These are all things that are true.
If you bring me onions,peppers, and carrots sauteed and maybe fried brown in a cast iron skillet and a hot plate of corn tortillas, I find it hard not to love you. When you say pintos de la vaina with that pit smoked accent I find it hard not to fall a little for you.
And when you sit with me after the neon sign is shut off and the booths and tables are occulted in the best sort of twilight exclusivity, I want you to live forever.
These things are also true. Pintos are the best beans, but their subtlety escapes the heavy hand of European culinary might. With a little salt and a couple cubes of white onion, they become the world to me. I can’t count the number of time our meager meals growing up would be carried on the pink steaming back of a bowl of pinto beans. A little salt, a little onion, a little bacon when times were rich.
And the times we would be out along the Delores River or up on The Rim, a pot of beans over the fire and potatoes buried in the sand. The plain talk of country people and the a capella singing of hymns older than faith.
When you tell me about Sonora, it is true I feel a singular ache in my bones.
It would be untrue to say that I believe in spirits or ghosts or gods or karma or fate. It would be untrue to say I believe in any plan.
It is true to say that in some other life, or in some other more perfect universe, you wake up next to me.
