Photo by Maria Teneva.
cinco de mayo alone sombrero mexico photo stock photo
My phone dings from across the room, and the screen lights up against the wall where I’ve plugged it in for the second time that afternoon. I hobble over from the too-tall desk where I’ve been kneeling on a pillow to raise myself to the computer monitor’s height, knees cracking, eyes a bit dry from forgetting to blink like my ophthalmologist told me—(“Do you read and write a lot?” she had asked, in an office near the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where I was an MFA student of creative writing. I stared at her, panicking. “It’s literally all I do.") As I creak beside my bed over to the phone, blinking furiously in recompense, I pass a splayed-open copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Muir’s Travels in Alaska, and the home screen of a Kindle packed with library books I know will be sent back into the system before I even find time to open them—all recompense, too, for the late days of March spent hiding from a virus I had poked fun of only a week before, for the days when I lay my head down at midnight and wondered where the hours had gone. Now I cram my brain with whatever I can, I think, bending to the wall socket. A few phrases in French. The closing stanzas of Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” A Youtube video about the evolution of North American domestic dogs, for some reason. I’m feeling good. Wise, even. Maybe I’m meant for a life of solitude, I think, and I’ll become a hermit of the forest and trade secrets for seeds of obscure medicinal herbs. I alone will learn the hidden language of the universe. Yes, indeed. Nirvana, here I come.
The screen lights up again. Displayed in my text messages, a photo shows a pair of hands cupped like an angel’s in a medieval painting around a chubby glass bottle labeled “Organic Jalepeño Limeade: Lime Juice Beverage.” Its postscript:
“this shiz from tjoes is v good with tequila.”
It isn’t Victorian poetry. It sure isn’t French. Actually, it’s probably mostly a sign that I’m not as cultured as I think I am, and that I’m still up for celebrating a Mexican holiday with only fleeting—albeit earnest—regard to the actual events that allowed beer and wine companies in the 1980s to promote imbibing margaritas on a Tuesday. More than any of those things, though, it’s a sign of the only type of knowledge that has brought a truly unexpected smile to my face these days: the knowledge that someone—no, multiple someones—are out there thinking of me, and would like to drink an Organic Jalepeño Limeade: Lime Juice Beverage with tequila at the exact same moment I do, separated by time zones, in a Zoom toast to the future, and to the past we’ve shared fondly together.
In that case, maybe grammatically leisured texts from old friends, amidst all these attempts at enlightenment, embody the real sort of truth that sets us free. Maybe you could even call them kindred in spirit to the day the Mexican Army overcame the prodigious French Empire in the Battle of Puebla in 1862: small victories.
