think she’ll become a good friend. People come and go so quickly. In with the good, out with the bad we always say. No matter what, the loyal always stick around regardless of time or space.

“I cheated on my boyfriend the other night,” a friend told me, “but it was with another girl so I don’t think he’ll mind.” It’s all in the wording sometimes, I guess.

Days go by faster when the sun is hiding behind clouds. There’s no way of telling what time it may be by looking out the window. It always just looks like 10 AM out there.

When we first moved in together, Jonathan and I worried we wouldn’t have enough space. Spending evenings with friends was of no help either.  They would usually end the night by arguing, making us feel like nothing but fuel to the fire. I couldn’t help but envision fights, constant annoyances, anything that would command space apart or shut doors to separate us. But the aforementioned argumentation never occurred. We aren’t like them.

Still, even if one of us goes into another room to eat, or paint, or read, or make dinner, the other soon pursuit. There’s a certain comfort that comes from knowing just being together is what we like to do.

It’s about loving each and every morning together, even if it means crooked necks, knotted up into hard mounds of dried up muscle, or stomach aches because hey, at least we’re waking up to another day of reading and eating and living.

My stomach can’t handle coffee anymore, the medication I’m taking irritates it too much and I can’t even drink half a cup without feeling like I’m about to hurl. However, my appreciation for tea had grown considerably. Green, mint, orange and spice, chamomile, oh the possibilities are endless. I’ve yet to drink a tea I don’t like.

I left far too many things in Brooklyn that I shouldn’t have. Plates, yoga mats, a desk lamp, my laptop charger. I can’t find them anywhere, and then I remember, “OH I LEFT THEM IN BROOKLYN.”

A cup I broke, drank endlessly fom, my favorite for the whole time I lived in New York shattered to pieces on the floor one night around the time I started to fall out of love with the city. I still miss it.

A tea kettle I bought here was defective. I’d boil water but it never even chirped.

This morning though, it finally whistled.

Enclosed by still-so-sweltering heat, I continue to live well in the desert despite constant threat of withering in the sun. I have to wear my hair up and my face turns red if I walk outside, even now at the start of October. But in the mornings on my way to work, I find sanctuary in air conditioned buses where I oftentimes need a sweater to stop from shivering. At Jonathan’s house, always so frigid, I dive under the covers the moment I enter his room, preempt of goosebumps and a sniffling nose.
The other day, Jonathan and I took a few minutes to note on the length of my hair. Though not very long at all, it seemed much longer, fuller than the day before. Johannah chopped it all off a year ago one particularly inconsequential Sunday, as Claudia watched with one hand pressed against her forehead and her jaw dropped wide open. I looked into the mirror as Johannah snipped away at strands of hair and wondered what I’d look like in the morning.

“Seven o’clock already and still such a fog.”

There is a time to wait things out, to enjoy things together even though you’re not sure if forever, tomorrow, children, anything is certain. I’m having a hell of a hard time swallowing my own saliva these days. Like an oracle, my body issues severe warnings against my former lifestyle, meanderings, obligations.

Every month, I sit out cramps and nausea praying to God it’s nothing serious, like cancer or a baby. At this point of my life, green means blood, means life, means independence. I spent a lot of money on myself today, and for once I didn’t feel guilty. I work hard every single day, and there’s nothing stopping me from enjoying what little free time I have.

A friend recently told me she was in the market for some new friends. It appeared to me that she was lonely, and instantly I felt guilty for not making enough time for her. We promised to reserve at least one afternoon a week for each other and I suggested being more social, like we used to be before significant others and jobs and school and being adults took up all of our time.

Growing up seems to be a main issue of concern to some people I know. Some of my old friends don’t even know who I am anymore. They love me, they enjoy spending time with me, but they don’t trust me. New blood never did sit well with some of them anyway, and they’ve been waiting for the day, that tiny instant where I mess up so they can finally say, “we told you so.”

“It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes,” said Dorthy Parker in an interview for the Paris Review. “I can’t stand messes.” I couldn’t agree more.

