Veronique came over for dinner; she just left. We always have great conversations, a French raised in an island and a Mexican raised in one of the most populated capitals of the world can have lots in common. At this very moment I'm drinking a glass of prosecco to fight the New York summer heat as I listen to Eric Clapton's Knockin' on Heavens Door. My favorite pastime, which I'm sometimes ashamed to accept, is to play music and contemplate. Just being; at ease. Staring deeply without focusing. Music outside, silence inside. A few lyrics from Bajo Fondo Tango Club grab my attention, "Me atravesó, tu suave vendaval, rumbo a tu recuredo seguí, la estela de tu perfume." This is so seductive that makes me fall in love with myself for a second.

Lily’s friend is the curator of the Lee Bontecue’s show at the MOMA, so we got invited for a tête-à-tête conversation with her as she walked us through every piece on the exhibition. The museum was closed today, so we got it all for ourselves. “This sculpture took Lee approximately 18 years for completion,” she told us as I wondered how each piece of the suspended sculpture came to life, and how Lee decided that the piece was finally finished, if ever. “Black holes are a constant in Bontecue’s art, so I got obsessed about them. So as many curators I’m now obsessed with the artists obsession.” Black in her work is actually deep, without any light or reflection, which makes it as soothing as unreal. It is hard to create; she used black velvet and burn materials with her welding pistol. Black reminds me of a line from RED, John Logan’s play on Mark Rothko: There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend. One day the black will swallow the red. Lee Bontacue, one of the few female artists of her generation, stopped showing her work for 35 years, until she accepted a retrospective at the MOMA a few years ago. “It’s unclear why she stopped showing her work, especially when she was recognized by some of the most important galleries.” As I try to make my own interpretation, again my reference goes back to RED, and Rothko’s reading on Jackson Pollock’s death: Suddenly he was a commodity. That Oldsmobile convertible really did kill him. Not because it crashed, because it existed. Bontecue’s works are untitled, so as her life, it is all open for the audience interpretation.


Where and how did I learn the script for my life? In the kind of work I do, scriptwriters have the power of scripting the way characters act in new and unexpected ways; therefore giving us, their audience, the possibility to rescript ours. A powerful script has the ability to reshape our imagination, to change the collective imaginary and even change social norms. There are so many ways to live, there are even more ways to tell the story of life; you can always choose the words you use to do so. As an amateur photographer I understand the importance of framing; selecting a piece of reality. But selection is not in the realm of scarcity, you can take as many pictures as you want, you can select as many frames as you wish. As an editor I know it is also possible to make your frames magical, sometimes. Reminding people about their ability to reframe their lives, to change their lens, is truly empowering. This pose an opportunity to rethink, redesign and add value to what they have decided; to where their decisions have taken them. It provides the chance to leave any guilt behind, to be kind to themselves, and to even start all over again. If they wish.

Some people ask the why, the what, and the how we all get to a certain definition of something; how we create a meaning. My guess is that these questions relate to the importance of utterance and affirmation. “Do you love me?” we often ask. “Why do you always ask me, you know I do,” we would get as an answer. How much meaning we create by saying and how much by doing? An action without naming is open to any interpretation; as all declaration without deed falls flat. Relationships of any kind are based on a shared responsibility; I own fifty percent of what we become when we are together. It is not about someone being a determined kind of person; it is about what I can do to make something great from what we share. Creating beauty out of what we got.

I try to kill a giant waterbug with my red mary janes as I wait for an email I wrote to Victor to go through. The internet connection is specially slow tonight. The AC is on and its noise fills the entire room. My sweat is cold by now. I've been accumulating lots of stories to write about on the blog, but it is precisely today that I feel sad that I take the time to do it. It might have been the tone on Victor's voice, or that I'm tired, or possibly that last night I questioned myself too many times the why I'm here; some nights the longing gets deep into the bone. Today, after work, I went to the top of Rockefeller Center to get a view of the city from another perspective. It has always amazed me the number of windows, and how each of them represents different characters, stories and possibilities. This city is both beautiful and tough, and it gives you as much as it takes. Sometimes you can frame yourself as part of an abundant whole, or some days like today, a tiny bit of something that gets lost in oblivion.

