Leslie Contreras Schwartz
FROM LETTERS TO FRIDA KAHLO
January 24, 2025
Dearest Frida,
I’m sorry it has been so long. I have spent more time outdoors since the weather has finally cooled and this week there was an unusual winter freeze in Houston—it even snowed four inches! I love the few weeks it feels like winter in Houston, not only because my body doesn’t fight the air, my lungs can breathe more easily; I love how the world is held tightly, protectively, how greenery is made stiff and frigid and inside that holding back there is promise that I can feel radiating from the core of things, life, preserved even as the plants and the trees die.
Something of life is retained in the cold, the caught breath, the withholding of the earth. Most people see the bare trees or the wilting flower beds (although in Houston the shrubbery and hardier plants are always green) but I don’t feel despair in the winter like many do. The quality of life grows thick and blank, not removed but like a slate wiped clean for something new to be rewritten. I am absolved, my body is absolved and I love myself again. I forget everything my body has done and can move freely about the world. It is as if my mind and body have forgotten the feeling of confinement and pain.
I have not told you in so many words what ails me. But this winter I went to Disney Land with my children before the fire set Los Angeles ablaze and I could only do using a wheelchair. I closed my eyes on the roller coasters sometimes when I felt like I might pass out from fright, not from the falls, but of how my body felt it would collapse. How my body felt pressed up against itself sitting next to my children as they screamed with delight. When I felt their happiness, I willed myself to open my eyes and imagined a beautiful life for them, even if I am not there to see it. I’m here now, even with its excruciating seconds of pain that seeps into my bones on bad days and hovers in another room, removed and cold, on others. I know its there, my collapsing, but I don’t need to speak to it all the time, right? I know you know, Frida.
Your loving friend and ever bed side companion
Leslie Contreras Schwartz