Writing in San Miguel

I remember this room in San Miguel; I was here before, wasn't I? Surrounded by this unbelievable mural: ceiling-high, terracotta skin, curved into hundreds of indigenous bodies, arms, strong backs and faces, praying hands, white eyes, white toenails. There is too much to see; it is like sitting inside a fire. But then we were writing, too, when I was here before, weren't we? Sitting in chairs facing forward like an audience watching a play, but instead, we all had notebooks and pens, all silently writing, soft brush of hand over page, a sniffle, a profound sigh, voices carrying through the window from the cafe next door.

Yes, I remember. It was the end of April, 2006, and I was getting ready to leave San Miguel, for the first time. I remember sitting with the writer's group, in the Quetzal Room at the Biblioteca, and tears rising in my eyes as I thought of how much I had learned during my time in this city: how to walk with an open heart, how to smile in the morning, how to see beauty, how to love more people, and then to love even more people than that.

Yes, that is a good memory, the one of writing in the Biblioteca, in the time and the place where I became a writer, to myself, and to the world. That memory is different from the second time I came to San Miguel, to heal my broken heart, and writing, or the third time I came with my new lover, and writing, or the fourth time I came to get my friend sober, and writing, or the fifth time I came, after my mother died, and writing, or the last time I came and stayed, and stayed, still, still writing.

"They'll have to carry me out of here in a box," I declare, and someday they will, and I'll still be writing even then, I imagine, because stories never end, and ways of telling them are infinite. When my body has become earth, and I live in the stars, remember me here, the first time, writing, here in the Biblioteca, in San Miguel, here with my tribe, in this room of fire, each of us writing, and writing, and writing, and writing, and writing, and writing and...