New York

"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.

I'm so glad Sean brought his camera...

The Island from the south...

The Island from the inside...

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.

I just love working on the floor

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.

Mom. 1998.