We take time in making sure that everything is right where it needs to be; work, family members, condoms. They’re all there, and just waiting to be noticed.
Just recently, Jonathan and I drove into the desert, making our way into the heart of the Tularosa basin just to watch the sun set. There, hills and hills of white sand form the largest pure gypsum dune field in the world.

A storm had been brewing all day long, and by the time we got to White Sands, it sounded as if the sky had an upset stomach.
Mounds of sand looked like snow, white lizards ran silently from one plant to another, unseen. Jonathan dug holes for me to rest in, and I dragged him from the peaks of a hill down to its base then back up again.
The sun set behind black clouds quicker than anticipated and we were still walking through the sand, everything looking just like everything else. A tree grew in the middle of nowhere, but as Ryan reported to us, sand had blown up all around it, totally hiding the trunk and allowing only the topmost branches to pop out of the ground.
Once we found our way back to the car, we shook off all the sand that had clung to us and made our way back home.

I’ve made new friends at work, and sometimes I spend more time with them than I do with my old friends and family. I’ve been working a lot, waitressing at a burger bar by UTEP. Its stressful work sometimes but it gets me places, like Ruidoso and Brooklyn for one. People there are also really friendly. Being the 4th best burger place in all of Texas, a few out of towners pop in with plenty of interesting things to say more often than not.

No matter how many times I clean my room at night, it always gets dirty again by the next day. Well, not so much dirty as messy, and not so much messy as lived in. Someone with a great library must have recently died because Jonathan and I found over 40 great books at a thrift store. I spent half my paycheck in there without feeling the slightest bit of remorse.
We also found a box of really old, valuable National Geographic’s at another thrift store by my house. We bought an original first issue for only 10 cents. We intended on saving it for our children and grandchildren to share, but we accidently hacked into it one afternoon for an art project.

Its ok though, I’m sure we’ll find another one someday.

A chink has appeared in the grand scheme of things. The growth of ignored intuition turned reality, the premonition of an internal addition, dreams of fertility; These have all left me petrified.
The sentence “we were all made with science” starts an everyday conversation over sweet iced tea, our eyes blinking rapidly under bright fluorescent lights. Its another evening well spent with Jay and Mayra.

Domesticity has always been a natural instinct for me, but my motherly intuition is suddenly on the fritz. I’m feeling quite altogether selfish. Not in a bad way at all, more like I know what I want in my life and what I want out of it. Its not so much neuroticism as existential jurisdiction. Right now, I will not accept leftovers.

I always forget to get excited about my birthday. This year, I want a bicycle. I also want to sit down on a patch of grass and share a sweet sangria with friends. That’s all I want: comradery, closeness, if it must happen in one liturgical form or another, I prefer a picnic to honor my birth. Ayla will be in town by then, hopefully. We communicated not too long ago, and I confessed to her that the eagle had landed and I had found happiness and comfort in something I had been fighting.

There is no sense of asphyxiation here. It’s opulent, yet sweet and unhurried. I’m beaming; scarcely unsatisfied at the proliferation of something that had at one point dwindled down to nothing. This transition seems to be for the best.

We were driving back from Albuquerque on the first night of June, and just as I was dozing off, we almost drove off of a bridge. What a way to welcome the summer. Hello heat! Freedom! Baseball! Oh what a season to be born in, my mother sure picked the best one for me indeed!

Anyway, a day’s worth of music and adventure left us dog-tired. Our young eyes were begging for some sort of darkness, a rest from color and sensation. Soon after the bridge incident, we pulled over and took a night-long nap in the desert.

We were sure that where we had been was just like home, only a bit misplaced on the map. Certain incidents exemplified the miscalculated physical and cultural topography. Josh showed us the hospital he went to after he had been held up at gun point (and he has the scar to prove it). Our pocketbooks refused to pay so much money to explore the mountains that should have been free to us. We ate New Mexican food and then took our full stomachs to an aquarium.

For a while we, searched for a dolphin that wasn’t even there – instead we found two seagulls yelling at each other and at us on the rocks overlooking a deadly pool of stingrays. One fish was terribly afraid of the artificial waves in his tanks and we felt sorry for the little fella. We were walking underwater with our mouths wide open, pointing up at eels in leopard skins and cooing over tiny sea horses fluttering past us.

