We saved it for later. Instead of finding a dark corner off the beach, away from the rest of our friends, snorting it from a dirty key with clumsy hands. I said let's do it on the terrace when we get to my house. You said, yeah, let's do it and then go swimming.
I have a decorative clear glass plate, colorful dots arranged in rows across it. I bought the plate several years ago. In the past, I have placed it on dressers and let it gather my loose rings and necklaces. I bought it when I was living in Spain. Now I'm living in a small town on the southwestern Mexican coast. I am originally from Wisconsin. Usually I live in Portland, when I'm not traveling or giving myself writing sabbaticals like I am currently.
I didn't bring a lot with me to Mexico, but I brought the plate, perhaps thinking I might need it to hold my jewelry. It had been sitting in the cupboard with the other plates and bowls and cups, unused for over a month. I pulled out the plate and dumped the contents of a small plastic bag onto it. Its rows of colorful dots became a guide for forming straight lines of white powder. You let down the bamboo curtain to cover the window, though as a curtain it did little more than keep out a small amount of light. If anyone walked by they would be able to see through it, if they bothered to look. I know, because I walk by it all the time.
We ran down the stairs to the terrace. A terrace high above the bay. The stars always seemed to be out at night, and the lights on the boats anchored in the bay, they looked like stars, the way they were still and floating in the darkness just above the water.
We were high. We took off our clothes and dove into the warm cerulean pool. We swam around each other. We swam into each other's arms. You lifted me up and dropped me back into the water. You grabbed my face and kissed me and I grabbed your face and kissed you and we looked up at Orion's belt and then back at each other. Night has so much depth to it without being high. We were already on top of the city.
Before we snorted lines of bright white cocaine off the glass plate with all the colorful dots in the tiny kitchen of my tiny apartment in a tiny seaside village in Soutern Mexico, there was infatuation. It happened right away, you know the kind. Like stars floating low and close, that appear as if by magic just by noticing they exist.
I thought the plate would be the object of this essay. Or the cocaine. This is the kind of essay that has "things." It is the pool, its blueness, that reminds me most of that night. Knowing on the beach, when we decided to save it for later, that we were grasping for things to remember each other by. Night swimming in the beautiful blue pool, naked and high and full of love. The cocaine was just an excuse. I saw that scene before it unfolded in front of me, my body knowing itself, its relishing in the sensory world to help it keep something forever.