I love the feeling of being in what is called the "deep South". Betsy and her husband took me to hear her son Charlie, a fiddler, play Old-Time music. We sat by a tree on a yard filled with antiques and flying june bugs to watch him and his friends perform old songs that must have travelled from Scotland and Ireland into the Southern Appalachians. "Most of these songs were not written down, they have traveled through generations, so each time they play it they do it differently," Betsy said. "Charlie plays for himself, he just loves it and if someone happens to be listening it's only incidental. It doesn't really matter." For me it was a soothing experience watching him play waltzes with banjos and fiddles as he followed the rhythm tapping his bare feet on the ground. For a moment I felt I could live here, where life seems so straightforward and simple. There are so many lives one could live, it's just a matter of choosing it.

Sunday in Alabama

It was warm and humid as Connie and I sat at her porch drinking chilled Rosé and nibbled on rice crackers. I asked her to show me old pictures, so her husband pulled a couple of shoe boxes filled with photographs from the top closet drawers. We looked at pictures of her teenage son who died a year and a half ago, their trip to Italy, her upbringing in Iowa, as a teenager with long red hair, her PhD graduation and a set of Connie and her two children snuggling in bed. "These pictures are filled with love," her husband said as he placed one over the fireplace. The quiet Birmingham breeze was blowing as she walked me through the memories behind the pictures and the fate of the people in them. It made me feel I was listening to the story of my family. I like how lives intersect, mine and hers, from such different backgrounds and still being able to relate. "Would you consider moving to Alabama after you leave New York?" she asked. "It could be. You never know."

On the flight to Amsterdam I read about an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois' fabric works opening in Venice this month. I found out then that she had just died a few days before. "Art is the guarantee to sanity", she was quoted in the article. For me, the search for beauty and art are core signs of humanity, a call for the resilience of meaning. I spent my birthday in Amsterdam walking by the canals, and must have crossed several bridges as I returned to my room at night. It was the perfect analogy to start a new cycle; now at 32 there are many more bridges to cross.

Try once to measure your hand against mine

Try once to love me even when you don't know me
Try once to draw a giraffe with your left hand
Try once to speak out the precise word you are thinking right now
Try once to ask the right questions
Try once to recreate your dreams in origami
Try once to follow the dots in a different order each time
Try once to write something that doesn't make sense
Try once to name your plants
Try once to eat food without salt
Try once to find the right way to finish this blog
. --> dot

"Maria just left" I called Victor crying. Oscar and Lu took her to the airport, but I decided to stay home. Despedida is the word in Spanish for the act of saying good-bye, and up to this point I haven't found a word in English that fully translates it. This is not the first time that someone had left us. Agatha, Victor, Yoli, Laura and Pepe, and everyone else that had left New York in the past years: Maria Jose, Mark, Natalia, Martha and many others. I walked past Maria's bedroom and I could feel the absence of a space that suddenly belongs to no one. As it has happened in the past, new people will come, bringing new stories. That is the way of New York.

I kill a mosquito as it discreetly tries to walk on the table towards us. My Mom is sitting by me reading her email, or more precisely, opening all the attachments people sent her on mass emails. Power Points on the meaning of life, the price of living, selections of curious images from the web, or plain jokes. She opens them even as I try to convince her she shouldn't. She was raised at a time when all mail was meaningful, so she has an innate need to read carefully everything she gets. Her computer freezes, so she resets it. Now she is overlooking my monitor trying to understand what I write. I translate. She nods in silence, keeps staring to the monitor, laughs and kisses me. Her computer is working now. We can listen a Norah Jones' song playing from the bar by my house. My Mom stops reading to pay attention to the song. Music always hypnotizes her.

"When you travel on a plane your soul stays behind and it can take several hours to catch up with you," Sean said quoting a friend. After two weeks in the Caribbean, it feels like we need almost the same amount of time for our soul and energy to get back home. My Mom arrived to New York City the same day I did, so I've been sleeping in the guest room since Monday. I miss my bed, but I'm happy she'll be around for the next two weeks. I never thought I would see my Mom for short periods of time each year only, and we both agree this needs to change.

