About Loss In Life

This is a story about loss. When something is lost, does it mean that you, the seeker, can no longer find the object, state or entity that you desire? Or does it mean that that thing which we are discussing does not know where it is?

I had an acquaintance who lost her job. She woke up one morning and couldn't find it.

These things happen. She had spent too much time at the local pub drinking. This combined with the information that she entered her bathroom at least seven times a day, peeled the cover off the air vent and lit up a big glass bong stoked with hash. In the end, she awoke one morning and didn't know her identity, or her location, or why she should be here rather than anywhere else. She could not remember her workplace. She could not remember that she had ever held a job. She picked up a tennis racket that was lying nearby and, after I watched her make love to it, I told her that that was not what it was for and gave her a couple of furry green balls. She started licking these, but I stopped her and took her to a tennis court and that is where she is today, running to and fro across the court swinging at balls with strangers that come in with neat little tubes filled with more bright green balls to play with. I meet up with her now and again, but for the most part, she is lost to me, I can't get through to her. In the past we used to have long discussions, conversations on the topic of death, on dying, on U.F.Os and Jesus and the loss of "los toltecas." It was my opinion that neither Jesus nor "los toltecas" had ever walked the earth, but she would shake her head and say,
"Y si la vida te pisa, desvaina una sonrisa y vuelvete a levantar."

Inspite of my own critical objections, I spent much of my time outside of the midget closet wondering about both Jesus and los toltecas. I had once known an old man that told stories. He had insisted that he himself was a Toltec, one of the last of his kind, a survivor, searching for his lost brethren like the unicorn whose voice was supplied by Mia Farrow had searched for her own milky white sisters. He maintained that the toltecs had gone "underground", to disappear from public view. It was their mores and not their origins which made them toltecs, and when a more aggressive culture swept the land with the force of a violent viral infection, the toltec culture simply slipped into the shadows to hide, to get along until the time was right to re-emerge, a time where the culture of death would have exhausted itself in its bloody rage and be ready to sleep for another millennium or so.

These stories of the culturas prehispanicas were mostly lost on me. That is to say that they went all over my white flesh looking for a way inside and lost their compass and settled in the valley between my breasts and multiplied in the warmth and wetness of my bosom, giving rise a whole new generation of stories, tales which twisted and turned like that of a grinning cat.

How is it possible for the last Toltec renew his culture without exposing it to the possibility of mutation? No, there was no way. Evolution itself is a form of mutation.

These stories that I spin now out of the wiggly spaghetti that we call the crown of Metus, (when I say "we", I mean all of us of the culturas post hispanicas, the gringos who have been given secrets by lonely old men and women of naual who had no one better to describe their stories to) are a new strain built upon the old foundation. They are the bastard children of a hidden teaching, the type of bastards that return to the kingdom someday to say that the King was their father and they are prepared claim the throne. The good King will hug his child and take him into his heart and say:

"That which I was is no more, that which I am lives in you." And he will lay himself gently upon the pyre and wait for the fire to turn his flesh to ash so that he may join his ancestors in the halls of the glorious. Then the maidens will sing the old song, the song that says,
"Y si la vida te pisa, desvaina una sonrisa y vuelvete a levantar."

This is it, all that I have to give, all that I can share, an orphan of the storm. The basis laid by the tequihua has succumbed to the vines of the twisted jungles within my heart. Zu birds fly with flaming wings among the branches of new trees in which shimmering demonesses crouch, waiting for the boy and the girl who will surely come down the path. The girl will say,
"Hansel, I'm afraid that we are lost."
"Don't worry Gretel, I have left a trail made from the powdered bones of our ancestors so that we will be able to see where we came from but we will never go back, only forward. That star you see on the horizon is our destination. That is our Kingdom, but first, we must go and create it. For that is what we are."

The Tequihua Foundation www.tequihuafoundation.org