By noon next day the fever suddenly went, leaving me purged and ravenously hungry. The women went back on their chairs, knees spread, hands folded, grouped silently around the walls. Seeing me sit up, one of them brought me some food and told me not to be such a fool in future. The others nodded in chorus, pointing their fingers at the sun and shrinking away in postures of dread. ‘Bad! Bad!’ they cried, drawing their scarves across their faces till only their eyes and knuckles were showing.
- Toledo, from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee

Let me tell you a story:
[he began, half smiling, in a way that only people do when revealing a terrible truth of the world,]
[but I was ready / a blood stream loaded / with stories of my own]

A couple’s anniversary. They save up a long time to have a night at a high class restaurant. They drink wine wine, wear their most elegant clothes. Then they go to an expensive club that few people are able to enter. The bouncers won’t let them in but they have money / no problem / it all goes round / they pass through.
Dancing. They move in a way that closes out the rest of the room, the entire the world. 
They drew attention. They were the only ones there dancing for themselves, for each other, without consciousness of others. Clearly, they were separate from the rest of the clientèle. Moving within a bubble.
From the moment they stepped in, one person in particular watched them more than anyone else. His father, president of the state, owned land further than the eye could see. He watched them long enough to taste his desire mounting, to feel his body become taunt with want.
[I know, now, the rest of the story.]
[And so do you, don’t you?]
[Something inside him enjoyed this telling of truth.]
[No, this is not my truth.]
He sets his eyes on her and makes his way over, filling himself with her bare thighs.
‘This dance is mine’, he tells the guy. Let’s call him, ‘Pedro’ so that he isn’t lost forever. The girl’s name is Layla. 
Pedro reacts in anger. This was his night. Their night. In a moment, the bouncers, that they had paid for entering, pick him off his feet and eject him from the building. There’s no way he’s getting back in in.
The next day, Layla returns to their place.
‘What happened?’
‘I never want to talk about it. Please, never ask again’.
[And he looked at me and I didn’t need to hear what he said next. I already knew].

Break. The air cracks. The sun gives in.
‘What would you do, Jass?’
A man went by on a bicycle cart selling fruits without names, whistling a crooked old song with no rhythm or melody.
He sat watching me, waiting for my reaction. He had become a good friend here - the days of swimming in the lagoon, nights of chess and conversations that dug down at the roots. He was the one who I had met first in the town, stumbling in as it rained, head beating from sleep deprivation - the night full of ants swarming over me as I had slept - waking on fire. The truck ride four hours west - the piña con chilli bought on the side of the road for me by the driver.
He’d taken me, upon asking for a place to wild camp for the night, to the writers place. And now here, a month and a half later.
‘No. This could happen at any moment, out with your girl and then-…’. He didn’t need to say any more. My vivid imagination. I have not yet got to the point where I can control it. They ambush me with images of the day of losing all my limbs.
Do anything to get through this. Or lie down under the earth already. We might as well all just leave now, breaths and all, pack it all up. The comforts aren’t worth it when you’re never here, never present, always in future days - the what if’s, the security alarms, life insurance.
‘I refuse it’. My voice sharp and cutting at the air.
‘What do you mean, you refuse it?’
‘I mean that it doesn’t exist for me. How many wars are going on in this moment? Guatemala, the country directly below us, has one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world. I know the vulture waiting for the small - almost skeleton - boy in Sudan. The crack-heads in London that trade everything they have for another hit, cleaning their family homes straight through. I’ve seen young men walking up to kittens and breaking their necks without a blink - I mean…I know this. And damnit, I’ve trusted and loved so much that I could have taken out my own eyes - and then… I’ve felt betrayal and loss gutting me wide open.’
‘But I can’t live inside this. There would be no point in going on. Yet, I know there is laughter, there is adoration, there is waking at dawn to write for five hours. There is the feeling of growth, there is music, there are huge forests to be explored and lagoons to be swam in.’
He never interrupts. Despite my scattered morning Spanish and disorientation in general.
‘I know it doesn’t mean anything for some who suffer so much that their bones feel like burning leads. The world is only this, for some. I’ve lived it, in my own way. I know too, that it gets worse. Yet, I have no desire to imagine all the deaths that await me. I refuse it, in this way. To surround myself by that which builds towards a future that I desire, you know? I need to burst with living - not sink with the dead.’

In an old peanut butter jar in front of us, there is movement. Until now, it has been unspoken. The elephant shitting in the corner of the room. I had rounded up seventy two people, all those I could think of from the last years that had been ‘what if’s’, those that had done their damnedest to push me down into the earth. I’d placed them there in the jar.
They could barely breathe - I’d put holes in the cap but perhaps not enough. 
‘What are you going to do with them?’, Julio asks.
We hadn’t swam yet, this morning. There are days, upon waking, where the skin no longer protects you. Anything can get through. If I swam, in this moment, I would become full of water, I’m sure.
They will come to drink tea with me and watch the sun set. What else can be done?
And then one day, I’ll lose the jar and think nothing of it.
‘And what if they escape?’
‘Let them. I’ll be ready’.

/
Photo by Jeremy Dyer, ‘3 Stars’