“That’s where he said it - ‘there it is - take it!’ “
We lay states away, on the river’s rocky bank. Sweat, cum, beads of river water trickled down our skin. My eyes followed the illuminated current. My eyes closed.
He was just in front of me, shaking between breaths on the very tall barbed wire fence. I put my hand on his and reassured. My voice was smooth. His breathing slowed. We went in together, but we escaped separately. I told him it would be okay. When he finally came back to me he was bleeding badly.
In front of me, another fence. Magic welcomed us across the threshold. We slid down the trashy incline until we made it to the river.
“Remember that water is still wild!”
We spent the day smoking and making paintings of the mossy overgrowth. We were miles inland, surrounded by infrastructure.
As the light faded, the heat receded. The water was little and flowed west. I began to follow its path.
The first time they put me in cuffs was on Valentine’s Day. I felt his breath against my neck as she stood in front of me and asked what was under my clothes. I was confused by the question, I was too young.
I wanted to look down, become unstuck in time and find myself with future lovers. I wanted to skip to the moments of learning the tenderness of stone and rock. Of holding lightness and transmuting hardness. I wanted to go away to wherever water runs.
But when the evening air hit my sex I was there between the officers. The cowards among me looked down and saw, but were too afraid to take. As they drove off, I picked my book back up. I didn’t feel much like reading.
I waited two years after his twenty year sentence to look him up and found his linkedin was still active. He told my parents I was special and that I mattered most. He thought aloud that I was like him.
I looked forward to being pulled out of class to play his new electric guitar. I didn’t care about him, I didn’t pay attention in his private office. I just played his guitar. I didn’t look up from the fretboard to see him holding her hand.
When the newspapers printed his name and face I felt like it was my own. My face wet with guilt for what happened to her - wet with guilt for what didn’t happen to me. I was there too.
The only light left in the sky was artificial. I had followed the wild water for miles. Beneath freeways and far from Magic, till the water ran parallel to the ocean. The waves did not roar. The wind was absent.
The river was corralled into a pipe bigger than my body. I continued alongside it, my path leading to a looming structure ahead. At the precipice, a barbed wire fence stood between me and a massive tower of pipes shooting towards the heavens.
The silence of the beach was shattered by the sound of torrenting water. I saw only metal, but I heard the deafening screaming thrust of water being forced upward through erected shafts. The sound was so loud and so sudden. I was dizzy and I grabbed the fence to keep from fainting. I wanted to go somewhere else. I wanted to go inside myself and take refuge in past embraces. I had ran away to water only to find it trapped and penetrated.
I felt limp against the fence. There was nowhere to go, no fair place to hide. Everyone had been hurt already by hands not unlike my own. Someone stole the water and I choked because I knew the flowers could be next. I closed my eyes and prayed for a lullaby to save us all. I was powerless.
John Garcia (b.1990, A Coruña, Spain) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and musician currently living and working between Los Angeles, CA and New York City. Recent solo shows have been held at Del Vaz Projects (2024); Carlye Packer (2023); The Material Room (2023). His work has also been included in exhibitions at Baba Yaga Gallery, New York, NY (2023) ; Simian Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2021); The Still House Group, New York, NY (2015). He also operates the bunker, a project space in the Santa Monica mountain range.
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