White Sands, Dark Night

We finish driving through Texas and enter into New Mexico in the afternoon. Tzadik drives up a smaller highway towards White Sands. There, we run around the cream-colored dunes, dancing in the falling sunlight and rolling down the hills, making photographs and spinning in circles. We stirr up so much emotion that the sky seems to twist into a knot and burst, drizzling soft rain onto our bodies and the dunes. Raindrops on dunes are a phenomena. One of the things that should have been included at the beginning of that movie Amelie, alongside the sensation of fingers running through a barrel of dry beans, or the crack of a spoon on the top of a dish of creme brulee.

We run around and move through so many different emotions and then make figure eights and donuts in the big parking lot before leaving the national monument that is White Sands. Then we have the crazy idea to go to Mexico for one last hurrah before heading home to Tucson. We return south and go back to El Paso and before we can even finalize the decision or figure out where to park, we are driving on a bridge over the Rio Grande and staring up at a big green sign that says, "Bienvenidos a Mexico." In Ciudad Juarez, we go to a big grocery store and wander around the aisles, getting brightly colored, super sweet smiley face cupcakes, Mexican hot chocolate bars, small avocados, and birthday cards in Spanish. We drive to the city center and walk around the plaza in front of the large cathedral. The place is littered with drunken folks and homeless folks and we smoke cigars and feel entirely transported to another world, a world all to familiar to me in some respects. We stop for tacos at one of the only restaurants still open. It feels like there is a part of my lungs that gets air for the first time in a long time--that is what it is to be in Mexico, outside of the United States--it is like a taste of freedom that makes the deception of our government all the more real, even within all of the poverty and darkness that a night in Juarez contains.

At the border, the patrol officer questions us like we will never get back in. First, the guy doesn't believe that "Tzadik" is really Tzadik's name. Then he doesn't believe that we're driving my best friend's car from Georgia to CA--a lie would have been more believable. Finally we call him out on his myriad of isms and he taps the wheels and lets us go. We reenter the land of skyscrapers with brightly lit US flags and street sweepers and SUVs. At the next rest area we switch drivers and I drive until I pull over to sleep at a gas station.