July 8th. Raining hard. Thundering. Just changad out of wet pants into dry pajama bottoms, peed into an old gatorade bottle, tossed it out into the lawn and rinsed the bottle with down pouring gutter water. Listening to Avett Brothers: Emotionalism. Thinking of the 5th dead person since I´ve been here. I didn´t look this time either. (The rain´s dripping hard down on my things, my hiking pack, clothes. Making them all moldy mildewy.) Don Tito: Little man in a falling down house made of dirt and sticks and pieces of tin, once sold me a bunch of bananas. They said he died from tiredness of the heart. I will have to tear up the census i did 2 months ago hurriedly, outside, without a seat. Maybe tiredness of the heart is something like a heart attack. Rain jacket, knee length skirt and rainbow flip flops walking through the mud and rain, water streams. Rainbow bright. Being a kid. This time an adult. An adult where death seems so real, touchable. Don Tito, two in the morning in his bed wonder if he knew it when it came. Wonder if he was shaking or yelling because i just keep picturing that he was shaking. 75 years old. 3 in the morning i heard them next door in the office getting money to go buy a coffin. Here there´s no waiting. Time turns the body, no refrigerators, technology to preserve things, make them work around our schedules. There won´t be any taking of vacation days, first class tickets flying in last minute. Just us around his tiny rotting body. Tall candles singing praying with rosary beads singing Ave Maria Ave Maria hoping my voice would swell and rise up to heaven with the rest wishing I’d known more of the words. Looking down at my mud caked flops wondering what someone back home might think if they could see. Always birds eye view. Had three cups of coffee tonight. That´s what you do when someone dies and they give you bread and you take 2 and later ask for more. They want you to stay up all night, praying singing laughing until early next morning when everyone rides into town to bury the body because who can sleep with a dead person inthe house? So we accompany. Sat on a woven sack on a mud floor, watched people kick dogs, listened to them yelp, listened to faint prayers wafting up through hard piercing rain on a lamina roof. Drip drip. drawing attention to my moon boot rainbow flops agin, sniffing death, candles, lemons-to keep the evil spirts away, bodies, farts, coffee boiling over firewood, chicken and rice only offered to certain folks eating nervously self conciously. I thought, “Do dogs have souls, too? Do parakeets?” I thought of how foolish people are. Self absorbed. Selfish. I wondered: Do people go to hell and burn for being ignorant? Isn´t that the problem? Ignorance, which might be equivalent or at least relevant to innocence. Who of all of us here in El Balsamar is worthy of hell-eternal damnation? Is it the mother of Wendy, Maria Espinoza? Mother Maria who lets her daughter, 8 years old, wander off into woods with old men who reek of alcohol and piss, knowing she´ll bring back a dollar, maybe 2. Is it the drunken men, boys, who set their drunken father afire last summer, who sing and drink who shoot bullets in the air, take Wendy to the woods, fall in the streets and stay there forgeting to go home to their wives. Is it the descent men? Ever Hernandez, who works in the hacienda and goes home to his wife but only after he has taken Berta Gomez or Marina Mundo to the woods, women with children, husbands. Could it be me? I´m naming names, but could it be me for doing nothing, for simply passing by saying “buenos dias.” Could it be me for looking down at it all like I´m sitting on an educated cloud thinkng this is just life. Looking at it all giving up trying to trace it back figure out who´s to blame, seeing everyone as children, foolish children. Is this how God sees allof us? Even the educated ones who walk around with briefcased paperwork, those of us who do things we think are good seeking praise, and getting it. So mush that we think we are blessed putting ourselves up on those clouds and wondering just what happened to the rest of the world. And so we invent hell, a place to fear, a reason to do good, a place to put people who piss us off. We are all foolish. We either all go to hell or we don´t. That´s what i think.