Pariah

“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.” Charles Bukowski

There’s a luminous side to being a pariah. What tortured me when I was nineteen today liberates me. There’s no ground that recognizes my footsteps, and no wall that holds my breath. I have no stories of lifelong friendships or high school sweethearts. I’ve survived on solitary, spontaneous sparks that break in the immensity of movement. Nothing ties me to this earth, no one makes me stay anywhere, any place is my home, and somewhere calls me constantly.

April 1st.

I’m smoking at the bus terminal, waiting for my bus to get back on the road after a stop in Guanajuato. Since my Pulp-Fiction-Moment my kidneys have been acting out and I’m no longer peeing, I’m just bleeding, so I had to get back to my dad’s house to get my stuff and see a doctor. People walk by looking lost, some of them walk in pairs and they’re so centered in each other they don’t even realize which bus they’re supposed to get in.

As I smoke near my bus I watch the new passengers. I befriended an English dentist and later I’ll befriend an interesting engineer, both of them were sitting to close to me to spare themselves of my extroversion.

As I watched the fields through my window, I start grasping the real freedom my divorce is buying me: I can go anywhere, I can do anything. No one will try to save me this time by being painfully controlling. I fell in love with SM as a substitute for Him, I transferred my infatuation and developed a crush in a tourist-filled small Mexican town.

This month I’m moving for the fiftieth time in my life, to the seventh state I’ve ever called home. Being brought up a nomad made change normal and necessary, If I grew roots I’d probably wither, so now I’ve got to get away, I’ve got to get away.

But Lautrec decided to follow me, in his last attempt to keep me around, or in his words, get me back. That’s ok, freedom is freedom, and even if we do become roomies, I just acquired something I’ve been longing for ever since he popped the question. I just got what I was looking for when I cheated on him, days after he proposed: freedom and independence.

“I don’t belong to you, I don’t belong to you, I don’t belong to anyone!” but I did, that’s why cheating hurt. Now I don’t, that’s why my back is so light and my legs are so fast.

Born in Guadalajara in 1992, I moved across the country mid 1993 to Wreck City, then in 1998 began our official peregrination: Sinaloa, Oaxaca, and Aguascalientes in two years. I moved to Querétaro Bat Country with my mother in 2004, and back to Wreck City by myself in 2012. Psychotic break, narcotics possession and me wanting to get clean left me in Hidalgo in 2014, only to get transfered to a much worse place in Wreck City three months later. back to Aguascalientes (Stepford) in 2014 and San Miguel in 2015. That’s seven states and fifty houses, apartments, a house with a tennis court, hotels and motels, two hellholes and a halfway house in twenty-two years, with me still planning to leave the country in a year or two.

But physical and mundane freedom are nothing unless inner freedom has been mastered, or, at least, known. I can now reclaim my life back, I don’t have to think of Lautrec as I make plans. I can go back to college and leave the country, take a year off and go backpacking, write for thirty hours straight without considering his real or hypothetical plans. My life is mine and the value of that melts in my mouth like the sweetest thing.

The first book I ever started writing is called Ithaca, I’ll finish that book in the summer, as it is the continuation of Iliás. The book was about me trying to regain some feeling of belonging, a sense of home. I was nineteen when I started writing it, and I had just left my mother’s house and moved to Wreck City. I drank -a lot- but I hadn’t tried Cocaine, so my life was still pretty pure and naive-ish. Today something wonderful has happened: I am no longer looking for my home, I have accepted that homes are temporary -weather my home is a place or a person: the feeling will fade- and I have decided not to suffer about my nomadic ways anymore.

I tend to reference music, books, movies or only authors -by quotes- that I like in my posts, and Closer is one of my favorite movies of all time. Gaby once said I looked a bit like Natalie Portman, and that’s been one of the best compliments I’ve ever received, but that’s not why I quote Closer and specially Alice so often. Alice is the type of woman I would consider my kind flirty, extroverted, unusual and elusive, oh so heartbreakingly elusive. 

And right now, with the whole Lautrec drama, she provides excellent projections.

Dan: And you left him, just like that?

Alice: It’s the only way to leave. “I don’t love you anymore. Goodbye.”

Dan: Supposing you do still love them?

Alice: You don’t leave.

Dan: You’ve never left someone you still love?

Alice: Nope.

I’ve been staying up all night too many nights by now, but lately I use those nights to write or talk to interesting people, Z is one of them, and my personal pilgrimage tragedy is depicted perfectly in the next conversation.

There is in the end, nothing left to do. No Farah/Regina to fight. I will go on accepting my nature, and down the wanderlust trail, even though the price of freedom is normally loneliness, a loneliness too excruciating to accept right away, I am now willing to pay that price.

I’ll be alone but not lonely from now on, free but as un-reckless as possible (yeah, I think I just made that word up). I’ll choose life, sober up before the year is done, write, publish, collaborate, send my pictures to SG and go back to college. Life is hard, but it is also sweet, because as one of my mother’s many spiritual gurus once said to us in a hippy-ass workshop:

Life isn’t fair, but it is generous.

The monologue is what counts for this post.

I was in the winter of my life, and the men and women I met along the road were my only summer. At night I fell sleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with them. Six Three years down the line of being on an endless world tour and my memories of them were the only things that sustained me, and my only real happy times

I was a writer singer, not a very popular one, I once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like million stars in the night sky, that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken, but I really didn’t mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is.

When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing. How I had been living, they asked me why, but there’s no use in talking to people who have a home, they have no idea what its like to seek safety in other people, for home to be wherever you lie you head.

I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me that I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing me due north, no fixed personality, just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide as wavering as the ocean, and if I said I didn’t plan for it to turn out this way I’d be lying.

Because I was born to be the other woman, who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone, who had nothing, who wanted everything. With a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about it, and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.

[Song]

Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did, on the open road, on groups and online, because I’m such a dork. We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art. (…) I believe in the person I want to become, I believe in the freedom of the open road, and my motto is the same as ever “I believe in the kindness of strangers”. And when I’m at war with myself, I ride, I just ride.
I (might be) am fucking crazy, but I am free.

“

Heartbreak opens on to the sunrise, for even breaking is opening, and I’m broken, I’m open. See the love shine in trough my cracks, see the light shine out through me. My spirit takes journey, my spirit takes flight, and I am not running, I am choosing.

“

I lost my sense of home, and a lot of common people are to anesthetized to wonder if they have one or not. But I know He lost it too, as well as many people I love, and I can only hope, seriously hope, that they find a way to be confortable with the nomad trail, or that they find a home stable enough for them to bloom.

Back to my little attempts to get my readers to interact:

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Where, What or Who is your home (or has been)?