feliz fiestas

I had it in my head I’d write a bunch about the writing of the book after the solstice but I haven’t finished it and I’m indifferent. Instead, here’s this. Feliz fiestas and I wish a few moments of quiet in the skull and light, somehow, for you.

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In Caracas on Christmas Day, where it is equatorial, between seasons, my dad used to go out with the kids and roller skate the day away. My mother, and sometimes my father, are part of a crew picking up a child to take between school and the home the family has found here, because the mother is terrified of being snatched. I am in the middle of an age and I think about dying a lot lately, in no particular way other than holding it in my head and considering I am closer to it than I have ever been. I do not think it is likely I will bear any children, although I have approached it in some similar way I think about death, now, as a decision I felt like would be made for me. There is a car seat in the back of my parents’ car that always surprises me, but there it is. No one wanted to make hallacas this year, and I’d had a screen on my phone to order them when my ma texted me the mother of this child had made arepas and hallacas and pushed them into the hands of the drivers and volunteers, my father who took them, a gift unlike any other. In Venezuela hallacas are made with what was assumed were the meat scraps of the wealthy: pork, beef, chicken, tocino, a big stew. They smell of annatto and the almost rot of banana leaves. It is not that Christmas is not hard and hasn’t been. I lay awake on noche buena as I do most nights, recently, in the equator between wildly grateful for the room I sleep in and my body as it works now, and so deeply sad for what is that counterweight. It is warm here in Chicago and I have wished for any sort of armistice but know it is not there, somehow all of us so far gone from all the never agains the people who slipped through promised, decisions they mostly did not make themselves. I am grateful I am grateful I am grateful and think about clarion calls from essential angels, to give of ourselves something we are called to do, beyond deciding. To all, at least once, a noche buena.