I'll wear flowers in my hair and depart with abandon, ready to melt into the pregnant darkness of death.
I don't know how or when, so must be ever ready. Being prepared, I pay no heed to habitual mind leading down paths of unworthiness, not-enoughness, washed-upness. I am calm and collected as I contemplate eternal connection. I focus on the moment, a moment that could take me anywhere.
My dark angel will be what no man has been: true and honest, oblivious to wrinkles and quirks, not jealous or controlling, a font of unconditional love, a permanent reprieve from 9-5.
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I love how Mexicans celebrate the dead. With art, color, music, and motion. They honor those departed with the things they once loved. They hold their mortality close.
The upper crusty suburb where I grew up was devoid of color, warmth and imagination. My high school dates were insufferable - pudgy, pimply pubescents with pukka shells tight around thick necks.
I escaped a semester early and enrolled in Spanish at the National University in Mexico City (UNAM). The altitude made me dizzy, as did the men who courted me like maniacs, one filling my arms with five dozen roses on a Xochimilco flat boat.
I was golden haired then, but not an angel as some believed. I ate those beautiful men for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was a game of ego, seeing how many I could conquer. Then I fell for a tall tan Elvis, 7 years my senior, and traveled the country with him, drinking Kahlua at sunset before heading out to the discotheques.
We did some bad things. We shoplifted and once got caught. I feared we would be jailed but his silver tongue and some pesos freed us. We fantasized about kidnapping the youngster he tutored so I could stay in Mexico on the ransom. Luckily we did not try this, and I did go home.
When I returned for a visit some years later, my Elvis was dissipated and puffy like the original. His vitality was sapped and he grasped with desperation, not desire. The years had not been kind. I imagine he continued on his path of self-destruction.
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Mexicans are experts at suffering. They know pain and poverty, romance and retribution. They worship their mothers, create altars to their deceased, and dance with passion. Their food is to die for and their art is an enchantment.
I am not ashamed of endlessly falling in love with the seductiveness of the culture and with those denizens who seduce me. They have prepared me to be strong and pliable, to welcome adversity, impediments, vexations, and catastrophes.
I cannot yet say I welcome death. But I am preparing. I aspire to be beautifully outrageous. As if I had nothing left to lose.
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