Yesterday I came across your Spanish book fallen behind a shelf, the one you’d nicked from the Jawaharlal Nehru University Library in Delhi, and left with me in London before heading off to El Salvador. Inside were some folded crib notes, written in your beautiful scrawled hand—so familiar to me, yet exotic looking, like Farsi or Urdu—speaking decades later of your optimism, passion, and sense of militant dedication. I couldn’t bear to look at it at first; I re-closed the book with its alluring promise: “Essentials of Mastery.” It felt like a time capsule. I wiped it gently with a soft cloth and left it on the blue kitchen chair.
I often think of the bent brown book of Neruda’s memoirs you gave me when we first met, and wish I could put my hands on that. But that one was left behind accidentally in Calcutta and could never be recovered.
I’m curious about this recent impulse of mine, to recover the traces of you, to think about what my longing for you interrupted and impeded, yet at the same time set in motion—Manuel in San Francisco, Carlos Sarandeses in northern Spain—and now I’ve had the option to check back in with both. But our young love is unmatchable…
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AUTHOR BIO: Originally from California, Julia Butterfield grew up surrounded by art worlds--high and low, local and international. She went on to live, study and do field work as an anthropologist across Europe and in India. Now director of a college writing center in Manhattan, Julia lives in Brooklyn and takes passionate advantage of all the film and art the city has to offer. She writes of romance and tragedy, of everyday events and more exotic ones.
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