Lluvia, Here in my palm I have found the slightest hint of a crack, a fissure of skin that veins its way up through my arm and pierces its way into my very heart. When I look at it closely I see that it spells your name. When will those righteous stars shine grace upon our faces and bring us close together again? I will go to you again tonight and wait for my answer.

-Minariu o La sed del desierto (for if you are rain, then I am that which pleads for your presence)

Here is what presented itself to me first, or second I suppose. Just before I read this note, this cloud of warming words, I had found the news about her suicide. I could say that it was some suicide. But I am a writer and I never was one to believe in coincidences. So when I read the note, I took it immediately as her suicide which I had read about from a newspaper I bought from a young boy for five pesos. I scanned the pages while I walked over to the convention center in which the bi-annual Committee for Integrity Based Patriotic Journalism of the United States of America was holding assembly.

Why we meet in Mexico- just outside the southernmost Texas border- I have never bothered to investigate. Twice a year several thousand self-proclaimed journalists spend a week in this small but restless town. Once the wearisome five hour meetings are over every afternoon, there are no regulations on how the members can spend their free time. After ten years of the Committee’s week long clam bakes I’d grasped a terribly indecent hold on the Spanish language, but I knew enough to order food and beer and room service when necessary, and I could read a bit as well. Even when I fumbled for a word or two plenty of people from the area knew enough English to catch my drift.

Attending the meetings had gotten much more difficult, where the very first meetings were at least more interesting with a sort of eclectic hodge-podge of so called professionals doing presentations on award winning articles and such crap, the last few years had been dauntingly announced with themes ahead of time. The first was gilded in red white and blue, and blazoned “Writing about the Land of the Free.” I’d guffawed at the audacity of the Committee when I’d opened my monthly newsletter and little bits of colored confetti spilt out of the envelope into my plate of scrambled eggs.