—But you will come back, right? The jungle is dripping, your clothes haven’t dried, and the sky is thundering as if it’s breaking apart. You don’t have to rush; I can sleep somewhere else, on the floor, like during those months when your head was in your body but the thoughts inside it kept your body away from me.
—I have to go, Carmela. Stop grinding your memories together with mine. Don’t sacrifice yourself in vain, for nothing. Don’t crash at full speed into that nonexistent, empty future—one missing you and missing me, and even if it had room for us, I’m not going there.
—Wait, there’s coffee and sweet bread. It’s getting dark and there’s no streetlight that can save you from the nahuales, the monsters; there are no matches or lanterns to light the rot of this senile hill.
—Enough already! The monstrous thing about those figures is your fears, and the darkness—mine. If with metaphors you want me to stay, with metaphors I tell you I’m leaving: let that darkness swallow me and chew me up; let the rotten teeth of your beasts shred me. Let me go; affection left this house before I did, spilled out somewhere—by now the plants must have drunk it up. Let me go, Carmela. This town turns me to cardboard; I dishonor it with my distaste for coffee and your tendency to believe I’m good.
—No, no, no, no, no. The rain is about to stop, and the coffee is ready.
—Does it have piloncillo?
Photography by Jerónimo Andrade
Writer and photographer from Mexico City and Baja California Norte. I've built a shrine around Stridentism and forgotten Infrarealism.