Set me free, Major Deegan: tying up loose ends
In the brief moments right before dawn, New York has a post-apocalyptic feel that Ynez finds completely appropriate. There aren’t many people on the street and it’s possible to spin a fantasy of the after-effects of a neutron bomb: no property damage, but everything is dead.
She is living in the aftermath of her own devastation now. It has been thirty-six days since Darius left her for good - she can’t help keeping count - and today is the day that she is leaving New York for the last time. When he walked out the door, she told him she would never see him again, and she meant it. At her most wounded and childish, she hopes that he spends the next two thousand years miserably lonely and missing her. She misses him. Sometimes she hates him.
Two days after the disaster, Ynez puts her home on the market and starts to dismantle her ofrenda. Nearly everything goes into storage: books, drums, shoes, all of it. If and when she settles somewhere again, she can have it all shipped. Until then, her belongings are in tidy, taped-up packages of limbo, not unlike her heart.
He lied to her. All along, he lied. He didn’t love her, he didn’t know how to love. After the Darius she knew and loved left - that one who had saved her from herself after Mexico - all that remained was an empty shell of a man. Not even a man, but some unchanging and unchangeable being, racked with fears and inadequacy, someone who has no way to encounter impermanence and imperfection honestly, who has to keep himself apart, lest he actually have deep feelings about anything.
Today, Ynez believes that this is what she returned from the desert for, this ending. All the things there hadn’t been time to tell him, time to explain. Now, she thinks, none of it would have made a difference. And that is how it should be.
The tehuapahuani restored her soul while she was gone. All that time after Carlos’s death, she had been suffering - literally - from susto, soul loss. There are times in a person’s life when a sudden shock or fright can rip their soul apart and send all or most of it fleeing from their body. They walk around alive and breathing, but empty. Broken.
Ynez is whole now. She spent days and nights in a sweat hut, an ancient man’s hands wrapped around her heart, listening as he called her truest self back from the depths to which it had fled. At the end of that ordeal, a spectral hummingbird had flown out of his mouth and into her chest.
So she is free again. Truly free, even though she is still numb with the shock of this latest separation. She knows that will pass and the pain will come. She will embrace it when it does. Sometime, Ynez feels sorry for Darius. His church is a prison, one he has accepted willingly. He is welcome to it, now and forever, amen.
When she walked out of the desert, she brought another gift besides her soul. She is carrying a child now. There had been no time to tell Darius, and now she is relieved about that. This is her child, one she traded her weeping for, and nothing will ever take it from her.
If you asked her now why she lied to people after that fight, she would not be able to explain it. It had seemed desperately important to pretend to the few people she spoke to that everything was fine between her and him, that she was planning a pregnancy, that she had only been on a short trip to regroup and that everything was fine.
In the midst of those lies, she made a lightning trip to Rome to retrieve the belongings she had left behind earlier in the year. When she held her drum in her hands - her best drum, her favorite, the one she herself made with part of her deepest core included - she knew that everything had happened this way for a reason. She is on a journey, even if Darius is not. There was one last trip to the Campo de’ Fiori to say goodbye to the love she shared with a deeply passionate man, and then back to New York, the place she no longer thinks of as home.
There is no home anymore. Ynez will be a nomad now.
There is traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway, even this early, trucks and gypsy cabs and random wanderers, flesh and metal, all on a journey somewhere. They bounce over potholes and speed as fast as they can through their lives. The noise is incredible, rumbling, clanking chaos, some order of supply and demand, need and satisfaction, driving all the lives, all the machines, birth, growth and decay in some majestic and inevitable dance through time and space.
Ynez does not know where she is going next. She decides to head west in her little Alfa Romeo, with one suitcase and some towels and two extra pairs of shoes. She has herself and she has her child. She even has morning sickness now, something she thanks God for even while vomiting her guts out. Her journey continues, even if his doesn’t.
Everything happens for a reason.
She is living in the aftermath of her own devastation now. It has been thirty-six days since Darius left her for good - she can’t help keeping count - and today is the day that she is leaving New York for the last time. When he walked out the door, she told him she would never see him again, and she meant it. At her most wounded and childish, she hopes that he spends the next two thousand years miserably lonely and missing her. She misses him. Sometimes she hates him.
Two days after the disaster, Ynez puts her home on the market and starts to dismantle her ofrenda. Nearly everything goes into storage: books, drums, shoes, all of it. If and when she settles somewhere again, she can have it all shipped. Until then, her belongings are in tidy, taped-up packages of limbo, not unlike her heart.
He lied to her. All along, he lied. He didn’t love her, he didn’t know how to love. After the Darius she knew and loved left - that one who had saved her from herself after Mexico - all that remained was an empty shell of a man. Not even a man, but some unchanging and unchangeable being, racked with fears and inadequacy, someone who has no way to encounter impermanence and imperfection honestly, who has to keep himself apart, lest he actually have deep feelings about anything.
Today, Ynez believes that this is what she returned from the desert for, this ending. All the things there hadn’t been time to tell him, time to explain. Now, she thinks, none of it would have made a difference. And that is how it should be.
The tehuapahuani restored her soul while she was gone. All that time after Carlos’s death, she had been suffering - literally - from susto, soul loss. There are times in a person’s life when a sudden shock or fright can rip their soul apart and send all or most of it fleeing from their body. They walk around alive and breathing, but empty. Broken.
Ynez is whole now. She spent days and nights in a sweat hut, an ancient man’s hands wrapped around her heart, listening as he called her truest self back from the depths to which it had fled. At the end of that ordeal, a spectral hummingbird had flown out of his mouth and into her chest.
So she is free again. Truly free, even though she is still numb with the shock of this latest separation. She knows that will pass and the pain will come. She will embrace it when it does. Sometime, Ynez feels sorry for Darius. His church is a prison, one he has accepted willingly. He is welcome to it, now and forever, amen.
When she walked out of the desert, she brought another gift besides her soul. She is carrying a child now. There had been no time to tell Darius, and now she is relieved about that. This is her child, one she traded her weeping for, and nothing will ever take it from her.
If you asked her now why she lied to people after that fight, she would not be able to explain it. It had seemed desperately important to pretend to the few people she spoke to that everything was fine between her and him, that she was planning a pregnancy, that she had only been on a short trip to regroup and that everything was fine.
In the midst of those lies, she made a lightning trip to Rome to retrieve the belongings she had left behind earlier in the year. When she held her drum in her hands - her best drum, her favorite, the one she herself made with part of her deepest core included - she knew that everything had happened this way for a reason. She is on a journey, even if Darius is not. There was one last trip to the Campo de’ Fiori to say goodbye to the love she shared with a deeply passionate man, and then back to New York, the place she no longer thinks of as home.
There is no home anymore. Ynez will be a nomad now.
There is traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway, even this early, trucks and gypsy cabs and random wanderers, flesh and metal, all on a journey somewhere. They bounce over potholes and speed as fast as they can through their lives. The noise is incredible, rumbling, clanking chaos, some order of supply and demand, need and satisfaction, driving all the lives, all the machines, birth, growth and decay in some majestic and inevitable dance through time and space.
Ynez does not know where she is going next. She decides to head west in her little Alfa Romeo, with one suitcase and some towels and two extra pairs of shoes. She has herself and she has her child. She even has morning sickness now, something she thanks God for even while vomiting her guts out. Her journey continues, even if his doesn’t.
Everything happens for a reason.