The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle by Francisco Goldman

Author:Francisco Goldman [Goldman, Francisco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail, Travel
ISBN: 9780802122568
Amazon: 0802122566
Barnesnoble: 0802122566
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2014-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

7

Interior Circuit Redux

IN FEBRUARY 2013, Jovi suddenly left me. Throughout the fall of 2012 and into the winter of 2013, I’d flown regularly, sometimes on a weekly basis, from Mexico to New York—taking a train to Hartford to teach my class at Trinity College—and then back, sometimes leaving the DF on Tuesday and returning on Thursday, sometimes spending an impatient nine days in Brooklyn, waiting to get back to the DF. After one such week plus two days in New York, I flew back to the DF and discovered, most unexpectedly, that the relationship was over. I was devastated because I was in love with Jovi. But even so my reaction was out of proportion. The sudden loss of Aura had been irreversible and this one wasn’t that. True, it actually seemed possible that I might never see Jovi again, but she was still alive, and could still answer e-mails. But my nervous system and subconscious seemed not to recognize the difference, and five-year-old trauma symptoms came flooding back. My Mexico City friends recognized what was happening, and were, once again, by my side. But this also meant a return of desperate insomniac prowling nights and all manner of excess, the only way I knew how to outlast and exhaust and finally quiet, for some hours, enough to get some sleep, the bedlam inside me. I believed, probably mistakenly, that without those nights—I was my own boozy Smoky the Bear on midnight to dawn patrol—mind and spirit might have blazed even more toxically. I still had to manage my schedule of flying back up to New York to teach my classes too. One night I dismissed my seminar an hour early because I felt so bereft that I could hardly speak. On the long bus ride back to New York—the bus didn’t get to the Port Authority until nearly two in the morning—I felt the return of the bleak, hollowing despair that had so frightened me five years before.

But this time, I was determined not to go through all that again, not to be swallowed by that abyss. I needed to wrestle myself back onto the “good path” that I’d found myself on at the end of the summer, but without having to reenact that forced march to the bottom first. Instead I decided to retrace my steps through that summer by writing about it. I could use words as my compass to map the route I’d taken and give it a narrative order, a sequence of incident and meaning, and rescue it from being something other than just circumstantial and ephemeral. It was my own life, after all, and now I needed to draw some strength from it. The stories one tells about oneself aren’t necessarily true, of course, but I wanted this one to be as true as I could make it. This didn’t mean that it all had to be factually true, but I decided that this story needed to be factually true too, a dependable Guía Roji of the summer.

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