writer

The sun rose on the horizon, reddening and yellowing the land the color of dawn. 

Tomás laid on his side.

He looked out the small window in the gardener's hut. 

He felt Gabby's body on his.

Her chest was on his back.

Her leg was over his hip.

Her arm was around his shoulder.

She was holding him.

"Her hands are my hands,” he thought.

“Her feet are my feet.

Her heart is my heart.

Her life is my life.”

Tomás feared loneliness with a fear ever present and absolute.

Sometimes he stood nose to nose and foot to foot against loneliness and fought against it with bare knuckles and a raging heart.

Sometimes he fled it unequivocally with weeping eyes and pounding heart, a fear that grew out of the dry, broken ground of his parents deaths, deaths he could neither fathom nor give voice to because one moment they were there with him, holding his hand, running their fingers through his hair as he drifted off to sleep, holding him in their arms, and the next moment they were gone, crushed by the landlord and the land until they disappeared into dust and memory, a bitter root of loneliness that grew into a plant of fear.

Once, an old priest told him, "Don't fear loneliness, Tomás. You're never alone. God promises that. God is with you. You're never alone."

Tomás loved the old priest and respected him. 

He didn't have much use for his metaphysics, though. 

There was much more comfort in the priest's friendship than in his words about God.

"Words," thought Tomás. 

“They're worth so little.

Yet they're worth so much.” 

He thought of his childhood.

When he was a boy, on his first day of school, his mamí held his hand and led him over the threshold of the door of their small house.

He stopped suddenly.

He grabbed the door frame and held on with all of his might.

“I'm only going to school so I can learn to write!" he exclaimed.

He learned to write, and afterwards he wrote and wrote all the time. 

His mamí, on her way to the garden to pick fruits and vegetables from the plants and trees of the land, would find him beneath the apple tree beside the fence of the garden, his bony shoulders hunched over his notebook as if he were a human question mark, his long fingers gripped around his pencil as if he were a human exclamation point, writing the things he saw and heard and smelled and tasted and felt. 

His papí, on the way back from the sugar cane fields, would find him on top of the giant rock in their yard, his eyes to the sky as if he were seeing something others were missing, his ears to the ground as if he were hearing something others were missing, writing so the world could see and hear.

Both his Mamí and his papí saw that in these moments of writing, a soft light encircled his body, the mark of a saint, a faint halo around his head. 

They didn't believe in the god of the church, but they did believe in the god of the people, looking for evidence of god all around them, hoping against hope that god was real, hoping against hope that god was good, hoping against hope that god was with them.

Perhaps god will be in the words of our son," they thought as they drifted off to sleep each night, worn down from the hard work of planting, gathering, tending, and hoping, holding each other with calloused hands and stick thin arms with full hearts hoping.

Sometimes as he wrote, and the light glowed around him at his sparse work desk, he used words to fight the loneliness.

He wrote to assuage the loneliness of the farmers, who gave their bodies to the land day after day, year after year, until they became the dust from which they were made.

He wrote to assuage the loneliness of the workers, who gave their souls to the factories, day after day, year after year, until they became gears and grease themselves.

He wrote to assuage the loneliness of the servants, who gave their hearts and souls to their patróns day after day, year after year, until they became the rags and the basins from which they served.

He wrote to assuage the loneliness of all those who worked to subsist, who worked for enough food to stay alive, who worked for enough wood and tin to stay alive, who worked for enough stories and music to stay alive.

They were living for nothing, and yet for everything.

He used words as colors and his pen as a brush to paint human faces.

“See with the eyes of your heart," the old doctor pleaded, "For it’s then, only then, that you will see the world as it is.”

He painted Gabby, her brown eyes filled with kindness, her hair hanging down to her shoulders, her naked body beautiful, her hands and feet calloused, her smile a light for the land.

He painted the priest, his tattered clothes, his tarnished crucifix, the reminder that Christ is in each and every person each and every day, his face full of love.

He painted the doctor, the sparkle in his blue eyes, the deep wrinkles on his forehead, his broken hands that healed.

He turned to Gabby in the morning light and held her close to him, until they became one.