El Sol Sobre Ermita - The Sun Over Ermita (Street)
When the sunlight peeks into the bathroom on the second floor
It seeps through, refracted by the slanted, window that for dozens of years has let your tíos and abuelos gaze into that bustling street of Iztapalapa
Ermita Street, it’s supposedly the calle of the isolated chapel. (god hasn’t come through here for some days, there’s only his stench of the leftover incense, the aromatic trail of a fatherly figure that comes whenever he pleases).
This is the place you claim to be from, the house where your childhood footsteps, memories, nightmares, you hope, will outlive you. Here, some of the adobe walls that guard this home are fractured, peeling, a mere thousand gusts of wind away from finally succumbing.
Dices que eres de aquí - you say you’re from here
Pero has estado aquí apenas un breve suspiro - you’ve only been for, at most, a brief sigh
You ever rarely showered in this buttery, yellow, gleaming bathroom. This room does not know you and as your hands fumble the dislodged mirror cabinet, nearly sending it to its one and only permissible free fall, you understand you only thought you knew it, too.
The other bathroom is yours, the one separated by bricks thick enough to withstand decades of whispers unloaded to the water that flows unimpeded and unfiltered by any shower head. That sanctuary’s window gifted you with the view of the lone palm tree in the garden south of the house.
But in that light, canary-colored room, if you timed it right, and if you aligned the valves in that one sweet spot, the water would drown out the sounds of the camiones, of the camoteros, of the cantinas and of the cantankerous conversations within,
El agua caliente - que casi se acaba, you remember someone yelling - fogs the butter into a yellow haze until the sun’s last rays crystallizes you in this amber (the hot water - which has nearly run out)
here, the room you don’t understand - how long does one need to say they were raised somewhere? - in that room that cannot remember you, it
is now infinitely glowing, beaming - where the sun invites itself for just as long as it takes for the steam to dissipate after the stream has shut
did you ever experience this before you left? there’s a semblance of a memory, maybe just the tail end of another of the lies you’ve always told yourself
doesn’t seem like the sun cares as it’s with you in the room
you stay until you pretend to relive the figments of the life you never had here, the one you try to piece together out of piecemeal memories and unlived dreams every single time you return
knowing full well all of that already passed
Siempre De Efe / Forever Federal District
It can’t be helped but every single time she’s back in el DF, it’s like the city simply doesn’t leave the 80s. It can’t be asked, it can’t be forced. Some goddamn song is always there to remind her about this immutable fact.
Like that night her stepdad was telling her that there simply was no future left, the love had simply run its course and that now things were going to be revoltingly different. She wasn’t sure what her steppadre was saying - I mean, obviously she fucking knew - but “Young Turks” was playing at the same time and it just made more sense to pay attention to Stewart’s lyrics than literally anything else during that ride through Del Valle.
Or when she tried to reconnect with her actual father. It always astounded her how much utter bulls*it mexicans will say when evading important matters. There is no limit to this when there is also no willingness to engage in any truths.
“Si verdad?” the response to any generic statement. “Chale” the ever indifferent response regardless of the gravity of the question. “No pues esta cabron” yet another empty, godless phrase meant to fill the fucking air with meaningless clouds.
And yet that’s how that one conversation had gone, with no amends made because for one party, at least, there seemed to be no issues to fix. That afternoon, after she again found this task to be fruitless, she decided to get lost down a street replete with jacarandas. It must have been mid-spring. As she passed the tiny cantina, “Viento” blasted through the semi-open windows, the song’s melancholic beat capturing the bulding’s nonchalant, boring facade. A pang of immediate, immeasurable sadness hit her. The sounds of 1988 rock en tu idioma convinced her that venturing inside made more sense than anything else she had attempted that day.
It’s a fucking laugh. Every time she tried to seek a truth or reconcile or be serious about whatever past she was trying to uncover in that place she still refused to call CDMX, the city instead hit her with some melodramatic, sometimes obscure song from her parents’ days.
Of the time she and her uncle had been on a daydrinking binge across the monstrosity of a city. Prior to that, she had never as much as had a non-alcoholic cider with his mother’s brother. Not even when she ventured down south during those undergraduate days or for the typical medical emergency. Errands were always carried out the day before heading back to gringolandia but this time, this proved to be no obstacle to downing Victorias or shitty red wine from Oxxo at every pit stop on their way to securing the barbacoa, the sweets, random clothes and whatever else the family north of the Rio Bravo had ordered.
At a Hooters - out of all pinche places - her uncle inadvertently smacked her with one of the more harbored family secrets. The truth came out at disparate points, you just had to find the right combination of fermented yeast. Had a stranger taken but a second to gaze at them two instead of the many American football games on the plasma televisions, they would’ve witnessed two giddy, damn drunkards - one, a shocked but smiling younger female, the other a more robust older man - crying profusely over two kitschy beer tankards while Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” played overhead. To this day, both pretend they never discussed what was uttered at that table. As for the drinking, however that kept going well into the night hours. Conversations changed, that was it.
She missed her flight the next morning.
When she arrived at the airport later that day, head spinning and mezcal on her clothes, “Viviendo de Noche” welcomed her. She laughed. This damn city would never free itself from the clutches of that decade. Siempre acompañando a la madruga, que a veces nos enseña su mala cara. Always accompanying the morning, which sometimes shows us its ugly face.