Just a few days before that I was in Brooklyn, sweating out the roughest fever of my life. On a rooftop one night, we listened to local bands at surreal estate. I looked over the ledge and counted the number of cop cars waiting for us to get rowdy or wild or vicious- but we never did. We smoked cigarettes and flicked our ashes down at them. Tiny little specks of grey disappeared into the black night.
The couch surfer from Belgium asked me if I lived in an area of Texas full of Mexican gangsters.

“At the hostel I was at before I went to stay with Alison (my friend, the couch surfer-host) there were so many of them there. I was so fucking scared.  Never had I ever seen so many chulos,” he said and took a swig of his rum and coke.
I laughed, holding my beer with one hand and holding the other’s palm flat across my forehead. I explained that the word he meant to use was cholo and what he was actually saying was that he had shared a room with a bunch of cute guys.

He shook his head and laughed at himself, “No! Thats definitely not what I meant at all!”
Later, the cops finally told us all to go home, like always.

Just before leaving New York, literally the morning my flight left, some friends and I had breakfast at Mike’s Coffee Shop around the corner.There’s nothing like strong coffee in a plain white mug. The best home fries in New York are made at Mike’s, currency from all over the world stuck on the walls and a jar of mints sits by the cash register for you to stick your grubby little paw into and grab as many as you can.

When I first walked in I saw Sophie and Robert sitting at the counter. Our arms flew up in excitement and we hugged and chatted for a while. Its always interesting to run into someone you know in New York. Especially when its someone you know and like.

“Its so easy to just fall back into New York. Brooklyn is always exactly how you left it, if only you look hard enough,” Johannah had said to me one night over wine and stale bagels.
Pratt was exactly as I had left it the month before – the grass green, sculptures tall and proud. My friends still drank as often as possible, setting aside unnecessary work for walks across the East River and dancing to African drums. The men in Bed-Stuy still had endless catcalls – one always called Lily his “sexy china doll” anytime she passed his stoop – and the rats on Bedford and Lafayette hopped on the sidewalks with pieces of fried chicken in their mouths.

My coffee and eggs that morning, before leaving, were so much more delicious knowing that I really did exist in two completely different places. Out of nothing I had established a life in the east, and still I had so much love and excitement growing and waiting in the sand back down south and just a bit to the west. Oh, how latitude and longitude intrigue me so. Geography thrives inside my veins, blood pumps anytime someone asks me to name a state’s capital. Knowing I had roots in two contrasting regions made my skin feel thick, accomplished.

By all means, I felt much like the 26 year old Kangaroo Communique from Murakami’s short story:
“My wish, if anything, is rather unassuming. I don’t want to be ruler of the world, nor do I want to be an artist of genius. I merely want to exist in two places simultaneously. Got it? Not three, not four, only two. I want to be roller-skating while I’m listening to an orchestra at a concert hall. I want to be a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder and still be a clerk in the product control section of a department store. I want to sleep with you and be sleeping with my girlfriend all the while. I want to lead a general existence and yet be a distinct, separate entity.”

One particularly lazy Sunday afternoon in El Paso, I applied sunblock on my face and walked to the park. I read under the shade of a tree and watched cars drive by. All the drivers had somewhere to go, and they went on so determined to reach their final destinations. I sat and went nowhere, instead just watching them zoom right past me.
The literature on my lap felt heavy, and I felt my legs sinking into the green grass, absorbing the moisture from the black dirt beneath the immaculate lawn. I began to wonder about life and outer space and state-wide high school exit testings and learning how to swim.

This summer, I’m ready to learn.

Two weeks ago, I watched a video of a walrus masturbating. I read about two ducks murdering and raping the carcass of the third duck. Two male giraffes had sex with each other. The true nature of the animal kingdom was revealed to me in one single museum exhibit. I felt naive and silly for blushing at something so natural. How much more information is waiting to be learned, witnessed, shared? So much.