Today we went out to the first of a series of good-bye parties for Maria; she is moving back to Mexico next week. Oscar and I need to look for a new roommate and I need to fill the gap she's leaving behind. For the past year we've been very close and have shared the day-to-day ups and downs of living, working and loving in New York. She is moving to Mexico without any certainty of a job or even the slightest idea of what she'll do. When are we going to settle? My friend Arvind says we should embrace ambiguity as much as we embrace clarity, as the seeds of growth lie mostly in it. "Ambiguity and clarity are two sides of the same coin, and we carry multiple coins in our pockets all the time." Sometimes we are too hard on ourselves, wishing to have a road map for everything to be resolved. "When the flowers bloom the bees will come".

Rita and I assisted to our first cricket match on Sunday as the Cricket’s World Cup is being held at Barbados, St. Lucia and other West Indies countries. It’s hard to find something that Rita hasn’t done. At age 85 she has traveled to almost all countries (expect for perhaps Uruguay and Bhutan), she was a pilot, movie and theater actress, regular at Studio 54, personal friend of Rothko and of many other artists and one of the few people I know that can tell the story of New York City through personal anecdotes. Most importantly, she is still traveling, enjoying art, contributing with new ideas, dancing to drumbeats by the beach and willing to learn and experiment new things. We arrived to the stadium a few minutes after the match had started and we decided to seat with the Indian crowd as they cheered their team against South Africa. I haven’t seen so many Indians at the same place, not even in Jackson Heights, and definitely, I’ve never seen Indians dancing and moving their hips to Afro-Caribbean beats. “Are you from Australia, the UK or just a US cricket fan”, a man asked me. “From Mexico! You've got to be kidding”, he replied surprised to my answer. Sometimes we tend to forget how diverse the world is. Rita left the match before the South Africans had the chance to bat. “Now that I know how it works, I don’t need to see it all”, she said as she got into the taxi. I stayed with the Indians until the game ended to their favor, and the Australians and Pakistanis took their sits for the next game.

There are a few things in life that give me goose bumps, and tonight my full body was covered by the feeling of being at a unique time and space. We went to a street fête, and as every Friday night in St. Lucia, a DJ was playing all kinds of Caribbean music, from reggae to dub. I might be new to the Caribbean, but I'm certainly not new to this kind of music. I spent most of my teenage years in Guadalajara listening to reggae and falling in love for pot-smoking surfers; imagining life in Jamaica and singing Redemption Song. Little have I known of the strong connection between the commonwealth nations, and it's affinity to cricket. Tonight's fête was a street fair with food vendors selling fried chicken legs and carts selling liquor called "mobile bars". It was a special night as the make-shift dance floor at an intersection was packed with cricket players from India and Pakistan, and along them the honeymooners, Rastafaris, expats, homeless, drug-dealers and distracted tourists. As we all danced and sung to Bob Marley's One Love I felt as if a piece of my life had come to a full circle. Here I was, singing my old repertoire along people in turbans and dreadlocks, Muslims, Hindu, Sikhs and Rastafaris, at a Caribbean island and under a full moon. You can hardly get more real than that.

There is something surreal about waking up in St Lucia after spending a week in Bolivia. My nose is stuffed, my hair is frizzed, my skin sticky from humidity and I'm constipated, as I always do when I travel. I'm still trying to understand how an island could be a country, and to digest the idea that we crossed the entire country when we drove from the airport to our hotel. These Caribbean islands are closer in distance to South America, but tied to England and France by history. I'm having trouble identifying the core of the region's identity, although there is a unique hybrid culture between Africa and Europe. I want to discover what what makes them who they are. Colonialism is a beyond-complex issue. My only reference so far has been Latin America, where strong civilizations preexisted. I guess not having such deep roots to a land adds a whole other dimension to the equation. I don't have deep roots in Mexico either as my family arrived two or three generations ago. I guess what makes the difference is that Mexico is a cultural/identity vortex.