To Breathe in Bahia...

Alright Yall! Here it is. My first one to be completed by my 35th. Let me hear it, the good, the bad, and the ugly:)

I jumped up from under my covers breathless. I was dreaming, but I didn’t know altogether what I was dreaming about. Well, not really. It was about Bení, and the stress of the voice that called his name repeatedly in my head indicated that there was an issue. Trouble, some sort of danger.

I took a deep breath and tried to blink my way out of the confusion. The hotel sheets were comfortable, but by no means were they the high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets that I was used to sleeping on. The room décor was vibrant but not restful, and I couldn’t help but think that they should fire the interior decorator that designed the room. The banana yellow and orange sherbet window treatments were too bright under the light of the moon shining brightly in the window and did nothing to take the edge off my stress. I tried to blame my uneasiness on the room, but I knew better. Maybe I was conjuring things in my head because I recalled the shrouded urgency in Bení’s voice when he phoned me last week asking me to visit. Maybe my heart and soul was stirring because I knew that he needed me, and I was missing him.

My nerves were really going haywire. I couldn’t seem to settle what felt like dice rolling around inside of me. There were no little soft, beautiful butterflies in this stomach. My abdomen felt like a roulette table on the first of the month, and the only, the only thing to stop it from spinning madly was to see him. Was to lay my eyes on the man who changed my view of things, who understood the complexities of my brown female mind, all the while maintaining the distinct and unwavering maleness that was so characteristically South American, so Bení. And I wanted to see find out what it was that was causing him to vex in a way that made me uneasy.

As I prepared my mind and body for our re-connection, I remembered the first time that I really received him. I could feel his energy across the large conference room table in the student center at graduate school. We had just ended our Environmental Politics class. He was sitting with a few others, discussing the implications of deforestation on the Brazilian rainforests with other students in the room, and his understated but passionate views and opinions seemed to rise above the din of voices and objections. I was intrigued. I watched him over shoulders and bald spots, between bodies shifting and heads bobbing. My group partner, the arrogant wannabe ivy-leaguer of the class was trying to convince Bení, Benjamín Merceal, he who was born in the land of endangered species and indigenous peoples, that the clearing away and destruction of God’s green Earth, was OK. Bení was not to be convinced.

They went back and forth for quite sometime, until Aaron the ivy-leaguer’s arguments were spent, and Bení shook his hand triumphantly and prepared to go. I was so moved by him and drawn to his presence that I hadn’t noticed that there were only a few of us left in the room. I was stuck. It was obvious that I was watching them, but I tried to play it off by gathering my things and moving towards the door. He, though, was not going to allow an uneventful departure on my part, and stopped me before I could walk out and catch my breath again.

“So, what do YOU think?” he asked, softly but firmly, in a voice that oozed the Bossa Nova and warm beaches at sunset.

I could only issue an awkward and almost inaudible “hum?” before I choked up, and in what I now know to be his way, he asked the question again, giving me to room to recover. I am not sure if he knew at the time how affected I was, not just by his physical appearance, because he is F-I-N-E, but by the charismatic hold he held over people listening to him. He was not overbearing in the least, nor was he the E. F. Hutton of the American University’s School of Public Affairs graduate program. But when he had your attention, he had you, and it was not easy to get away. Of course, if you were in your right mind, you really didn’t want to. Needless to say, I didn’t get away. And I didn’t want to do such a thing that would be contrary to my being. That fact was apparent to me back then. So I told him what I thought about the discussion. And he listened. He listened to that which was not spoken too. I was transfixed by his ability to do so, and we have been joined ever since.