073118 i was so, so tired in those days, summer be damned, but my mom was trying to help me out by getting me more involved in her busybodying. Give me a reason to get out of bed and have tawdry conversations full of speculation while the monsoon season painted flowery pastiches of tropical scents all over our corrugated tin roof. The thing she was currently interested in and worrying about: my brilliant cousin had just about graduated from her post-grad program in ethnobiology or biological anthropology or philosophical meta-brainery or i’m-too-smart-for-my-own-goodery or whatever it was. she almost had that overachiever’s security blanket in her hand, when she decided she’d rather just keep working in the tiny corner shope—i guess you’d call it a bodega?—over by the tiny alley that was i suppose something like third street, if you could really call anything a street in those days in that loose amalgam of spider web connections and looped together shacks and giant brick governmental edificies and boats swaying gently in acrid black water and endless blossoms of vhuieuflksdvn alongside footpaths and bike paths and mule paths and the occasional incongruous busy streett choked with funkymobiles and hack hack hack (what’s that word for a human-pulled taxi or a bike-pulled taxi? not pedicab, something else with an h in it?). By that time the only thing I really still had in common with my cousin was that we were both living in a kind of exile, she by choice and me due to crushing depression that seeped through my veins and settled in all my joints every night while I slept, until I could hardly open my eyes in the morning without feeling like I was trying to push the sarcophagus lid off myself will my will power alone. But we still had the dubious kind of love connection born of being cousins our whole lives—we were born three hours and two rooms apart—and my mom to some extent was right. Even though her mission was nosy and stupid, and I didn’t really care about what she cared about, it was good for me to have a reason to forec myself let someone pretend to be forcing me to get out of bed and take the old-fishing-dock studded walk down erufhodsnfd, around the corner under the big umbrellas of the eifjorv café, and through the crazily downhill-sloping alley between viriefjoidsj and the back of reufnsdsa. My cousin was really pretty, I could see that by peering through the window before she knew I was there. She had always been acceptably normal looking, maybe a bit pale and waiflike, and her grin had always had a lopsidedness to it, like a lesbian artist from the days before lesbian and artist were two words that people knew how to put together casually. But there had always been something kind of parboiled about her demeanor and her face; a kind of tentative acceptance of being (in) a (roughly) human body. She’d been like half a pair of white parenthesis hovering over a smoky grey page, looking for the right word to embrace, but now— I stood there for a while, being jostled by ponies and tarantulas and more of those accursed hack hack hack (what the fuck do you call those things?) and the newspaper guy who “accidentally” elbowed me on his way past, as he threw a wet mat of news at the shop door, like a kid in a long-ago vanished summer throwing a torn-off shingle down to be used as second base. It was like I was standing in a river, and all these people in fluttering yellow and orange fabric and bronze and gold and mahogany skin just kept being the current, and as I stood there I was getting soaked in their electromagnetic insistence on existing, while the rest of the world thought of them as, as, as—what did the rest of the world think of them? I was the rest of the world, after all, I’d only been there two or three weeks at this point, and I had involuntarily dragged the stale air of the airplane with me, that stale air from the gleaming airport of the First World—but as I stood here in this river of dogs and fish and alien breakfast smells and meandering sentience, that cloak of steely civilization was being washed off me, swirled off me slowly but surely, as cheap dye from a tourist’s long thin garment being washed (with a washboard in the stream below a corrugated shack) for the first time. So I stood there and looked through the window at my cousin, who was beautiful now. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to tell my mother about this, or if I even wanted to—no, bullshit. I wanted to. I wanted to tell her real bad, and be super nice about it which would itself be a mild form of agression. See? I would be telling her. See? Other people can be happy, even if they don’t do everything right and make good decisions and live up to their potential! See? Just because someone wasn’t afraid of the same things you were afraid of doesn’t mean they’re a lost cause. As I was sitting there stupidly getting sidetracked by my mother issues, my cousin handed someone their change. It was two or three golder-than-gold coins; they looked like pizza-arcade tokens the way they glittered like something so bright you glimpsed it all the way at the bottom of the river, and when you dived down to retrieve it, and came back up sputtering and triumphant, you discovered that it wasn’t real money at all, but rather some bauble that some kid had dropped and that had been sitting down there collecting sunlight for days, weeks, years even. The change my cousin handed back to the bald, robed individual in the little shop on third street chose that moment to discharge all that stored-up sunshine, and the sunshine exploded quietly, instantly, up my cousin’s arm, swirled around her throat like picturesque wine in reverse, flushed up her cheeks, and burst out of her eyes with a triumphant strain of the most pure and silent crescendo of movie music no one has ever heard or will ever hear again. But even though her body absorbed all that sunshine, and it made her lithe slip of a pale figure into something radiant and fragrant, there was still plenty left over, and it zapped out of her now brilliant river-green eyes across the space between her and the robed guy, the street-corner dignitary, the back-alley monk, and it splashed all over his face, washed his bald head, fluffed out his robe like exotic feathers, and pooled around his feet in a golden deluge of excess that you could tell he could totally feel, and either he or else my cousin said something banal, and they both laughed and they both loved each other for exactly one beat, and that was why the world was still spinning, and that was why the rest of the world, the one on the other side of all the airplanes still romanticized this part, these parts of the world, and that was why this city hadn’t burned down even though good god, it should have, the way it was all wired up without any wiring codes and fire-escaped without any fire codes, and that was why my cousin still wanted to work here, and of course I understood that for that one beat, and then promptly forgot it, because I was still standing in the river, the river of people and cats and donuts, and my understanding went right on down the stream into someone else’s mouth, and that was why I was grateful to be a part of it all, at that moment, watching my cousin be beautiful, and whatever happened next—whether I went inside the shop to talk to her, or whether I turned around to make my way back up the crooked hills and zags and alleys to report back to my mother—whatever happened next, it was already too late for me. My depression was about to get scoured off me by the hands of a whole team of invisible old ladies in traditional garb, while they spat tobacco and talked about old men, and it was going to hurt, and I was going to hate it, and I was going to love it.