She stands askance a wall with a look of mild annoyance. I’m ten minutes late. Without any sort of excuse at hand. The countenance communicates strike one, two, and three. We didn’t just start off on the wrong foot. She shot my foot off and threw it into the foaming sea. My big toe being carried off by a scuttling sea crab on the ocean floor.
If extreme violence to my face was imminent, then Mariflor from Venezuela was quick to tamp away the compulsion and let her instinctual cordiality retake the controls. Before long we’re at the Autry Museum and her peepers are scrutinizing the original manuscript for Kerouac’s On the Road. Her eyes quite candidly gaze-worthy themselves. And eyelashes, like the beatnik scroll itself, went on for miles rambling with jazz, poetry, and counterculture.
She was in her final year of studying journalism. One parent a dentist and the other a lawyer. Good teeth and a swift mind. Oh, she was a sharp cookie. That was made all too apparent within moments of acquaintance. She was a flood gate of opinions and discernment. I was undone by her. It was a thorough vivisection by Venezuelan.
Much turmoil and strife in Caracas. Much rioting and revolution colour the streets. Aside from the dissatisfaction with the current regime and the angst of the young boiling over to a critical point of societal conflagration, I like to think a Molotov cocktail or two must’ve been thrown because of her absence. Order and enlightenment blooms at her softest of murmurs. Civilization crumbles when she absconds from your shores.
We find ourselves walking one of many undescript trails found in Los Angeles. Dusty, sun-soaked, and accosted on all sides by idyll panoramas of the city. Perfect, I must begrudgingly concede. In all it’s majestic mundanity. The only thing interrupting the monotony was this sunburst walking aside me. A bundle of light bulbs orbiting around Mar’s divine coif.
I pulled the lever on the series of go-to inquiries: What do you love, what are you afraid of, and what’s in your pocket?
She’s not wearing a get-up conducive for pockets. Which is kind of a trend I’m noticing. I look forward eagerly to the day I encounter a lass with custom cargo pants and is armed with a smorgasbord of baubles and trinkets and it’s finally a windfall of answers. This interviewer can only wring his hands and hope for the day.
She’s afraid of enclosed spaces. Claustrophobic, this one. Which is a particular brand of irony as when you’re in her presence you feel like a gazelle bounding through an ample and expansive vale. Sartorial muscles aching with liberation. The very contrapuntal of feeling encased and boxed in.
Her loves are simple. Mar enjoys the company of her friends and laughing and fraternizing and all-around being a carefree twenty-something. She’s most in her element with her hair down and good conversation in the air. Which she induces with little effort. Despite my attempts to veer the dialogue into farce.
“So,” I drone, “if you could be marooned on an island with only one food stuff, what would it be?”
“Bananas,” is the quick answer as if some other simpleton has interrogated her already with this query.
“What was the greatest lie you ever told?”
“That I never lie,” said with a mischievous smirk. This one is trouble. And we hanker for every misfortune and tragedy that runs tandem with said trouble.
The sun begins to set behind us. The Hollywood sign bathing in dusky blue, shouting from its director’s chair, implores us to wrap things up. I point at the vista and ask to provide us with an impromptu haiku, why not. And Mar recites.
“This way is not long
The sun is beautiful now
The weather is great.”
She was on a plane back to Caracas the next day. And the moment the plane’s vapour trails dissipated from our air space, I was filled with an acute urge to pick up a trash can and chuck it into a pizza shop window and bellow, “Viva la revolucion!”