It’s May 2020, and for more than two months now, to keep each other—loved ones and strangers alike—safe and healthy, we’re all staying inside and avoiding contact as much as possible. I’m in my hometown of El Paso, my one-week trip from early March now in its third month. I feel lucky to have sunshine and family within my reach, but of course it’s bittersweet—what I’ve left behind, and what will no longer be, linger in my mind.
I don’t know when I’ll see my partner, sheltering at home on the East Coast, next. In a different world, we’d planned to take off for Mexico City at the end of this month, for our second long-ish stay there together; he was going to work on his dissertation and I was going to translate, translate, translate all summer, popping out for a street taco at mealtimes, or warming up one of a dozen tamales we’d have stocked in the rental apartment’s fridge. That’s how we’d imagined the summer, anyway. It’ll have to stay imagined for a while, as we’ve (of course) cancelled the trip.
So, a fitting tune for all of that: the amazing Chilean singer Mon Laferte’s “Chilango Blues.”
In the world of home-enclosure, a couple funny, eerie lines from the song: “Se acabó la democracia en casa / Ahora vive un monstruo en la terraza.” A straightforward translation: “Democracy has ended at home / Now a monster lives on the terrace.” Now imagine it rhyming and Mon Laferte’s voice crooning it. So good.
Anyway, I hope that your terraces remain monster-free and that we can keep democracy alive, at home and outside it. Take care.