There was a night long ago when I was awake at about 2am on 16 Essex Street. I was in my top bunk, with my sister sound asleep below me, and I had a comforter (it was Laura Ashley, I remember my mother saying this) with widely spread out flowers all over it in many primary colors. The wall paper matched the comforter except the flowers were all yellow. It was like having buttercups all over the wall. There was lots of white space though, which I liked, I remember, between the flowers. And they were scattered about in no particular order. I liked that, their randomness. Anyway, that night in bed, I remember feeling this sense of mischievous secrecy in that I was the only one up, and I had my small blue typewriter at hand and I was probably talking to myself out loud. Knowing me, I was probably thinking of all the swear words I knew so far, or all the items my cousin Abby had that I wished were mine. There was something sneaky about me, but I sensed that it would lead to lots of fun . . . that moment of self-awareness then has stayed with me ever since.
Jaime Saenz is someone I discovered when sitting in Guatemala at an internet cafe. I think I google searched something strange like, "depressive artists Bolivia," or some phrase that only made sense to me, and I started reading about Saenz. In all honesty, I am a terrible researcher, but certainly a unique one, because I come up with the oddest ways of saying things. You get 200 hits, I get 5. But my 5 are all gems. Anyway, ever since then, probably about 2002, I have been reading him periodically when the mood strikes me. He is an amazing writer. I read some of his lines and feel like they are running through my veins, like ice-cold water. His words would be glacier blue, not just because I am obsessed with blue. He is from La Paz, and sometimes I feel like I am in a teeny alley way near the plaza of San Francisco when I read him, ducking into a doorway to block myself from the wind. Other times I feel like I am tucked into a narrow twin bed with woolly itchy blankets thinking about how happy I am to be alone. And other times, like I just noted, I am brought back to a corner of myself that is formative not to anyone in the world but me. These formative moments are always so ordinary. They are simple. They are the minutes that no one sees of you, realizing, you are you.
Here's a beautiful section of Saenz that makes me breathe really deeply in thanks for someone else who was once in the world who felt the alienation that some of us still feel:
Nunca me sentí en el mundo como si fuera mi casa; siempre me sentí quisquilloso, susceptible y desasosegado, como un intruso o, en el mejor de los casos, como un mero visitante.
I never felt as if the world were my house; I always felt uneasy, exposed, and restless, like an intruder or, in the best of cases, like a mere visitor.
He also writes, and these lines inspired me to go back to Essex Street, "Aprendí cosas y cosas de la vida y de la muerte, del mundo y del sufrimiento en la oscuridad de mi cuarto, en la soledad de un rincón de mi cuarto, cuando mi madre, joven aún, me miraba con mucha pena, pues según su sentir, yo era muy retraído y huraño, y además muy tímido. . ." I learned things, and things about life and death, about the world and about suffering, in the darkness of my bedroom, in the loneliness of a corner of my room, when my mom, still young, would look at me with concern, because it was her feeling that i was very withdrawn, unsociable, and timid. . ."
His writing consistently pulls on the part of me that loves to have hours at night to myself so that I can sit up in my bunk bed and write without anyone asking me what I am doing, or can imagine bodies under sheets and blankets dreaming while I study them, peering at them, even touching them, from afar. And it's weird, but I feel like the other dwellers of corners know who else is up right now doing the same thing they are, those few lights you see when you arrive on a late bus into a city and think how reassuring it is to know that someone is up; someone who might be your friend. Saenz would have always been up, even if he was in the dark.
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