“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
—Albert Einstein
(1) I have my first taste of whiskey in my abuelo’s boat, just after I eat a live clam. Quivering, the clam bleeds between us. You could die, my grandfather whispers, in lesser hands; don’t ever trust anyone like this. It’s my first raw flesh. I want to tear it to bits. I want it to scream and beg. I chew until my own lips bleed. Here drink a little of this, he says, it kills the bad stuff.
I drink the whisky straight from his lips, and all the salt and ethanol and spit and morning cigarettes. I’m dying. The sun blazed over us, my mouth dry, my throat tightening. Do you know what death is, mi ciela? Death is the ocean.
(2) Viruses are alien in nature. That we fall ill at all is alien itself. That we can’t foresee microscopic warfare. What’s not built into our nature—invader, hypnotist, seducer. We are taken in by our fevers, that strange eroticism of consorting in the shadows.
(3) Because we are born, the Sabbath was never silent, but the first stone breaking through bluebottle glass windows. I mean silence is not the sweetest sound. I mean to leave that world is as violent as breaking into it. I understand why newborns cry: the world is gone. No longer held in completeness, all embrace too long and loose, to sleep always with the pins sticking.
(4) The boomerang of retaliation: blind wolves chasing blind wolves. The boomerang of the all-quiet: once more down the well, sever the rope, fail the song.
(5) Written in my Hebrew school primer at 13: In this home you promised me/What right to return/ When I was the famine born/From betraying you in Canaan.
(6) After the Exxon oil spill in the Gulf, my parents help with the rescue effort. Everywhere, death and muted cries. My mother recalls the clotted air, a pelican whose oil-swarmed eyes told of the befouled swell. It was too late, but she held the bird until it died, its exposed quills pressing into her wavering breastbone.
(7) There have been times I was so hungry I no longer knew my hunger. There were times I’d sleep alongside this animal desiring to wear my skin.
(8) What would Edmond Jabès write today? Yukel in the bombed fields. Yukel carrying a gas mask in a perfect brown box, the shoulder strap too long for his shoulder. Yukel hearing his father: Even the Fulbright Scholars have left Jerusalem. Yukel unable to speak, less he poison himself.
(9) You are not a high priest. You are forbidden to speak that holy of holies, that real name. That you cannot ask your questions directly, that you knowingly speak to a great silence—it is the same peculiarity of longing for places in which you currently live, as if missing home while away, a loss that never diminishes.
These are the words of your blood brother. The same words. The same pain.
(10) When wandering is your blood brother’s homeland. When he promises is to always leave. When he is tired and asks: But where is the sky. When you pretend: What sky.
This is the third installment of a 4-part series. Check out the first, second and final installments.