Ghost

We meet at the airport. I pretend not to see you at first. You face-plant onto my face a kiss that highlights what a stranger you are. When the nice old man shows us to our room with the queen bed, it feels wrong, like I shouldn’t be here. The floral pattern in my memory won’t be accurate. The window in the bathroom is barred, and the bigger one overlooks empty dorms in darkness.

We eat in a tiny comedor in Barrio 1 full of noisy locals and smoking coals. I can’t eat much so you help me. We fight about feminism, then we walk for hours in the dark, through downtown and a Mayan settlement with blue Christmas lights and yellow flecks twinkling from dilapidated huts, the darkness masking what we’ll discover when we find it in the daylight. Children ride tricycles in the winding narrow alleys while men drink silently under the dim light of closed shops, and our English bounces off the tin walls, a racket against the stillness of a sleepy Monday night.

You're sexy when you’re mad.

Back at the hostel, I wait for you on the rooftop and peek through the chain-link fence that protects me from the city with two rows of barbed wire even on the third floor; its myths and warnings floating into chimney smoke, and I wonder like I used to, looking out over the flatlands of East Oakland, what exactly I’m watching over in this moment: who is dying, who is going to bed hungry, who is getting assaulted, protected as I was then from the vantage point of my father’s two-story home, a trampoline, a backyard with a big pink tree I never noticed until years after we’d moved. When you come up to meet me, we make love on a blanket stolen off a clothesline, not noticing the stairwell light flicker on part-way through. I roll off of you when it’s over, our naked bodies shining next to plastic furniture, and we laugh as I look for my brown lace bra in the stream of stair light.

At some point back in our room, tangled up in each other, you say, Look at us. We’re pretty romantic, aren’t we?

I don’t know if that’s true. And when you ask me days later if I’m always so cuddly with my lovers, if I always wrap myself up in their limbs, hungrily breathing into their dirty bodies, I lie and say no. Because I see you want to believe you are special; because you have not been like this until now, that my passion unhinges you and lets you become a version of yourself that is neither false nor authentic; all the while wondering when I will start to feel something again.