New world
Gerardo Lamadrid
Catching sight of you and your group (making eye contact with you, actually, and immediately noticing how you’d given up on contacts – the itchiness and the having to clean them getting the better of you – and finally tried out those tortoise-shell rims I suggested), I suddenly felt like I wasn’t where I thought I was. Was I back in Caguas, I wondered. It felt like we were all back in Caguas, with its similar heat and language, the quick-shifting shade, the sporadic cobblestones. Yet there were still sándwiches called “tortas” being sold from colorful, rundown carts to people in suits talking on their phones during their lunch hours, and el Ángel de la Independencia gleaming in the midday sun of another daily traffic rush, as well as jolly, old-seeming kids in school uniforms lugging backpacks bigger than their torsos, and kid-seeming elders with wrinkles like commuters crammed in their tin trains, like corn collected on its cob, and also pink dresses – as rosa mexicano as their taxis – and flawless, dark braids like endless trains, or endless corncobs, chatting with each other across their tables littered with knickknacks and housewares. And now you were there too, another old spirit, ancient as ever tho always younger than me, with a new shoulder-grazing bob capped with blonde, a blonde the hue of genetically-modified corn. And, as always, your family was with you, yelling past each other, looming over you, taking pictures, almost tipping towards the ground, while you held them up, already tired halfway thru the day but feigning a smile, the way glistening tourists pose in a noonish glare with the Leaning Tower in Pisa as if they hadn’t asked for this chore, as if they deserved thanks for anyone else being there, as if they’d all come especially for them, as if it was their duty to keep the show running and removing them would mean having to remove the tower itself, airlifting it into a safe container, and sending everyone back home emptyhanded, sans trendy Instagram post captioned with a pizza pun, with nothing, really – not even a refund. And it was you who came over to say hi and ask me (looking me in the eyes, ignoring my parents) how I’d known you’d be there. Then you laughed and asked again. Was I stalking you? Did your mom tell me (cuz, even though you broke up with me three years ago, she still texts me)? If I wasn’t following you, then how come I looked like Bambi
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