Volume 09

MEDITATIONS AT BANDELIER
Ana Stina Rimal
Distantly, I hear a man reading a pamphlet from the Visitor’s Center to his
family. They inch their way closer to me as they explore the caves corresponding
to the pamphlet descriptions. “Dad! Read number thirteen,” the girl says.
She is young and awkward. She had tried to put her hair into a braid,
I can tell, but her knots are loose and falling. I imagine her asking her
mother for help and her mother saying from behind a magazine or a roadmap
or a web page about National Parks in New Mexico; “I don’t braid.”
The young girl is wearing bell bottom pants that are too short for her long
legs and I instantly empathize. It is girls like this that I want to run and hug,
girls that I decide are like me. I sit and stare.
There is a strange kind of bliss in the idea that no one wants to talk to me.
The cooing birds are not going to ask me how my day was. The ghosts of ancestors
who forged these caves are not concerned with my happiness. Lately,
I have felt overwhelmed by the pressure to be a wife to everyone; to communicate
with kindness, to be sweet, beautiful, sexual, nurturing and honest. I
don’t want to be those things, not right now. I want to be angry. There are
nasty crevices in me; caves, almost. They are filled with thorns and miniature
tequila bottles (collected from the street corners, the back of my car, the very
bottom of my trash can) and orange lines of crushed up pills and lesions and
dead dogs. These places, in me, ooze anger and resentment and scream in
mute. I keep looking for experiences and I keep finding myself in the same
experience. Some things are different but we are not different. The songs we
listen to in the car are different but we are not different.
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