🏷️ العلامة: memory

You don’t walk in Mesa. You squint, you scurry, you shimmer — mirage-style — from air-conditioned shade to air-conditioned shade.

But one morning, I did walk. Not just across parking lots, but through neighborhoods where the houses crouch low to the ground, like they’re bracing for something. Heat? Time? Memory?

The stucco here is the color of toasted almonds. The streets are wide — wide like they were built for tanks, not people. Yet on the margins: turquoise fences, blooming bougainvillea, and murals whispering we’ve been here a long time.

There’s adobe influence everywhere, even in new builds — though sometimes it feels more like a costume than a conviction. I stood in front of one apartment complex with faux-wooden vigas jutting out like stage props. A cactus had grown up beside them. It looked more authentic than the building.

I stopped for a raspa at a roadside stand. The owner had lived in the area since 1962. He said, “Mesa used to be sleepy. Now it just sweats louder.”

He wasn’t wrong. But there’s music in it.

You just have to slow down enough to hear it.

And if you listen closely, you’ll hear the dissonance too — a city shaped by indigenous forms and Latin rhythm, but one that once voted for a sheriff known for racial profiling and making inmates wear pink underwear. I sketched a mural of Quetzalcoatl across the street from a campaign billboard, sun-bleached and flaking. It made me wonder: can a place sing two songs at once?

Sometimes it concerns me how little I retain of the majority of books I read.

Since summer 2017, I've maintained a complete list of every book started and completed, and considering how much time has passed since then, there actually aren't very many of them to name: only 141. Of those, only about twenty of them left behind a well-cemented memory of the plot, and for the rest, only vague impressions remain at best, of sundry characters, settings, writing styles, and my own emotional reaction to the book. For the record, one of the most memorable was Blindness by José Saramago. Some books I barely recall beyond the title. Is this some type of clinical amnesia? The reason it worries me is that while reading, I am fully conscious, with almost no exception. In other words, comprehension while reading isn't the problem, but retention instead. These fugues seem strictly literary in contact, because my memories of social interactions, places visited, and decisions made during the time I read some of these "lost books" are crystal clear, or at least plastic-bottle clear.

Apparently, my brain consumes books like my body consumes food: It serves its purpose in the moment, providing mental nutritition, but then somehow my brain manages to excrete 90% of its intake through some rhetorical rectum. It would be much more satisfying to benefit from both full comprehension and recall, but how to get there isn't clear right now.