Every Time I Died

It started like this—a perfectly comfortable Thursday afternoon. The sun had neatly tucked the shadows of the buildings into their drawers in the side streets. In a similar fashion, my aching uncertainties had retreated to the unfelt corners of my mind.

The leaves of the trees lining the sidewalk kept calling my eyes upward. Their multitudes undulated in soft layered waves pulled by the tides of their tiny intimate dances. The sky was ecuatorial blue. It painted every mind below it with existential pondering. Nobody under a sky like that was thinking about doing laundry or stirring the rice on the stovetop. Nobody that day was worried about arriving late for a meeting or dripping watermelon juice onto a white dress shirt. Nobody was thinking about the traffic of the city or the light turning green as you crossed the street. Like so many others under that sky, I was reveling in my own internal gallery of rich memories and blissful nostalgic flavors. I wandered through fragments of my life’s landscapes and laughter—so many poignant flames, so much heartbreak, and so much more joy. It’s what a person hopes to be pondering in the precise moment in which it all hits the wall. Or a speeding sports car.

In an instant, my thoughts shattered like glass against the realization that the warmth spreading around me was my own blood departing from my body. I had never seen so much of it like that. It was the most sacred, heavy shade of crimson. The weathered traffic light swayed ever so slightly above me, backed by the blue. My earbuds were still muting out everything except the music. Devotchka, fittingly was playing “Dearly Departed.” I was paralyzed but I was not afraid, nor distraught. Arms folded around my broken body. A face appeared over me. “J?” “Oh my God, Kali” she stammered. “J, what…what are you doing here?” J, one of my best friends since high school, she was living in Florida at the time. She cried over me, rocking me like a baby. She was wearing a beautiful flowing yellow dress. I watched the blood creep slowly into the fabric. “J…You are going to ruin that dress…” She smiled and whispered, “Well, you know…yellow isn’t my color anyway.” I smiled with her, noticed the way her long shiny dark hair slid off her shoulders lock by lock as it always had. Her smile transported me a moment of shaking laughing fits one summer day years back as we laid sunning on a river rock, up above the Ohiopyle falls. The details escaped me, but the perfection of her laughter and the memory of the water pulling around us was the last memory before the last breath.

I opened my eyes. It was Sunday. The sunlight through my bedroom window lit up the thousands of tiny dust particles drifting about the room. My face was streamed with tear-trails. How many times I had had the dream. It always started with the same blue sky. It was always the same song. The same traffic light at the same intersection I crossed daily on 12 de Octubre Avenue.

Only one part of the dream ever changed—the person who rushed to my side as I lay helplessly on the pavement. Over a period of two weeks, I had dreamt the dream six times that I could recall. It had been J, a child with a wind-swept face I met one day while hiking near Lago Quilatoa. It had been a forbidden, unrequited lover who I loved silently, in solitude since the first day we spoke. It had been a generous woman I met in Manuel Antonio beach in Costa Rica when I was sixteen who shared her lunch and gave me her business card for her shop in Antigua, Guatemala called “The Flying Pig.” It had been my brother, Ty, who took his life ten years ago. It had been Luis, a young boy who lived in the sheet metal hut across from my house in my village in El Salvador. Six dreams, six rescuers crying with me, holding me, from different times, locations, durations within my life. Some hummed, some spoke, some gazed at me silently but with each death, I woke up feeling the deepest peace and gratitude for all those who had rescued me in their ways, in their small and massive ways that only they could. And every time I died and opened my eyes to find another day before me, I felt exponentially more awake, more alive—ravenous for more crossings with people who could move me deeper and closer to that one ocean of constellations--this elusive thing we call "love."

Ode to Friends

My friends wear LOUD emotions.
Curse at rocks as they trip over them.
Smile at the punch line of their own bad jokes.
Cry at the grandeur of mist over a river.
And never want to apologize for throwing a fist.

My friends stay, disappear, reappear constantly.
Smoke fags not cigarettes and ask me things like
“Mijia que te pasa?” as they stir their café con leche.
They worship stilettos, dark chocolate, the horizon at the sea.
They wait for sunrise, dancing next to me on an overpass at 6am.
(Shhhh...they don’t know that the whole world isn’t a dance club in Ibiza.)

My friends could be called Activists. Ragers. Pacifists.
Hipsters. Hippies. Narcissists. Dreamers. Addicts.
They’d be OK with that because they know who they aren’t.
And they are too busy living bravely
To keep track of misperceptions.
They are game-changers. Rule-breakers. Peace-chasers.
They protect me from as far away as tomorrow
--in Australia. In Japan.

My friends drink before noon on Saturdays and
volunteer at homeless shelters on Sundays.
They are homeless and homeful like me.
They heap lost’n’found joy upon my heartbreaks.
Their laughter harmonizes with mine.
They are so. damn. strong.
Know how to fold loneliness into la masa of tortilla and soldier on.
They believe in. They reach out. They speak up.
Open and close constantly like morning glories.
Which I hate. And I love.

Ode to my friends.
Mis media-naranjas. Mis locos. My homegirls.
My brahs. Panas. Cheras. Compadres.
You are the color and the beat.
Thank you.