It is almost midnight in Mexico and the Cantina next door will play music for another three hours.

My wife is asleep, the thin sheet wrapped tightly around her body. In the morning we will visit Maya ruins.

I am reading about black holes and the way time wraps itself tightly around a mass. And when I put down the book I imagine myself speeding far away from here, so far, to regions where the speed of light has not yet reached and standing in that moment of first light and witnessing its beginning and my beginning and my wife’s and the Mayans.

I could watch the first squealing breath.

The ruins built block by block and the oceans spread out thin like butter.

Such beauty in beginnings. Why do I mourn decay? The slow entropy in time.

I find hope in things being put together.

Joy in Legos, in writing stories, in watching a good movie, the story of love.

At the ruins tomorrow we will say, such decay, and the tour guide will say, this was restored in 1997, you can imagine what it must have looked like back then.

I will hold hands with my wife and we will talk about the dead past and the hopeful, incoming light of the future.