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After the day of the dead
Camilo Lozano-Rivera¹ & ChatGPT 4.0
¹Universidad Católica de Manizales, Colombia. Email: clozano@ucm.edu.co
Image credit: Microsoft Image Creator. Created by using words from the story.

That November 1st, 2018, morning hung over me, thick with the dregs of last night’s excess. Tap water wasn’t an option in Xicochimalco, a notorious wellspring of a brutal kind of sickness. There was a woman, her breathing a muted rhythm in the morning’s silence. I thought of waking her with a kiss, holding her—a constant readiness in her being, a vessel filled with words, laughter, and the simplicity of raw passion.

I reached for water, putting the woman second, the harsh aftermath of the night towering over the day’s early fears. My mind was a tumult of cascading memories, each a vivid, colorful, echoing waterfall. Fears shaped themselves as memories, dancing like elusive shadows, never fully tangible, flickering like a mosquito that tiptoes on the skin, ready to take flight at the slightest hint of danger, forever avoiding the fatal swat.

I found a glass, its form, a simple jug of glass. Cold water flowed, modest but steadfast. I drank with the thirst of desolation and then moved back beside the woman, intending a kiss—a mindful sweep of her hair, unveiling the curves of her neck. Back then, I thought it was a fortunate luxury, having someone do that for you every morning. And that’s how I treated her, like a fortunate luxury. Like something you can’t afford to lose, a diamond, direction, or hope.

We stepped out and wandered the streets, camera in hand, tracing the paths of flower-strewn memorials, walking the intricate weave between the ordinary streets and intimate homes. We met a jarana maker and his wife, a weaver of stories and strings, and in the sharing, a tale unfolded—simple lives intersecting, a subtle theatre of existence played out in ordinary settings. Here it goes.

A few months prior, they were neighbors, their lives unfolding on opposite sides of a common street, a silent stage where unspoken scripts played in the quiet rhythms of everyday life. She, with hands graced by the warmth of tortillas and a life marked by the rough and observant eyes of a factory worker, lived scenes etched in simplicity and survival. Parallel to this, the jarana maker, immersed in woods and strings, crafted tales of melodic sensitivity, his life a canvas painted with strokes of simple satisfactions and the subtle warmth of occasional tequilas or mezcales. In the silent orchestration of shared glances and unspoken words, a new act emerged, subtly redrawing the boundaries of their existence. Lines of separation blurred, and in their place, paths of closeness were woven, doors across the street became thresholds of shared intimacies, and the theatre of their lives was quietly transformed into a patchwork of forbidden warmth and intricate connections.

The jarana maker, while refilling the four glasses (his, his woman’s, the woman’s I kissed on the neck, and mine) with the content of an exceptional tequila bottle, looked me directly in the eyes and said, “and so, between whistles and flutes, one day I brought her here.” I figured that, for some reason, a forbidden closeness began to brew between him and his tortilla-selling neighbor. And the best way they found to resolve it was for her to move her things from the house she shared with her husband to the jarana maker’s house, curiously located across the street.

The story left me feeling adrift, caught in the echoes of uncertain dramas. Questions lingered in the room’s silence. Can betrayal and harmony coexist in the narrowing alleys of daily existence? Who are the real neighbors in the interlocking puzzles of relationship and desire? Even today, I can’t explain whether the discomfort I began to feel then was caused by the strange drama narrated by the woman and the jarana maker, or by the tap water I decided to drink on the morning after the Day of the Dead. I turned pale, almost transparent. I wanted to leave, disappear, and board a plane at the nearest corner. I thought of cutting my veins with an animal cookie.

The woman I kissed on the neck was my wife’s best friend (because she was). The husband of that woman (because she had one) and I were almost friends. The best friend of the woman I kissed on the neck frequented discos and motels with my wife, in another city, during my absence. The brother of an occasional lover of the woman I kissed on the neck was invited by my wife to the house we shared, while I wasn’t looking; they danced closely, sparks flying. With whom did I really have a neighborhood? With them? With them?

In the mirrored corridors of closeness and separation, allegiances blurred, leaving me marooned on islands of confusion. Familiar streets became mazes of uncertainty, the layouts of intimacy redrawn in the shadows of ambiguity and unanswered questions.

In my town, people use the expression “he doesn’t even know where he’s a neighbor from” referring to someone going through a state of extreme confusion, caused by drunkenness, for example. In Mexico, people lay petals of yellow and crimson on the streets on the Day of the Dead, so that their deceased find their way, so that even death does not confuse them, and they know for certain where they are neighbors from.

But in my disoriented heart, neither flowers nor the soft blurring of intoxication offers a way back to the simple geography of belonging. Sometimes, the disorientation is a landscape harsher than the finality of death itself.