emptiness vs repletion

emptiness


In the sombre and modest downtown of San Ignacio, I stumbled upon a dog. I cannot properly refer to the animal as he or she, being as the body was so emaciated, the sex organs were nearly unidentifiable. Because I could not bear to refer to this animal as "it", I am going to choose to speak of her as though she was of my own kind.

My heart broke instantaneously upon setting sights on her; although I have seen some very hapless, haggard and starved creatures since traveling, none have thrown me into such a state of near despair.

She was so thin that each rib was plainly discernible beneath the tightly fitting sheath of skin and patchy, scant fur. Her tail was meager and feeble like a bone near breaking with age and prostration, she had clearly been battered and denied and kicked and eaten at by insects. She gazed timidly but eagerly up at passerby, including us; following a few steps slowly behind, there was a clear sense that she was barely clinging to a miniscule and faded shred of hope that someone, anyone may take pity on her and toss her a crumb, an unwanted and stale sliver of meat. Or perhaps touch her head in passing, scratch behind her neglected ears, decrepit, blanched, and wasted away as they were. Uncaring and ambivalent, cruel and callous ....even the few sympathetic, or the even fewer horrified (only foreigners, such as myself) were too terrified of disease to go near enough to offer a smidgeon of comfort or tenderness.

She trotted and stumbled on meager, unsteady legs after us slowly, watching us with ears pressed back to her head in humiliation and gentle desperation. When we walked too far for her to keep her wayworn eyes upon us in wait and despondent aspiration, her crippled form hobbled to a stop along the curb as she spotted a crushed piece of wrapper and tried to pick at it in vain, hoping for any kind of sustenance. As with the thousand times before, there was no sustenance to be found on these roads, in these alleys and markets and tiendas and bottomless holes; there was nothing life could offer her except for emptiness.

While waiting in line to use the ATM, I could not tear my eyes from her. I nearly broke down in public.

I watched as she nearly got ran over because she was slow to cross the road,
I watched as another dog appeared from the din, a dog that was beyond healthy;fit, with a robust and rich brown coat of fur, shiny and full...a steady and quick gait, alert and lively eyes. I watched her regard him in weak excitement and approach him tentatively, once again seeking some semblance of accord, alliance, or rapport; I watched as she was once more negated, as her strong and virile fellow progeny regarded her with uncomfortable indisposition and moved away from her curious nose and gaze.
I watched her and saw her as more than just one dog; in my eyes she became the widespread carnage, the populace and locality, the indigenous, the starving and diseased, the forgotten, the neglected, a panoramic view of the far less fortunate. I was the hardy dog with lustrous chestnut hair, ignorant of my own blessings, blind to the annihilation right under my flourishing snout.

This instilled a disquiet in my spirit unlike anything I have ever experienced or been able to shake, the witnessing of this dog and the resulting realizations that have followed it like dominos crashing and collapsing into one another (as the steady but inevitable crumbling of an empire). The mental photograph, the supposition-they have possessed me, quietly and subtly, and although indiscernible most times, it has become a savage plague.

I can't stop seeing it.
In my head, it hounds me- the guilt, the shame, the bedraggled image-now slightly faded with age and overcast, hazy and weak and staggering along the littered canals of my mind like a discarded ribbon of film stripped of its carrier and sent spiraling down the dirty streets of the city center of the capital of Cayo.
Every time I think of the food on my plate,
every time I look in the mirror at my healthy frame and feel even the remotest of discontent,
at any given point in the day for vague reasons beyond my perception and cognizance;
It will not leave me.
The impression on my memory, haunting but not quite unwelcome, a privation- a message sent to live within me in a place that was merely prodded in the past, but never quite penetrated as deeply as necessary to leave a lasting brand.
Something so lackluster is not completely without color; learning is so often a kick and punching struggle that leaves one breathless and panting and bruised, sweaty satisfaction attained through the lost blood and muscle aching deep.
Even without the threat of malaria, everyone hates mosquitoes, is terrified by the idea of a creature (size aside) suckling their blood, draining a smidgeon of their essence.

This mental construction is my mosquito.
The unnerving sounds of it buzzing near the drums of my ears wakes me in my sleep,
as I fight the infection,
the (self) sickness.

And I know I'm not supposed to scratch it, but I can't help it, it itches terribly...no, stop, take your fingers away, it will spread, and then the antibiotics will have been trivial. Stop. Leave it. Let it heal. But the urge to prod it is nearly unbearable,
and suddenly it becomes so much more than simply a persistent and agonizing phantasm.
It swells and subsists; I feel it nag me and then fall away; it tugs at my edges and threatens to consume me each time I try to contemplate it and dissimilate it into something I can comprehend and absorb, learn from.

It is not always the mandatory nature of the medicine that leads me to plan days around the next meal; it has become bad habit, and perhaps it is far from gluttony,
but each morsel of my life (figuratively literally, of course) that I have taken for granted has begun to slowly but surely gnaw at me, chewing my insides as I feast upon and swallow the salt of benefaction.
In my eyes tonight I became merely an animal, always in wait of the next feeding time.
It is easy to find scapegoats and we can ignore the truth even as it glares acutely, straight into our irises with undeniable ferocity, but even as we stand strong in the face of the beast, we will not realize it is corroding our core; in the end the result is still destruction. The longer you hide, the more a children's game of pretend seeks delusion and volition becomes, unknowingly, beyond your control.

And I can't share it openly, it is not so simple to express, to understand and to compress into something measurable.
For days I considered sharing it with him; however, I can't allow myself that concession so lightly and so smoothly- for to bestow it onto another means it becomes less pure, less virtuous; it will become something that takes solace and consolation in the compassion of others, but it is not compassion I seek; compassion is a luxury that will only inflate and encourage my own malefaction, and this is not about me. Not nearly.
I don't want help, right now.
She didn't get any.






There is a strange and sad magic here, in Mexico,
I see women wearing purple lipstick like I used to do when I was eleven and twelve,
when I was still vastly unaware of my own vacillation,
and would look upon my own reflection and see nothing more than something to be disguised;
but I love how sugar is accompanied by spice,
everything sweet has an edge.


(C)