I got up from my patch of grass at the park, eventually, and started to walk back home. I passed by a man with his two daughters lying on a picnic table, he on the top table part and his two girls strewn along the seats at either side of him. They were looking up at the sky, pointing at clouds.

“There’s the bear Daddy!” They all gasped and agreed that there was in fact a bear the sky, so I decided to look for myself. Their interest and happiness was contagious. However, I saw nothing. I could still hear them giggling even after I was a block away so I decided to take one last look up there, just in case. I stopped walking, turned completely around to see the sky behind me, shading my eyes from the sun.

Still, I saw nothing.

It’s hot. Not just hot, but suffocatingly so. The kind of heat that bakes mirrors in rooms so that everything in them is no longer crisp but oblong and wavy. This is not spring time in Brooklyn where heavy rain turns into 90 degrees then back to a cooling mist again in a single day. This is El Paso heat, desert heat. This is the heat that sucks all the moisture out of your skin until it looks like the sand you’re walking on.
I drink vitamin enhanced water to boost my immunity and pop a tylenol to relax my muscles after I put lotion on my hands to heal the cracks. I’m pretty healthy right now, I think. I hope.

“You know how they said we’d never get a black president until pigs could fly? Well… Swine Flu!”
Mayra interrupted a silent car to tell that joke the other night. There’s a pandemic afoot. Or maybe it’s behind us already. It’s hard to say. Mexico is shutting down its capital for a few days, stores have run out of hand sanitizer, and people are staying in their homes. I met up with a friend for lunch downtown last week and kids of all ages, from little babies to college students, were wearing surgical masks as a precaution against the Swine Flu. People at work are ordering less ham and more turkey.

“Are you kidding me?” my boss tells me as she pours coffee beans into the grinder. “This is the perfect month for Mexico to shut itself down! Within a week, Cinco de Mayo rolls around, then comes Mother’s Day, and El Dia Del Estudiante, and who knows what other holiday they’ll make up this year. This swine stuff couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

She pretends not to care, but I saw her come into the cafe with a bag from Walgreens, full of Airborne and face masks.

Everyone is on edge. England has published a list of the “least wanted” people to enter their country. Masked attackers raided a wedding in Turkey and killed 44 people.

I picked a fight the other night, but just because I initiated the verbal exchange doesn’t mean I am to blame for the overall issue. It had to be done. April was such a cruel, cruel month this year, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain” as Eliot said. Indeed, I felt pushed to finally turn the page and welcome May with all of its ups and downs already marked on the calendar. There’s hope in that.

April 29. 2009

“Imagine if today was a dream,” I tell Mayra, “and all that we’ve just walked and said didn’t really happen. What if this was just Jay’s dream and she’s about to wake up and then we just disappear?” We walked all the way around the mountains from one side of town to our homes. It felt like we didn’t do it at all, and if I didn’t have photos to document the occasion, I wouldn’t believe it actually happened.
All of April has felt like that. Everything in this month has felt off. This month was lived in the wrong dimension.

I boarded a plane to Brooklyn last week and I haven’t felt awake since. I kept feeling ill at ease, like everything was an illusion and like I was going to wake up at any second.
Thursday night, I hugged Johannah and Kseniya for the first time in months. We ate hearty and drank red wine. I began the deterioration of my lungs by smoking hookah and talking loud. Bars felt too noisy, too crowded and we were in strange moods, the three of us, plus Camila by this point. So we took some forties and shared gummy bears and secrets until 3 in the morning under the trees sitting on wet dirt, listening to homeless men snore, sirens wail, and cars honking.
Johannah’s days in America were numbered, so we didn’t waste any time. On Friday we had more wine and more free bagels and techno music – the latter against our will but we made the most of it and danced with strangers and talked to dog walkers.

Cheers to prosperity in taking time off for just yourself, just because! Cheers to the Amazon, Johannah’s new home! Cheers to cheap wine with the Last Supper pictured on the label! Cheers to guests who never leave!
I fell asleep downstairs and woke up on the second floor. How!?

“My father named me after his mistress,” a friend said over brunch later that day. Who knew. I mentioned the ghost I was named after. Before I used to forget I had a middle name, but not so much anymore. I use it often.

