A dog doesn’t understand death. Not the way we do. He understands silence. He understands that someone who was always there is now not.

He waits by doors that won’t open. He listens for footsteps that only memory still makes. He sniffs at the air for a scent that’s already fading.

But he never hears the words: “She’s gone.” “He passed.” “Never again.”

So in his heart, you’re still alive— just elsewhere. Delayed. Caught in some long errand beyond comprehension.

And isn’t that what we humans do too? We know the facts, we say the words— but inside, we keep waiting. For a call. A knock. A laugh in the next room. As if love had no burial rights. As if memory was a leash tied to a ghost.

Perhaps the dog suffers less because he doesn’t know it’s forever. But perhaps he suffers more, because he never stops hoping.

And maybe that’s what grief really is: the stubborn part of us that waits, ears perked, at a door that will never open again.

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.

P.S. Of the books counted above, four are in progress, either ones I am currently actively reading or have placed on extended hiatus. My personal reading rate slowed down immensely last August when I first made plans to resume formal studies in physics, because almost every book I've picked up since then has been a physics textbook, and they take me many times longer to read with full comprehension compared with novels and popular non-fiction.