7/25/21

By Josh Rubin

I am in the south of Mexico, in a city not terribly far from the Guatemala border. The weather is cool, slightly chilly in the mornings until the sun comes up. This morning I linger in my room, loosening my fingers on my guitar, and sitting down to write this.

I spend so much of my time looking at the dysfunction of the world in my everyday life that I forget what wonder I feel at the miraculous way the human race works together. Usually, when I ponder this, I think of how many of us manage to get into cars and drive these tons of metallic death without incident, consciously cooperating enough to reach our destinations unhurt, alive and unimpressed. How the hell do we do it?

And yesterday here, weaving my way through the teeming Saturday market, I am in awe of the intricacies of a system that has wefted its way through centuries that can nearly be tasted in the air. I watch each exchange, and along another dimension—there are countless—I marvel at the chain of production and transport that brings this market day.

Every way I turn my head, I see a swirl of color that weighs more than the heavily framed works on the walls of all the museums I have paced through. And the people! Mothers and children and babies too beautiful to rest my gaze upon; I have to look away, as if I were staring at the sun.

Can I see the displacement that drives people out to join the trail of tears that ends in my own country? Here and there, there are hints. Bodies that have known hunger show it. But I keep my head down, my head that on its not particularly tall body floats above the mass.

And I, for moments I cherish, moments that are watery from tears that well but do not spill, forget the doom I usually live with, and remember what I can only know through others, that lives have been lived for millennia, and that I am one of the uncounted in a market.