Malas noches

The music sounds nice. It really does. And the booming men's voices drifting up from the lower landing are a rarity. So I hold my tongue, as they drum on the coffee table and cheer at the close of each song. And I don't walk downstairs with my hair tousled and my clothing hanging askew, to look my most sleepy-wifely, to guilt them into being quiet, or go home... even though it is quarter to 1, and I just awoke to the damn alarm that someone failed to turn off despite it being his night off. And now... I lay in the darkness. Not angry, though this is surprising given my propensity for a short temper.

How to describe my feelings? Tonight? Of late? We spent the greater part of the afternoon at one of the Mexicanos parties... it is this group of Mexican graduate students and families that have been getting together for the last several years, saying goodbye to our neighbors who are going back to Xalapa, and others who are off for a year of field work... mostly anthropologists and linguists, though there are people from other departments too. I like them, and they are kind, but they remind me of my ultimate inadequacy as a wife (I will never meet the social expectations for a Mexican woman: impeccable house, meal on the table at 1 pm, unwavering selflessness...) and after several hours of being social (I wanted to go home by around 8 but I. was having so much fun with the other children I felt it unfair to make her come home just because I was starting to withdraw into myself.) Finally at 10 I gave all the requisite hugs and kisses and left I. with her dad. I curled up in my bed, and made my usual rounds of cyberspace before closing out quickly when I heard voices outside the door, so as to pretend to my child that I was really asleep. It failed. She convinced me to read a story, and promptly fell asleep. And so did I until now.

Ennui. Apathy. General malaise? Pit in my stomach. Infinite solitude...

I won't go downstairs, even though they are playing music that I might like to sing. It is a private party. I don't want to be the killjoy that I know I am. If I could float out into the middle of the ocean in this moonlight, as if my body were a raft, impenetrable by the cold, or the sharks that would surely circle... sleep might come in the echo of silence against which the cries reverberate in my brain. All I ever wanted was to bring happiness to another, and even that is an impossibility.