In your father’s apartment, you begin to hear it. Dancing, music, through the night and into the morning. It lacks the sensuality of its Americanized take on its culture, and instead is… happy. Vital. A quality that was not absent from their poverty, even in the lines of the weary. A humble enjoyment of modest sensorial pleasures.
One by one you crush the orange halves, watch the juice drip, the sugary parts slowing to an ooze. It’s fresh. You seem to spend your days crushing and juicing and sucking dry. You wonder when it will be time to live again.
There’s a pervasive stillness that permeates the frenetic markings on the city. A tense plateau that hangs and hangs, like the fog from the river current. As though the cozy city anxiously awaits a kind of psychic release. A certain restlessness moves underneath the languid day to day of the upper class.
The gardens are carved into the ground. Pops of pink and orange pepper the isolated pieces of land, gently protected by the looming trees encircling the parks. The ocean can be seen. The inescapable ocean peers over you as protective and nurturing as a deity would. The edges merging with land and sky create a sensation of living inside what can only be described as a giant womb.
The people are small, quiet and unassuming. And yet they live in a way you have not yet learned to.
You see this most in the small girl, who is almost overwhelmingly vital and open to the world. The girl who does not yet understand the scope or magnitude of her tragedy. The girl with the brilliant, and dead father.
You find the familial love of your dreams waiting for you in another country. You resolve to follow it, and finally return it.
The party goes on anyway. You watch a tribe of people move their bodies into the stillness, compelling the world to happen. Realistically, nothing is happening, and yet, for a moment, there is nothing more real than the corporal cry of life.
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