declarations

Juárez. 11:38pm. Near the corner of Avenida Bolivia and Calle Insurgentes. Centro.

And then it’s nighttime and I’m lying in bed with a stranger who lives across from my apartment. His lean, copper form lounging in rumpled, dirty sheets. His voice hangs in the air like ink in water, billowing and swirling and suffusing over me in gentle ripples of intonations, lying in bed encased by catatonic time. The world outside hums and buzzes, static and meaningless, incoherent. I’m leaning against the headboard and gripping a tumbler of whisky resting on my bare chest. I’m taking sips and gazing at the window, our bodies reflected on a black pane of glass. He’s resting his head on me, and we’re in our underwear. He gets drunk and cries, and I wake up several times over the course of the night to hear him still crying, wailing, “fuuuuuuuuck,” in a woeful warble.

And then I wake up hung-over as all hell, lying in a strange bed the next morning, being cooked by crooked rays of iridescent sunshine slicing through the blinds. And the cold day is dragging its feet as time moves in trepid tremors. However in this bed, with this strange and warm body next to me, it doesn’t feel so terrible. And perhaps he’s one of the good ones. Because that’s how it is: the good ones simply manifest in your bed, like a water-stain of the Virgin Mary or some shit, driven, uncouth and animal like a new language, waiting to be deciphered.

We’re smoking cigarettes. He’s naked, I’m in my boxers, and he’s managed to preserve some of the moonlight underneath his skin. Then he turns to me.

“Do you ever miss anyone?” He asks.

“Yeah, all the time.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Just people,” I lie; I do know.

“Do you ever feel lonely?”

“Sure. I get lonely as hell sometimes, baby.”

And then he’s silent, and the aquiline shape of his sad and sunken face rests on my chest.

“Do you ever feel happy?”

I shrug and take a drag of my cigarette. Languidly discharge great plumes toward the stained ceiling.

“Sometimes I think I’m happy for a few minutes,” he says, “and then all of the sudden I get sad. I hate it. That’s how life is, you know? Sadness is the bookend to the happiness. That’s just the way life is, you know.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I know.”

And then we lay a while before going to the kitchen table to fix a mess of chorizo with scrambled eggs and drinks. We’re sitting at the table in silence. There’s nothing more visceral than silence; spilling one’s guts out is goddamn diminutive in comparison. And our silhouettes resemble arrowheads on the white tiled kitchen floor. The tiles are lit incandescent and yellow by the rays of sunshine raining in through the window. We sit and drink out of dirty and smudged glasses. I realize after today, I’ll never see him again. And so it goes.