Caminos Entrelazados or Intertwined Paths.

                                                             
                                                      Part 1

We’d met in el mercado, a small one, right in the heart of Chiapas, Mexico. The one on Guyava St.  just  across from the Library. Both of us marveling at the beauty of a Country that wasn’t  our own. Though the color of our skin, made us seem to fit in. Indigenous almost.

I was there in search of a scarf to compliment the dress I’d bought there the previous day.

“El Amarillo." (the yellow one) he whispered as he passed.

Just the sound of his voice, like the first strum of a guitar, the last dance at a wedding, brings chills to my entire being, even to the innermost depths of my soul.

I turn and his smile meets mine.  A bit crooked, but welcoming. Familiar, and stranger all at once. Like leaving home, like coming back and starting all over again.
Like breathing for the first time. Like being in a place the last time.

"Have we met?" I ask, even though I know we haven’t, I would’ve remembered those eyes.

So rich of a brown they almost looked black, like an endless pit, a place of  guile, a place of refuge.
With hair so thick and lush of a brown, I contemplated running my hands through it, a nose more like a beak, and hands so dense yet vulnerable. In this one, mere moment, I couldn't help but fall in love.

“Not quite yet” he continued, as his hand reached out from the inner depths of his coat pocket.

“I’m Ernesto, and you are?”

“Aeida” I shyly proclaimed

“Ahh,  Eres tourista?” He asked

“ Si, Si, y  tu?” I reply in my white washed Spanish

He replies yes, and seems to tell me his life story all in one sentence, all in a language I hardly understood.

“Ehh, no nintendo mucho espanol?” I stupidly answered, as he laughed at me.

 A laugh, that sounded  more like a hiccup. A laugh that became my getting through the day, my getting through the nights. The nights with him, but mostly the nights with out him.

Oh Ernesto, sometimes I wish you’d never have come up to me in the market that lazy afternoon.

Sometimes I wish I would have just told you to go away, to go bother some other hopeless damsel in distress.

 Mindlessly, I grab  the  chivalry of your palm, as you reach out and ask me to dinner.

I accept, and we become a love story that was not. With only time to kill and adventure to chase.

 Early the next morning during coffee, we decide to stick together and headed off to a small indigenous village in Chiapas called Chamula. Instead of taking a taxi, like any sane human being would, we walk. Thinking it's only so far away, we realized we were wrong. Walking down an endless highway with our luggage on our backs, and our hands intertwined, I supposed we looked like rebels, It was us against the world. We would not succumb to paying a whole eight dollars and change for a simple taxi ride to the next village over.

Ernesto notices I'm getting weary and shouts "Come on Aeida, wave your arms like this, it helps!" as he flapped his arms like a bird.

Almost angelic it seemed. He and I, walking in the blistering Mexican sun flapping our arms like pigeons. Like fools.