Contigo puedo ser // With you, I can be: 7 stories of a love

1

We were standing in the kitchen, facing the window. He put his arm around my shoulder and said in Spanish, imagine if we opened a mobile art store on a camper van; I do tattoos, dreadlocks, piercings, and you do paintings. We travel the world and make art together. Would you like that? Sí, me gustaría. I said at 2 in the morning, softy and definitely, more softly and definitely than I ever remember being. Because I was drunk on little sleep, and he on caguama; but we were definitely drunk on something stronger, something even stronger in after effect. That would last for months, and what I hope to be years.

Phrase #1 that we’re gonna paint on our camper van.

2

He was trying to explain what “Qué poca madre” means, and I was yawning. He wanted me to go to sleep, but I didn’t. So I kept kissing him, interrupting his sentence that he couldn’t get out more than two words at once. I sucked his under lip, and his finger pressed harder into my shoulder. He bit my under lip and asked me if it hurt. “No,” I said — when I wanted to say, no, it gives the opposite of hurt; it gives pleasure, so much pleasure, so many multitudes of pleasure. I kissed his neck, and he kissed mine. “Me haces sentir mucho,” I say the line I looked up earlier that day, because I knew I would want to say that to him. He said it back. “No tienes mucho sueño ahora? Los besos tienen este efecto.”

Phrase #2.

3

He runs his finger from my forehead down to my nose. In another life, you’ll know it’s me when I do this, he says. My tears come pouring out. You have said the same thing in the past life, I say.

4

“Sígame!” He shouted to me on the bike.

5

He said, can I read something and you tell me if my pronunciation is good?

I say, sure. I pull up The Little Prince.

“Once?” He said, as in the Spanish word for “eleven.”

6

We’re standing by the sinks. I’m brushing my teeth. He peers over the column that separates the two sinks: “Hola.”

“Hola.”

“Como te llamas?”

“Mm — ” I am rinsing my mouth with water.

He feels sorry for distracting me and waves his act away, “Lo siento — ”

But I wouldn’t let him end what’s going on here. I would never miss out on an opportunity to create a story. “Me llamo…” Let me think, “Logan.”

“Guau. Me gusta este nombre.”

“Y tú?”

“Metztli.”

“Guau.”

“De dónde eres?” We say at the same time.

My eyes light up, “Tenemos…” I’m searching among my limited vocabulary in Spanish, this language of his, this beautiful, beautiful language of his.

“Sincronía.” He finishes my sentence. He always does. He reaches into the depths of the universe, where our souls connect, feels what I want to say, and says it for me. Like if the universe is made up of layers of existence, which are made up of wavelengths, and we are all looking for people on the same wavelength as us, people who we vibe with, people with whom we feel like we’re home. Like we’re on this trampoline of a wavelength; I jump, and he feels the layer of existence tremble under his feet, so he also bounces.

“Soy de Finlandia. Mis padres son de China, y emigraron a Finlandia.” I enter into this act with him. I think of Lotus, on that dusk by the Berlin canal, where she told me of a game she and her boyfriend played. They pretended to be strangers on a first date, and they talked about their boyfriend/girlfriend in third person — when, really, they are talking about each other.

“Y qué estas haciendo aquí?”

“Estoy trabajando aquí. De verdad conocí un chico aquí, y estamos muy enamorados.”

“Ah sí? Es tu novio?” He asks with an innocent face, his real-life personality yearning to break free.

“Sí.” I say sweetly, soothing Nox, hushing him back in.

The act goes on. “Cómo se llama?”

“Mario, pero yo digo Nox.”

“Guau. Nox y Miztla son nombres similares; ambos son de Náhuatl.”

“Y tú? De dónde eres?”

“De la luna.” Wow. He really went all out. And he’s met his counterpart: I happen to be a trained improv actor.

“Guau! Y qué estás haciendo aquí?”

“Estoy aquí para conocer este planeta.”

He then went on to tell me about his life on the moon, how it’s beautiful but a little lonely, how there are no humans but it’s good, because there are stars and spaceships. And I’m not supposed to tell anyone about the spaceships, because it’s a secret; if others knew, he would be kicked out from the moon.

“Te invitó a ti y tu novio a mi casa un día.”

“Sí?!”

As I’m racking my brain for a way to make Metztli and Nox meet, he cuts off my thought: “De verdad también conocí una chica aquí. Estoy muy enamorado en ella. Cada noche veo que ella camina, veo su sueño, veo cuando llora, cuando esta feliz , cuando está triste. Veo su locura también. No puedo verla en el día, porque el sol es demasiado brillante. Cada noche espero por ella. Por eso quedo aquí. No quiero volver a la luna.”

Tears gather in my eyes. I can’t believe this extraterrestrial creature is standing in front of me, loving me, determined to share a life with me.

Now it’s my turn to falter. My act starts to waver. I’m shaking a little. My real-life personality wants to jump out and hug him, hold him, kiss him, but none of these actions would suffice. None could express how deeply he has touched my soul, so I stay in the limbo space between my character and my identity, Logan and Arden, gazing at him, gazing at his galaxy of a story, gazing at one of the greatest loves of my life.

“No eres real.” I muffle into his shoulder.

“Sí, soy tan real como los latidos de mi corazón que palpita por ti.”

I will write this story into a book for you, illustrated and everything, he said. The trampoline we’re on vibrates.

Let’s illustrate it together, I said, I’ll do the background and you’ll do the characters.

We’ll make it a book that never finishes.

We should collect paper from the streets, stores we visit, and so on, and with each paper we collect, we use that to add one page to the story, I said.

We’ll collect paper from every place we’ve been to.

This layer of existence of ours is a marvelous trampoline.

“This moment is really beautiful, isn’t it?” in traditional Chinese.

7

“Hola.”

“Hola, cómo se llama?”

“Alberto. Y tú?”

“Uhhhhh…Zhengting. Mucho gusto.”

“Mucho gusto. De dónde eres?”

“Japón. Y tú?”

“Alaska.”

“Ah, so we can speak in English?”

“No…”

“Por qué?”

“Porque me aparto de las personas. Solomente fui porque me gusta el frio.”

“Que voy a decir puede ser un poco extraño, pero siento que te he conocido antes.”

“Yo también. Porque te veía a pasar.”

“En dónde?’

“En los lugares. Y sentí que te conocía.”

[The conversation continues like this for a few minutes.]

“Eres hermosa.”

“Gracias, pero soy un chico.”

“No me importa.”

“…Sí? Por supuesto no te importa. Porque no nos conocimos.”

“En la vida pasada, eras mujer.”

“Y cómo sabes que yo soy esta persona?”

“Porque lo siento. Es intuición. Es como cuando entras tu habitación con la luz apagada, y encuentras tu cama, aunque no la veas, sabes que esta allí.”

I reach for the light switch and turn off the lights. I kiss him. “Y ahora he encontrado mi cama.”

We cry. These are the conversations that we decided are going to take place, before we are born. Before Alberto and Zhengting were born. Before his soul reincarnates into Alberto, and mine Zhengting.

Perhaps it is precisely in this life that we decide that we will find each other in every other life, past and future, because time does not exist in souls. This is really what we are doing right now: we are rehearsing the conversations we are to have, have had, are having in other lives. We are writing the scripts. We are the gods of our lives.