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MORTARS

It’s not that I use it all the time. The few things I crush in it are lovely though: coriander, cumin, fennel, mustard. Crushing a seed, extracting its encapsulated fragrance, its dormant potentiality broken open, pressed to the point of collapse. Pressure on stone from bone on muscle to mash the kernel, releasing essence.

My crush on Pablo unfolded the time I met him on a trip to the big city, which was Salt Lake City then. He hung out with Amy and I loved his metal hair, elbow length, straight black and already striped with grey despite still being in high school. Tool scratched onto his backpack, 35mm camera around his neck, vampire-like canines suspended from upper gums, nervous high-pitched laugh mixed with wild energy, strange humor, Mexican Jewishness, and mama’s boy sensibilities made Pablo special. I was thirteen or fourteen. We assigned each other Mexican Jewish monikers: Amy was Maria Weinberg. He was Pablo Berkowitz. He named me Rosa Goldstein and it felt like a present. We mailed each other some letters.

When the relative length, sticky contents, humiliating secrets, transference, brotherly love, and stoned histories of a friendship cease to be enough, one wonders what connection can withstand a lifetime. No one has known me so tightly since those days.

We didn’t date for four more years, until I moved to the big city. Then we were serious about playing house; at least I was. From our first hookup, I harbored a plot to move him out of his parent’s basement where he read Kafka, Calvino, played bass, made me mixed tapes of Radiohead, Tool, the Talking Heads and drank PBR.  We moved in together when I was turning 18, shared car insurance and a credit card. I focused an inappropriate amount of energy trying to get us to cook and eat dinner together. Like the Dylan song, I was so much older then – I’m younger than that now.

I think if I were a boy it would be so much funnier.

We drank so much that year spent in our first apartment on G Street that the days still hide from us both. I mistook the hallway for the toilet, drove home in a blizzard on acid, gave the cat away, kissed Chelsea from the unit downstairs whenever I could, and obsessed about death and suicide – believing they were questions I could solve.  Still, I craved dinner together, the indicator of stability. I’d drink a bottle of wine and begin a turbulent, forceful, sloppy argument through tears about how I cooked dinner and cared about spending time with him, and it was anti-feminist of him to not reciprocate. My belligerent tantrums about dinner had a violence to them.

Ten out of ten doctors say that we have a one hundred percent chance of dying. So I stopped myself from dying to know. It was as simple as that. The wine, like women – they both stretched time.

Things started to look up when Paco bought one of Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks of Indian recipes. When he got excited to go buy bulk bags of spices and dal at the Indian market, all my displaced anger found a hopeful solution. If Pablo would cook me dinner, my emotions would be under control. He filled our microkitchen with bags of turmeric, cardamom pods and a couple of times, with smells of Jaffrey’s recipes. For Valentine’s Day, I bought him a small, sweet, tan marbled mortar and pestle so he could grind his spices. Cold, hard, smooth, almost sexual in its sleek texture, form, and purpose. He bought me copo-de-leite flowers and he made one of these dishes. okra and dal, full of onions and seeds ground by the stone tool. We shared dinner to a PJ Harvey record.

Will I never read the Great Authors? Because I am doing other things.

A few years and several apartments later, for many reasons including but not limited to: gayness, drunkenness, treason, mental illness, the lingering traumas of childhood abuse, cocaine-fueled battles of exaggerated proportions, and other run-of-the-mill existential crises, we broke up. When we divided our belongings, the mortar and pestle traveled in a box with my name on it. I don’t remember if we concluded together that I could have it since I cooked more and he was moving back in with his parents, or if my distorted logic justified a sneaky repossession of his Valentine’s Day gift.

Wanted: a nice clean room, wanting to be inside it.

Somehow, at a slackish pace, I pulled my shit together. Paco sort of didn’t as much. But after a murky couple of years negotiating a line between “just friends” and jealous ex lovers who had sex when they were lonely, we became the best of friends. A fraternal sort of pair, close as hell.

Inseparable is more than supper. 

Inseparable felt good and the good thing was keepable. As our relationship settled, there were punctuated times of anguish as Paco struggled with mental breakdowns spawned by binge drinking and drug use, or vice versa. When these episodes flared up, I spent days and nights driving around parks, walking into bars during the daytime, calling jails and hospitals with his sister or mother in frantic search.  Sometimes he’d show up at my apartment at 4am barely able to walk, then sleep for a couple of days. It scared me and I loved him fiercely. We’d watch PBS and cuddle on my couch, eating Vietnamese food, drinking Gatorade and low-point Utah beer as he recovered.

What can help me accept that this fragile tool has enjoyed a more enduring relationship to time than Paco and I have? We’d finally constructed a soothing form of caring for one another. When the seed is crushed to powder instead of planted, its pleasant properties are dispersed erratically. There were seventeen years and myriad ways Paco and I loved one another and no one is dead.

It was hardest to leave him when I moved to New York.  I worried deeply about not being there for his benders. He’d visit me in my unheated Williamsburg warehouse turned shithole loft. During a particularly scary time, I flew back to help his family find him and try to check him into rehab once again. This time was the worst, but we were family.

There is no having peace with possible news all the time.

Four years ago is the last time we spoke. Before he got married, his fiancé forbade him to speak to any “exes.” So the unraveling went. In a letter to me:

“Friends, even ‘best friends’ are just that, friends. They are not family. I know you’re not keen on what you have been dealt in the family department, so if they disturb you, perhaps you should be working on building a new one. I really don’t know what else to say without putting you on a skewer so I’ll stop here. My fondest hopes, Pablo ”

There are some ends that don’t trade in death.

The letter’s teeth crushed me. I don’t know where those big bags of seeds ended up, and why haven’t the stones broken by now to release us? The pestle crushes seeds and old gardens now. That the mortar and pestle still belongs to me is my measure that I love him more, gave him more. That’s coolly satisfying. Memories are not a substitute, no wire mother. Seeds could just have been seeds forever, but I took the gift and it he dissolved the mortar, any way you tell it.

I know all of these words but can’t imagine them.