05/09/12

Camila,

I am in Dinuba and you are everywhere.

I arrived here last night and there was something of you in the way it seemed to open like a soft hand as I drove in from Road 80. I hadn’t been here since we were last together so many years ago and I drove around trying to remember how it used to be. I don’t think it’s changed much. The wind in October is still beautiful.

I parked at the movie theater when I got tired of driving. It was almost midnight and no one was there. I remembered our first date. How we left the theater and walked to the gazebo and touched hands for the first time in the late dusk as the theater’s neon sign buzzed behind us. We were so young and that memory is still so clear.

I miss you, Camila. I grew to be horrible and miserable to you and I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to hate me. I’m full of anger now and I write this letter because I want you to know how I feel. I spoke little when we were last together and I couldn’t because I think I blamed myself for your suffering. That I had planted some kind of anguish in you that took root in your cells and gradually killed you from the inside out.

They say there is a man here who can travel into the past simply by thinking it. His name is Mictlán. I don’t know when or how far into the past he is able to go, but I think I’ll go see him. If you are reading this, that means I’ve seen him and this may be you before we were together or this may be you after, but I think it only matters that it’s you. That you can see what I’ve written and know that I care.

Camila, you are probably wondering why I’m in Dinuba. I was sent here. I’m looking into the disappearance of a woman. Someone called the agency and requested me by name. I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, ‘You shouldn’t have taken it. Why would you go back to Dinuba?” But I couldn’t help it, Camila. I had to come back. There is little for me elsewhere and you know that best. I only go away to try and forget.

I long to see you, Camila. I’d like to feel the nighttime wind with you. It’s still beautiful in October. I’ll write you again soon.

Love,

M.

05-09-19

Camila, I think of you still. I grunt like an animal. Do you miss me? You exist without me in past times and they say memory is is timeless and circuits through a lifecycle like a pulse without end. So do you know me? Do you miss me? I wake every morning and I can’t stop thinking about you or of you. There are things here that seem to be you and I spend my mind on them and I cannot understand them. Can you believe things can be hard to understand? Impossible to know? Because I am confused because everything is knowable. I speak in half words and animal sounds and sing the same way because I know you loved singing and so I try to love with my voice so you can feel me across dimensions and stop missing me because I am here living ahead of you sending my love through time. Mictlán says he found you and that he found you and that he found you and that he found you and that he found you and that he found you alone one morning and gave you the first letter I wrote so long ago and that you said nothing and that when he returned a second time with my second letter you were with a man who held you like wanting to remember a dream, but that you took my second letter still despite the loving man and that you held it in your fingers the way anyone holds something delicate like a thing made of glass or sand and placed it in your bag without looking at the man and so I think you know, Camila, I think you know of me and miss me because even though you are in a past different from our past, you can feel me across this dimension because even though we are different at different times, we are still the same person. Look at me, I am from a future you’ll never know and I know you as you were here and the way you are there and I know you can feel it, Camila, feel the warmth of my hands like you did when we were young and the way we kissed with dry lips because we were both so anxious and I think the essence of that remains with a person through time and across time and through the forgetting of memories. Camila, there is a man who lives in the wind and he has explained his life to me. He has explained the death of the woman I wrote you about so long ago and I thought I could do it alone, I thought I could. I couldn’t and I thought only of you and why you left without speaking to me and I’ll remember two things always, even through the collapse of memory and the loss of faculty, the way you willed yourself to forget me, the way you did it like learning the movement of a new muscle and I won’t forget the taste of rose petals. But you remember me now and you’ve remembered me for years and now I await for Mictlán to return again with more than just words about you and with words from you. Camila, I can only write to you and I will continue to sing to breach dimensions and we are entangled and forever I’ll sing to you and you will move as I won’t move. Camila, do you miss me? Tell me, do you miss me?

—–M.