time/space alignment

Owing to nothing less than goddamn divine intervention, I retrieve my luggage from storage and high tail it via trolley to the Frontier. Amid bustling early morning commuters, I enter the Mexican immigration office and acquire my visa and rush out to be swamped by a million taxi drivers. Being the highbrow and somewhat finicky fag I am, I choose the most handsome out of the bunch and we jet over to Fifth and Madero Ave. el centro.

An entire year has passed since I ignorantly fled this town – a city I both adore and detest. And yet, this fetid metropolis will be my home for the next three months. I had purchased an online flight to Cambodia for January 2^nd…however, that will be another story.

So, as I was saying before I got interrupted by my sinister and condescending voices (troublesome little beasts), I drag my luggage across the dusty frontier, past the kaleidoscope of vibrant banners and trinkets and plump babies wallowing in dirt (their big brown eyes gaze at me as snot cakes on their upper lip), past the searing aromas of taco stands and churros sizzling in their grease pits, “A ver Moolburros!” from cigarette vendors competing with the beats of blasting salsa music, Nilton and I – Nilton being my cabbie and I tell you is he a sight for sore eyes, long and lanky, thin moustache, and bulging crotch that will raise any eyebrow – we casually chat about Tijuana, the whore houses, the beer, the food, the government – all those banal things one expects when first stepping on foreign soil and conversing with a local. Didn’t mind, he was a sweet fellah.

We pull up in front of the same guesthouse I had rented a room in a year prior and I noisily make my way up the broad, wooden stairs to the second floor reception. Lucia, the motherly matron of the joint, greets me with a huge smile and tight embrace. “Ay, guero, adonde vas?” I tell ya, it was a relief to get out of the States overtly inundated with bitter, conning, hateful people. America you may bitch and you may complain all you want concerning the state of affairs in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, but you worthless shits are getting exactly what your greedy, self-righteous, pompous asses deserve. America is evil. It has always been evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians…the evil has always been there lurking…

I slap down the two hundred a month for my room, shower and settle in. I sit on my queen size bed, staring out into the panorama of multicolored, graffitied buildings. A maudlin Mexican love ballad pumps from a passing car. I begin to weep uncontrollably, over run by a wave of such loss and sadness. What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing this? Where am I going? All avenues I see in my mind’s eye are veiled in shadows and confusion. Perhaps I am entirely insane. Perhaps I do need to seek psychiatric help…fuck it. I sat up and strode to the corner to one of my favorite coffee shops called Praga on Revu. Ordered a café americano and as I sat watching the happy, content people dart back and forth, (quite the opposite of the grimacing, brutal faces of American pedestrians) my eye caught the side glance of a handsome young Mexican man in his early twenties strolling with a girl. He didn’t stop, but he did turn and smile with that knowing look one gives another interested in same-sex innuendos and it was at that moment I knew. After a year of ill fortune and misdirection and deceit and defamations, I was exactly where I was supposed to be. My heart swelled and the gray fog in my head dissipated and everything exposed itself clear as glycerin. Tijuana…my home. After a long and horrible year, I was back home.