NOTES

Writing about love is the easiest and the most difficult. That’s why there are countless love poems and love songs. Unrequited love, puppy love, abusive love, heart breaks, and breaking hearts…

Like that piano song that started, “How do I begin?”

How do I begin to write about the immense, extensive, and inexplicable love and endearment I feel for you? 

I could instead think of moment when I became conscious of it. The moment when I thought to myself: Thank God I am alive. At then same time, curiously and unsurprisingly, I could die right now and I would regret nothing. 

I thought of when we sat next to each other under that Bodhi tree, which probably has offered shade to many other couples lifetimes ago. We were in your favorite Bangkok neighborhood (you should know where I’m referring to). We went through alleys after alleys of electric apparatus. I did not understand what we were looking for or at. All these cables, machines, buttons, and switches. I await your glee, excitement and pure joy. Saw you grabbing each component with familiarity and precision. You knew how to hold them, and I saw how you could bring out their magnetic and magical potential. I was just looking at you in your world of creation, in my tropical world of grimy streets. I saw the delightful collide of your existence in a place I have drawn intentional distance from. For a transient moment, I felt what the poets and writers have written so much about. Is this love? Between home and love, and how each embodies another. 

You let small drops of tears fell while we were there. I am so happy. Thank you. You said. I probably said a few words in response, unsure of how to name these emotions. 

The feeling of love that was a certainty in this world of impermanence. It was a reassurance that I could do this again, and again. I would be willing and excited to repeat the same mundane activity with this very same person. Each time you find a novel wonder of another person, another universe and also a wonder within yourself, of being capable of looking again, listening again, feeling again. Wondering and be in wonder. 

To feel joy simply because another person does. 

Isn’t that magical? 

Today is a full moon (in cancer, if you must know). It was encouraged to manifest one’s dreams and desires. I thought for the whole day what they should be.

Just the night before, the US bombed Caracas, Venezuela, and thus began yet another American intervention in Latin America.

The last night of 2025 (2568), I was also told to think of 12 wishes to follow the tradition of eating 12 grapes at each first 12 seconds of the new year.

I couldn’t think of too many wishes. 12 were a lot. Sometimes, you simply forgot of what you had dreamed of.

Today, I came to the conclusion, however, that I have not been able to think of many wishes because:

1- What I want is something I could and will achieve out of my own will, dedication, management, and consistency. I don’t think making wishes would be necessary.

2- Many of my desires have already came true, as a result of 1) Victoria’s own self from the past. I have found and cared for a partner whom I love wholeheartedly and who love me. I have already found my twin-soul in this petite and feisty cat, Lucrecia. She loves Juan Pablo, and this love triangle is all I ever wanted and wished for. I wanted a home. I have run away from the geographical home for so long that I didn’t know many, if not most, of my [bad] decisions are derived from my need to escape. now I want to stay, wherever they are. Now we are renovating an apartment together. The possibility to grow plants sounds simple, but is a deeply sensitive topic for me. It requires caring for beautiful lives of other dialects, having a place where I would stay for long enough time to watch new wet leaves emerging out of enthusiastic branches, having the calm and routine to tend to them. Basically, it requires my having a home, my knowing that ‘the rampage is over, and I must rest,’ and my confronting my own pattern of running away to finally embracing a home.

3- What I used to think I should wish for, such as affluence and career advancement, I no longer desire them. Amidst all these wars, I do not think I ever ‘need’ anything that I couldn’t achieve on my own. I have what I need. I don’t need anything.

The only things I need perhaps are what lie beyond my power and control. I hope for these wars to fucking end, for stupid heads in power to stop. That may never happen, but I was told to make a wish, however ambitious. I hope for people to love each other better. Not more, but love–as a verb–each other in an actually understanding, reciprocal, and honest manner. I hope for myself and my loved ones to be free of illness, though I wonder if that would be possible when the air, earth, rivers are all contaminated. We can mutate. Again, I wasn’t told how ambitious I could and should be.

The wishes didn’t quite matter in the end. I will wake up early tomorrow to clock in for some cash, respond to Lucrecia’s persistent greetings, kiss Juan Pablo, and continue to care the way I know how, and find the little fissures in compressed time to write as much as I can, as earnest as I could. The world won’t change, if I do not change. Wishes won’t materialize, if I don’t mobilize. I must. With that, I hug my most precious beings, and breathe in the moon. Soon, she will fade into the day sky, and I hope–ah, now I wish!–to be here again before her, beneath her, reminding myself of this same, humble thought.

23:11, Ciudad de México

Always the hardest part about writing or about any creative practice is to start, to begin. Perhaps, writing at this moment in time has become a metaphor, or rather a proxy of my own life. To begin again, to start anew, though not completely, since the pasts are present and the memories, fragmented. To grow a tree in the cracks of the ruins that were and still are a part of you.

The world is literally burning. Wars are waged seemingly on the basis of differences, but, worse, are so for the acquisition of more resources, more land, more control, power, domination, satisfaction, pride, only to realize that land–the basis of it all–will crumble and crack under our feet and as we fall through the sinkhole of complacency and ignorance, we only see flashes of fleeting joy and, yet, still do not realize that this is all for nothing. A total destruction to no end, for no one.

We cannot be mobilized by hope, for hope is pinned upon relative comparison. Now is not good, but the future may. We do not know that. The far future, maybe, or the near one, who knows? Time isn’t linear, and I would rather be mobilized by the rituals, the repetition of the mundane, that which sustains the foundation of this world–relations, hopefully loving ones.

It may feel hopeless. It will appear to be bleak. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. We are in the bottomless and headless eel of a time tunnel, and to our death, we may never find direction, let alone an exit. Do not hope for that mythical light–make fire, create friction, so that now, at this moment of forever darkness, there are sparks, specks of brightness that reveal flashing images of who we are, or hope to be.

What would be the force that mobilize us then? Nothing.

A convenient and safe answer I could fall on is, perhaps and obviously, love. Yet, I am too bitter, and simultaneously too romantic. I do not want my commitment to love, to the yearning for a more gentle embrace, to be depended upon itself. I have yet to discover the correct word, but I could say with confidence, that even without hope, I still stand and still move, and allow myself to be moved. I wonder if this incapacity to articulate a clear answer is a consequence of my being in movement, in torment. I may be able to tell you with clarity when I could no longer move, nor mobilize. By then, there is no word to be uttered, only experiences to be felt.