The colors are different in Mexico City. Different than
what?...
The colors are different in Mexico City. Different than
what? Different than the colors I know in the city where I live. Different than
the colors I’ve known in every city I’ve been. A stretch of days there earlier
this month, and each walk it felt like my eyes were getting washed with
pleasure. The rose and golds and oranges, dusky and rich at once. The royal
blue, all cheer. Key lime pie, mango, plum. Every color saturated. Even
white looked richer, deeper, like it was made of the powder of the inside of
shells. As we moved along each street, my eyes seemed to feed, nourished by the
colors pouring into them.
It’s a good time of year for the colors. The papel picado strung
for Día de los Muertos swayed like prayer flags with
silhouettes
of skeletons.
The marigold petals glowed, in heaps, in trails, in bunches hung outside of
doorways, helping souls find their way. For Day of the Dead itself, we traveled
south of the city a few hours to a town in the mountains called Tepoztlán.
Children dressed as skeletons, wizards, wolves wandered the narrow cobbled
street holding hollowed gourds like little watermelons with lit candles inside.
Adults held big cups of beer. There were candles everywhere and petals
everywhere and people everywhere and the drenching colors made me swoon. How often I found myself breathless, euphoric.
Back home, a Danish woman expressed surprise that
others went to places and tried to imagine if they could see their lives unfolding
there. “I thought I was the only one who did this,” she said to a small group of us. I
thought everyone did this. Do you do this? When you go a place? Do you ask:
could I live here? Could my life unfold here? The answer, for me, comes
quick and definitive. Could my life unfold here? Sometimes the answer is so
obvious I barely have to ask the question.
