The Anatomy of An Aguamala

The Box Man knows that loneliness chosen loses its sting and claims no victims. He declares what we all know in the secret passages of our own nights, that although we long for perfect harmony, communion, and blending with another soul, this is a solo voyage.
The first half of our lives is spent stubbornly denying it. As children we acquire language to make our selves understood and soon learn from the blank stares in response to our babblings that even these, our saviors, our parents, are strangers. in adolescence when we replay earlier dramas with peers in the place of parents, we begin the quest for the best friend, that person who will receive all thoughts as if they were her own. Later we assert that true love will find the way. True love finds many ways, but no escape from exile. The shores are littered with us, Annas and Ophelias, Emmas, and Juliets, all outcasts from the dream of perfect understanding. We might as well draw the night around us and find solace there and a friend in our own voice.

One could do worse than be a collector of boxes.

I fancy myself a collector. I’m collecting words and stories and photographs of my memories. They aren’t mine to keep, but I can cherish them during my time in this world and before I’m gone I’ll lock them away in a little wooden box and bury it under a tree who’s seen even more remarkable things than I have and hide my treasures for someone else to discover and collect all over again. That’s how i like to think of my life and if I ever feel there isn”t enough time to see every thing I’d like to see, read all the books I dream of in libraries all around the world. I just think that i’ll have to make a list like a treasure hunt, and someone else will have to explore these things for me when I start to fade.

I’m worried most about my stories.

A panicked, the-sea-is-churning-and-i’m-in-a-rowboat-without-my-oars-and-oh-dear-oh-my-i’m-slipping-and-i-forgot-how-to-swim kind of a worry. The worry sends my neurons into a flurry of anxiety, little impulses singing the corners of my brain and gasping, someone please understand, please listen these crazy thoughts I hide away in these frightening seas of my mind.

I’m worried I won’t get to write all the stories I have dancing about in my foggy little head. They come to me at midnight, clamering through my window and travelling like spirits amongst the fog under cracks in my door and through furnace-flamed air vents. They whisper sweet nothings, beating on my ear drums and playing with the tenacity of my heart: beautiful muses filling my head with make believe boys to fall in love with while I sleep. I can never remember them in the mornings.

I’m worried I don’t even have the words to explain them. I have an affinity for words maybe, but if anything I’m just a curator. Like those paper projects they gave us in kindergarten to see if we could cut straight lines and use glue sparingly, I’m arranging words on a page. Maybe that’s not enough.

What makes people feel things? Which words make us feel less alone and more beautiful and entirely loved and appreciated? I keep my best ideas under lock and key behind lips sealed with the lie cross my heart and hope to die. I’m so, so terrified for anyone to see what’s inside my mind. (At the same time, I’m desperate for it.)

It’s so hard to for me to write with TVs in the background or cars rumbling past my windows. I need peace and quiet and old parchment and a sooty pencil with a perfectly sharp tip that orchestrates a scribble-scratch soundtrack to my thoughts as I rush to get them onto the paper and out of my head. I’m trying. Please understand.