While in New York, I had hoped to see a lot of people. I made plans to call, to arrange, to invite, to intrude, but I felt weird the whole time. I felt as though I was recuperating from some tragic accident and I needed time to relearn to walk, to talk.  I needed to be alone and I was, except when my friends got out of class or when I bumped into someone I knew on the subway.
It rained. I smoked. I drank. I remembered how to be me again, after such an odd week in El Paso, and I missed home a great deal. And I phoned, and wrote, and counted the seconds until I would return.
I had a lot of fun in Brooklyn, and I can’t wait to be back in May. I honestly hope to see plenty more people from Pratt this time around, so be expecting a call from me in May, all of you.

Until then, I’ll be in El Paso with the ones I love and can’t live without. I’ll be with the rocks and sand and mountains — On my first night back Mayra and Alex pointed out the weird colors of the sky, illuminating the dark Franklins and clouds. Oh, they are so beautiful, and so tall, and so sturdy.

April 16. 2009

Blending into everyone else, I sit on a black stool, using my laptop at an airport, hoping somehow my internet connection will come through. Driving through the city at 4:30 in the morning I felt El Paso for what it truly is. El Paso looks like a movie set at 4:30 in the morning, El Paso looks like it’s people aren’t walking around because they’re asleep but mostly because they’re scared, of color and substance. El Paso is solid at 4:30 in the morning, when you haven’t slept all night and you feel the blood slowly sifting through your veins. The shapes are clearer, the colors are sterling and complete. A grandfather’s interest is genuine concern. He slips an extra twenty into my hand, again, when we say goodbye, again.

I’ve never met a man I couldn’t see. Highly visible, open, wiling to speak naturally, fluid gushing out in the form of words. A-B-C’s tickling ear drums, once plugged, drowning in water since that afternoon I changed the color of my hair. My mother swears she can drain my ears clean. Fix them right back up. 

“We twist a sheet of newspaper into a funnel you see,” she explains to me, wringing a tiny scrap of paper in her hands. “Then we stick the point into your ears, light the other end on fire, and the smoke will clean your ear out! Good as new!”

No sense even listening to her sometimes. I know I’ll never let her light my head on fire. 

A trip to Austin last weekend proved to be exactly what I needed right now. Holding my breath at checkpoints, elevated walking on the ceiling over anxious loved ones, my grandpa standing at the foot of the escalator waiting for me to get past the guards, I pulled at the ends of my hair and counted the number of people wearing Crocs. When Arianna had been in Brooklyn, we counted the number of people wearing NorthFace jackets.I think we reached 32 in a single afternoon. 

My plane had touched Texas soil once again, and I walked out of the airport building triumphant. The air outside smelled like a zoo – artificial wildlife kept preserved and unruly. Birds chirped and cars vroomed. Who can say what is and isn’t natural. It’s all welcome when you live on concrete and stucco. At least your house is made of dried mud in the Southwest, but don’t bricks work best against the Big Bad Wolf?

A man, I forgot his name, asked me where I was from and when I told him he smiled, shook my hand and said, “I’ve been to El Paso! I went there, man, and lemme tell ya! I got to El Paso and it was so dark.” He paused a moment and I smiled, blinking a lot reliving his trip in his head. “I went outside, to walk to the store and you know, I was just in awe of those big old mountains. They were so beautiful and just right there, in the middle of everything!” 

While I waited for Arianna, I drank ice cold coffee in a cozy coffeehouse called The Hideout. Green buses passed by on the streets outside. People pushed past one another, dogs barked, bikes sped past pedestrians. Meanwhile, I read a read book inside, sitting on a squeaky wooden chair, calling Brooklyn, asking about hair and beer and beds. 

After drinking wine and staring at art, learning how to create our own sun-powered scooters, Arianna and I went to the car and I stood in a field. A small patch of grass, nothing dangerous. Ants crawled into my shoe, not wanting to share, demanding their space. Three ant bites, one Lone Star, one cut lip, and a Mexican Dia de los muertos skull later, I boarded a plane and said goodbye to Arianna, and Austin, and breakfast tacos.

