{ Essays }

8/23/22

Dear Juan Caceres Carreño,

My nomad brother, I have learned about love from you. I have had to fight very hard to make my way out of the acid ways I used to know, and I have learned to love very gradually over years, I mean YEARS, I mean, digging-out-of-prison-with-a-spoon, years, ha ha. But in such times, there are plateaus and there are surges, and my friendship with you has helped me surge.

This isn’t possible, I thought, when I saw the news. I had just been telling people how much I love you. Our friendship inched along, accumulating gradually until over the last few months, when I realized you were one of my favorite people in the world. I don’t even know how it started! I probably thought your work was interesting and followed you, and since we’re both social media addicts, we chatted every once in a while. I started bucking you up after your occasional why-can’t-I-get-my-love-life together posts. You are such a great cheerleader for others’ endeavors. And when you announced that HBO funded your pilot about Afro-Latinos in our beloved city, that project I would call “beloved of each other and ourselves in our beloved city.” You created an ode to the city that is one of our collection of homelands, we nomads, I knew the project would be like you. I knew it would be all warm heart, the heart that radiates through the flaws and the petty grievances of our programming. Your series would be of cultural importance, the story that must be told.

One of the things I loved best about you is that you weren’t perfect. I think we imagine that loving people must be like Buddhist monks, wanting for nothing, subsisting on water and rice, emerging from mountain caves to wish for the rest of us that our dreams come true, a monk without dreams or aches of his own. But no, Juan wasn’t like that. It taught me that loving people aren’t perfect, and don’t have to be perfect. Loving people live in their affections like fundamental fact. Love radiates out of their body. We can feel it. Their hearts speak to our hearts and we can’t tell you how we know it’s traveling through the air, but it is.

 It feels like that moment in which you have an urge to hug someone, your best friend’s good news, your child’s accomplishment, and you’re brimming with the high, so you open your arms. Juan always felt like that moment in which we’re driven to open our arms. All day long, every day, that’s what he felt like. How can someone built so absolutely of love die young?

Juan, you were flawed! I love your flaws. Your flaws were hella funny. You could be petty. You liked to psychologically torture people who mis-texted. You told some young woman, showing off her new purse to her best friend, “What do you think?” with a photo of the thing. You told her it was ugly, and you didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. You were petty about your exes sometimes, but mature and loving others. You said they were crazy, then you said you were crazy. Someone found a post from 2013 saying you faked your own death to get out of a relationship. Okay, so I had some telenovela dream that that’s what you’re doing now.

You were just hella funny. I had been traveling, and I texted you that I’m a punk because I’m in the hood in Medellin and I’m afraid to go out at night. You responded, “I lived in Valparaiso and the view from my window I will never forget…but it was in the hood part. Fuck no, I didn’t go out at night. I’m from New York, but I ain’t stupid.” It’s something rare amongst Americans, our loving the rest of the world as much as we love ourselves, and we did, Juan-of-the-open-arms. Juan-with-a-touch-of-petty.

You said you loved my girls. You hired Precious, of course you needed a Pinay in a Latinx show. This makes sense because of the wide wonderous and cruel voyages of history. You jumped on Larilyn’s project about the one Filipino dude in Boogaloo. I know why: because it is love. The music is love. The tale is love. The tale of the people. The tale of loving two homelands, or four, shall I say or five? Five, I shall I say. By this, I mean continents. So many continents in our tales.  That’s you, if it had love, that’s where you’d be. If it crossed the continents, that was your tale.

And let me talk about three things I know you were good at. You were good at that feeling, that moment-the-arms-open feeling. You were good at art, you knew what this world needed and there you were, filling the space, making them know. Precious said it was one of the best sets she’d ever been on; she just met you. You loved her as I knew you would. And she loved you, as I knew she would. And perhaps most importantly, Juan, you were good at being a man.

Juan loved people, and he loved women. He wasn’t like too many hetero men, where if we’re not gonna fuck him, what’s the point? Most of best friends were women, he sent us his petty texts, he complained about the ones he was dating, or even just talking to, and we got to exchange those little hugs, those, “Fuck her if she can’t see it,” or “You got this.”

Juan, I knew you loved me. You said so, but I could feel it even if you hadn’t. We knew this of you. I wish those could have been my last words; you have made us feel loved. And as we became closer friends in the past year, hung a bit here and there, those texts about our colonized motherlands the Americas, plural, the Philippines, same boats, same flag, about the valleys where the people who inherit houses get to live on flat land, and those who can’t miss a day of work lug their wares up the hillside, up the crumbling steps. I loved the things you said. Delight: your love for the world, your petty, it was delight.

I kept telling people, you’ve got to meet my friend Juan. Larilyn and you had plans for the history of Boogaloo, the gorgeous melding of motherlands. I texted, “Say something Chilean to these young backpackers I met in my travels, these ayahuasca-doing anti-incarceration, pro-recycling mother-earth loving twenty-somethings. You said,  “CTM,” initials since the whole phrase is offensive and involves euphemism for sex and our maternal figure, and my young friend gave me a feminist lesson on sexualizing-the-mother insults. You said you loved that. You loved my friend, that was the third friend I introduced you to that you loved. You loved those leftist Chilean intellectual feminists. You always had more love to give. Love is a non-count noun, you said (but didn’t really literally say). It’s like water, you can’t break it up into pieces. More brings more and the more the better. When we love jealously, when we say, “That one is mine,”it’s because we fear the love isn’t real. Juan taught us, it’s real and it’s the best we’ve got and it’s as massive as air and it’s everywhere; it can be, if we just open our eyes.

New York City, the city that brought us Juan. The city that brought us together with our thousand thousand motherlands. How exquisite I got to share that with you. How exquisite you were making art to say just that: love your people, love your city, love your motherlands. I’ve been asking, what will we do with all this love? Continents, shanties up the hillside, house on the hill, boats, planes, subways. The people.

And this is crazy, I just learned that Pinochet drove Juan’s family to Liverpool. He actually sounded like a Beatle until he was sixteen. That is so hard to imagine, and it’s some mysterious part of the puzzle that helps me understand why he was so brave. It makes me sad to know how little I knew of him.

But I know. Juan, I loved you. It was only a few months back we became close enough that I might text you a joke or a question. But I started saying to people, “You have got to meet Juan. I love Juan.” I thought it. I thought walking around about my day, “I love Juan.” I walked around thinking it, Juan is one of my favorites, Juan is a gift. Juan was bigger than our awkward twitches, the worst of our memories that make us want to hide. Juan knew he didn’t have much to fear or be ashamed of. Juan thought it all was slightly funny.

What do I do with all this love? I know the answer. I try to be like you. That’s what the fuck I do. I walk around in that feeling, that moment that makes you wish to open your arms. I don’t have to be perfect. I get a touch of petty like spice in a dish, double the spice of any lame-ass recipe. Thank you for the lesson, Señor Cariño. If I am a better person as life goes on, if I’m able to live in the space where the arms open, if this is my biggest surge yet, and I’ve made it up up above the petty and acid feelings of the rocky valley, it is because of you.

Ingat, abrazos,

Lara