While We Wait (to Hold Each Other Once Again) - A letter to my lover from across the Mexican border in times of lockdown

Writing

May 27

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On March 20th, the US-Mexican border, the most heavily trafficked land port of entry, was closed for “non-essential” workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to quarantine in the same household, families, friends, and lovers have since been separated until further notice.

May 13th, 2020

Neville,

I no longer know how to translate this pain. It’s been nearly fifty-four days since we shared the same bed, since we held each other in a warm embrace and whispered eternal love, a declaration only audible to the texture and folds of our skin. The last time we showered together, there was music playing in the background and warm water pouring down my back and shoulders. I couldn’t hear the music nor feel the water, but I could wrap my arms around your lower waist to bring you closer to me. To touch you, to taste you, to bathe you in salt, that was called living. You see, what the way your body moves and talks and questions mine has taught me is that there is so much beauty to be found in the mundane. Maybe it’s silly to say it out loud. Maybe a declaration of love so pure might seem obsessive, overdone at times, empty and lacking given how many other lovers have said the same words before in vain. But it doesn’t matter, because this letter is for you, just for you.

We have nothing left but the heavy drag of the light shifting across the room in sharp angles, bringing with it occasional warmth. Somedays, it doesn’t even show up, it sits behind a bed of clouds, and so we shut the blinds, maybe light a candle. We pretend it’s the sun or we sit in the dark and feel our limbs as they harden with time. Legs, shoulders, neck, spine. I stretch in bed whenever I remember to. I pick up a pen, press it across tomorrow and the day after, I stop at the 30th, and jot down a question mark. I scribble over it and remind myself that hoping for the best has done nothing but prove to be the quickest route to disappointment. The line between optimism and foolishness shaves itself thinner every day I don’t leave the house.

When I was younger, I used to run from my parent’s house all the way to the beach, all the way to the tall, brown fence that rose from the sand to mark the limits of my country, a border that, to this day, keeps growing taller. Some people say it grows to make space for more names to be written on it. The names of the lost, the names of the dead, the names of the mothers and fathers and children and lovers, lovers just like us, separated by the doings of those whose understanding of the world does not fit compassion. So, I do what I do best and cry. I cry for you, and I cry for everybody else because that’s the only thing I can do. I cry for myself last, and then I keep the tears in a jar to remind myself that sometimes sorrow deserves to be held as tenderly as we hold joy.

It is on this beach that I sit to write this letter. My bed is the sand, and the sheets are the waves that leave on me the scent of the bodies they shower. This kind of loneliness feels so familiar. The turning of the handle, the piling of cups and glasses and wraps, the not-looking-forward-to-anything that comes like clockwork when I stare at accumulated toilet paper used to wipe the cum off my belly, reminiscent of sweaty armpits and long-overdue showers, and that heaviness and that knot on the side of the neck that, like a night bird, keeps me turning and twisting down and to the right, forward and to the left, up and down and then a momentary sense of relief before the handle turns again.

I don’t know how to drive, but last night I dreamt I knew how to just to go see you, and when I drove across the border the CBPs had no questions, the freeway lay empty, and you were waiting for me at 12 & Imperial just like the first time we met, with your shorts on and your hair in twists, waiving and calling my name, smiling the way we both smile with wrinkles around our eyes, and we took the trolley up to Seaport Village, and we talked about making chicken stew for dinner, and we bought a small bag of cuties, and we ate them all in one sitting.

It’s strange to think of a time when I took your embrace for granted, your fingers braided with mine, our legs clasped together in bed, how I’d turn to let you hug me from behind in the middle of the night, putting your warm palms over my lower stomach, how you’d whisper “my baby, my baby, my baby, I love you, my baby.” It’s strange to think that we’d be set apart, not by our past or by mutual hurt, by a disconnect in our frequencies, but something greater and more threatening. It’s easier to fall apart when love turns sour on both ends, when missing comes with an underlying feeling that it was all for the best.

I sit to wait for the pears rot and turn sour. I sit to feel the tangerines and lemons in my garden run dry. I sit in the shower, and my tears blend in with the water. I remember bathing your body, adoring it, grasping your fullness in my palms, nurturing it, admiring the way the liquid would fall and change with your chest, change with your legs, change with the small of your back. I sit and cry for the way I’d take your face in my hands and kiss your eyelids, kiss your forehead, kiss your cheeks. It takes me back to epsom salt and white wine nights in the bathtub. My fingertips conjure back your presence, and I trace in the air your body, and, when consciousness falls back into this body, I pretend to hold you with eyes shut.

And while we wait to hold each other once again, the unkempt grass grows for nobody to see, it cuts the pavement in strings and you, you move like the wind shifts and chases, you shine hard and call and go through hair, through doors and tunnels and branches, you reach the depth of the water, the roots in the soil, the bottom of the glass. And it is then that I am reminded that things exist in a perpetual state of chaos, and life is only trying to figure out how to cope with the fact that there is no such thing as a consistent state of peace. Peace, like water, cannot be held or attained, and it only grows more unattainable there more we point out its lack in presence. And in this chaos, I write to tell you this: I’ve loved you, and I love you still, like I love the soft early-morning light.

Yours truly,
Andrés

Andrés Hernández is a self-taught queer Mexican artist currently based in the border city of Tijuana, Baja California. Their work aims to document and explore personal experiences centered around intimacy and vulnerability. They have been featured in publications such as Kaltblut, Pineapple, and Inverosímil.

Email: andres.hdz.zeta@gmail.com
Online portfolio: https://www.andreshernandez.space/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewgrams/

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