Hello Mountains! Hello Mexican food! HELLO! HELLO!

I forgot how in the middle of everything mountains really are. I forgot how in the middle of things I insert him, his kisses. How do you know if someone really does love you? They tell you and ask you how your day is. They ask you if you’re feeling ok. They kiss you and touch your face and don’t expect anything in return. He doesn’t love me though and I know it.

He and Mayra have recently started listening to a band that reminds me of being 13 years old. Puffy eyes, cigarette smoke, dusty kitchens, ice. Oh ice. Oh baby. Being 13 and watching Ricardo get tossed into a dumpster. That was when his friends were still his friends, before they watched him get pummeled. Before they let him get a swift kick to the left eye. They tried helping though, but no one got it as bad as Ricardo.

“You’re good,” he told me later that week, black eye bulging. “Too good to be friends with us.” He was living with his girlfriend and she was cheating on him with his friends, their brothers, her neighbors. He got kicked out of his house for smoking too much weed, for drinking too much. I was reading Salinger.

Fuck, we were 13.

A broken pen sits in a coffee cup amongst other pens in my room. I accidentally grab it every now and then, but mostly it just sits there, collecting dust and resentment. There’s still hope in it though.

“Normally if a pen doesn’t work, you throw it away!” Mayra said to me, a little concerned but mostly annoyed, but I can’t toss something so full of ink. Maybe someday I can fix it.

At work, people want drinks to look as pretty and perfect as they do in the pictures on the wall behind the counter. One woman asked me where the “pretty caramel” was, pointing fiercely at her blended coffee drink as if the mountain of whipped cream on top wasn’t sugary enough to satisfy her sweet tooth. She pronounced it funny, like ker-mel. Oddly enough, we don’t even carry any caramel in the cafe.

I was upset that she had turned into such a pain in the ass customer. I had instantly liked her when she first walked in because I took her some menus as she sat down as she said, “lemme ha some tequila” with such a tired and empathetic voice, I half expected her to take out a gun. Instead, she took out whatever grief she had towards the world on me and constantly criticized my every move. And so, to her rant over the caramel, or rather lack thereof I said, “I didn’t have lunch today so I froze it and ate it all like a popsicle, sorry” and walked away to take someone else’s order.

It’s difficult smiling at someone else seconds after being mean.

Betty, my boss, makes lists of what is running out, what might run out every now and then. She’ll look through the fridge and write some things down, shaking half empty containers of chicken or mushrooms and putting them back. 

“Eh we have enough for tomorrow,” she squints at me in the dark and walks away. Her carefree attitude never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her worry about anything other than why the limes aren’t juicy enough to make limonada.

Midway through Sean Wilsey’s memoir, I made the startling revelation that my first car should be named after him as soon as it is purchased. I picture it tan, with square windows and sandy leather interior. And wearing a baseball cap. Of course.

An aunt we all called Cousin passed away earlier this week. I spent much of my time at her house when I was younger. My cousins, her grandchildren, who she lived with, would convince me to spend the night. I would always have a lot of fun there, at their house, but come nighttime I would always wake up at 3 in the morning and cry because I wanted to sleep in my own bed. 

It was at Cousin’s house that I learned to ride a bicycle. It was at her house that I secretly watched my first sex scene in a movie – my cousins and I giggling all through the panting, the up and down motions. To eight year olds, this looked absolutely ridiculous.

“Don’t tell your Grandpa that we watched this movie!” I can still hear Lisa telling me before she popped in the VHS. “If he finds out! He’ll never let you come back!”

Anytime we went to visit Cousin, she would cry a lot. She would hug John and me and kiss us on the cheek over and over again, blessing us, blessing the roof over our heads, blessing the peas in her pantry. She was a kind old lady. The last five years of her life, I visited her probably twice. Bedridden by then, she would forget my name seconds after I told it to her. She cried less, but her eyes were so sad, so tired, like that of someone who isn’t really living anymore. My family’s only consolation to her death is that she’s at peace now.