I arrived at Roxy’s hut covered in mud and knocked on her door, number ten. She opened it fully naked as if it was a completely natural thing to do the second time meeting someone.
A Tiny Desk Concert by Masego was playing on her home studio speakers. The lights were dimmed and half a joint was hanging next to a glowing incense stick in a red ashtray by her bed.
"Shall we jump into the sea first?" I asked her. "I'm full of dirt, I don't want to mess up your place." I took off my bathing trunks, no need for them anymore, and followed Roxy down a narrow path past palm trees and stone sculptures leading to the beach.
I was a little nervous around her, I must admit. When we first met, she seemed almost surreal to me, like a mirage, a fata morgana, or some mythical creature.
It was as if the lucy made me dream that day, it was just too good to be true. I feared at any moment the shrill sound of some bullshit alarm clock would wake me up and force me back to my desk. I waited for it without any longing.
Nothing happened, and that was the best part. This lucid dream still lasted and didn't seem to end. I was next to this naked girl in the waves of a wild ocean, above us the full moon, bats, and the twitter of birds. After our swim, we took a hot shower until the steam clouded our vision, and dried one another off before lying in her bed.
I, a small-town boy with sweaty palms, a wry sense of humor and romance, nervous as a nerdy schoolboy who can't get a clear sentence out of his mouth. She, a woman of the world, cultured from her travels through Indian ashrams, the lands of Latin America, and Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist temples in Asia.
She was as dreamy as Alice on a handful of super pills, yet as mentally and intellectually present as a tough businesswoman from New York. She was so many women in one body.
In her spread-out suitcase were books, mantras, holy scripts, and eastern works of mythology like the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Things that to me, a simple boy who preferred to spend his days in his bed, seemed from another world. I had been to Thailand and Mexico, as well as China. However, I had only ever hit that real nerve center of cultural and free life once, during my days in the bush of New Zealand.
Everything else seemed to me like a trivial tourist attraction, a collective drunkenness of nomads and tourists who went from hostel to hostel, from box to box, and talking that same old pseudo-cultural gibberish about earning money and growing their reproductive fitness over and over again.“Hey, where are you from and where will you go next?”
Roxy, on the other hand, had pranced along unconventional paths all her life. She danced past the hamster wheel, past the institutional assembly line, past the bourgeois life and its bourgeois demands. She had made her existence a spiritual journey, a wondrous adventure.
From the limited point of view of the mainstream, she was an outsider, a strange person, a dream dancer, to some, perhaps she was an alien. But she was right in the middle of it all. On the floors of this world.
She was devoted to the badly off, to ethnic minorities, women, and children in need, protesting at the forefront from all her viscera, from her guts until turning hoarse and blind from tear gas, fighting against dictatorship, oppression, racism, police brutality and all kinds of systemic bullshit, and eventually fighting for love and light to shine through.
She organized political and cultural events, petitions, and fundraisers, she always had some art or film project she was involved in, an author she was writing a book for, while always leaving her own manuscripts unpublished.
It was as if this woman could publish twenty volumes of autobiographical books yet no one would ever be able to fully understand her and penetrate down to her very core, her essence, fathom her infinite ways and vastness. Least of all she could be fully understood by a man like myself, a tail-driven, shiny bastard with a bad and stumbling heart.
Although I didn't know her well yet and she seemed to me, all in all, like one single mystery, a puzzle without a bottom, I could extract from her stories a decisive basic essence, a small but potent beauty, which underlay everyone of her words and steps, her unconditional love of life.
She loved life and the universe from which it sprang. She loved people. All people. Not in a casual and mundane way, like a junkie who loves his drug or a girlfriend who loves her boyfriend, but uncompromisingly. Limitless. Divine. Like a matured being, a millennia-old tree, firmly and calmly rooted, that has recognized love as the universal answer to the existential equation.
Roxy's unrestricted and openly loving nature immediately seemed to be the reason for her polyamorous lifestyle. Most people, myself included, saw polyamory as a way to avoid and escape their fears of a serious and deeply committed partnership, as an ability to casually date more than one person at a time. It was like building multiple income streams so that if one of them would break away you could still rely on the other ones.
Roxy, however, was polyamorous because she had so much love inside of her that she had no other option but to give it to several people. Like fine art for the artist, like a tiger in the jungle, like a mountain for the hermit, a sharp knife for the suicidal, like a bed inside the ocean, like Buddha, Ram Dass, Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, Osho & Sheela coming together for a touch & play party in her little hut. She seemed to be that matching and final puzzle piece.
Perhaps, I thought, she carried so much love inside of her that a single person, simply could not bear it, would implode with happiness, would go mad.
Roxy led exclusively deep friendships, love affairs, and partnerships without any fear of putting herself in front of a person or in front of the whole world and being completely naked, making herself vulnerable and being defined as crazy.
In knowing her I saw that as naked as she opened the door to me, she opened it to the world.
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Alex is a writer and musician who enjoys creating the weird and trippy, the beautiful and painful, & the strange and disgusting things life offers. His stories tend to have underlying humor that can range from dry to dark. Most of his writings are autobiographical.
You can find his first novel here.
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