mourning in mexico city
journal entries and film photos from a sad nomad
june 20, 2021
the final days of 2017 brought me a lot.
with the recent end of a resentment-filled years long relationship, i was freshly 19 and desperate for something new. naturally, i flew myself to paris.
i arrived mid-morning after three insane days in new york city and spent my first-ever hours in europe garden and museum hopping, people-watching, dining, and drinking, the most appropriate way i knew to.
my night was spent at the dorm style hostel room alone (a rare pleasure), but as i stumbled home late at night after being out all day the next, i discovered someone asleep in the once-empty bed: marina, a thirty-year-old woman from mexico city.
“are you a virgo?” i ask her in the morning as we introduce ourselves and she shows me her hour-by-hour parisian itinerary. of course, she is.
we go our separate ways and meet afterward for drinks. laughing the night away over stories, mojitos, and beers, i’m quickly drunk for the like, third time ever.
on the way home we purchase tequila beers (appropriately named “desperados”) and a bottle of rosè, which i quickly decided, after less than 48 hours in france, was by far my favorite wine variation.
while attempting to open it, without an opener between us, i drunkenly drop its entirety down the hostel’s windy and white staircase, gasping in disbelief and surprise as thin pink liquid and clear glass spill the ground after its open-air travel of four floors. after helping the night shift sop and sweep i run back to the room where we laugh harder and through the morning.
here is how i find myself today in cdmx.
june 21, 2021
it is very obvious i am not from mexico city. though the city of nine million, north america’s most populous, homes a wide arrange of faces, races, sexualities, religions, statuses, and histories, i somehow stand out at this table of seven.
too diverse; my glazed eyes scan over the bottles of amber beer, mezcal, passionfruit flavored mezcal, canned michaeladas and empty pizza boxes.
perhaps it’s that i’m sitting and watching them converse, recognizing only every third word, acknowledging how disconnected and disassociated i must appear.
i’m thinking of other things; my day, the art i create…
june 22, 2021
convinced somewhere along the way my prominent palestinian genes would gift me a unibrow, and that such growth was undesirable, with my mother’s razor i’d religiously shave the phantasmic fuzzy bridge between my eyebrows, its square form present in every picture taken of me from 12 to 14.
and then i met frida. in her presence is where i first decided to devalue the male gaze and praise my unconventionality, all within a brief high school art class lesson on her life.
i’m reminded of this as i wander the city’s frida kahlo museum, its cobalt-colored venue her former home. mesmerized and staring at the emerald and gold framed nickolas muray portrait of her draped in magenta, i can’t help but shed a tear; for she is so beautiful, and she looks just like me.
june 30, 2021
my nails have been professionally scrubbed and picked, painted with a mauve pink gel polish. this fails to mask my felt pain. i’m wondering where i lost my tenderness, my forgiveness.
did i ever harbor any?
i’ve never been tender nor forgiving to myself, what makes me think i can exhibit it to others? how could i? i cannot leak what i do not have. i cannot exhibit what i do not have.
