Una ventana inmensa: Edgardo Anduaga

Por Edgardo Anduaga

Hermosillo, Sonora, 15 de agosto de 2024 (Neotraba)

Cab Fare

In complete and ungraceful silence, I am out of cooked fiction, raw reality makes itself present. I look through the window, trying not to sink in the oils of my seas, sharing many shadows in silence without being used to it, surrendering to the painful acquaintances of my memories and experimenting the stiffness of the air and sound between me and the taxi driver, especially at these hours in which, if I was inside my room, existentialism would stop being a philosophical movement and would turn into an endless activity, uninterested on my sleep or fears. Words that hold no meaning or interest to me come out of the driver’s mouth, asking vague puzzles of topics and themes that I can only answer monosyllabically. I direct my thoughts into the uninviting view of the streets in their nightly state of daily decay.
     Shining cars of many colors and speeds pass by, some of them like the rapid fire of a gun and the others like fireflies dancing slowly towards the electric zapper of promising light. I wonder where they are going to, I wonder which of them are heading home to their cold and empty beds, I wonder which of them are in a rush because of an emergency call, I wonder which of them are going to crash. 
     Acidic neon lights invite you to spend your money either on a bed or a drink that will make you regret the existence of your past. Flickering public street lights speak effortlessly to the shadows to cast themselves away from their crooked corners, in which darkness consumes the day workers that walk home with only a fist of clacking coins in their pockets and dried sweat in their foreheads. 
     Slowly walking hooded men looking for the unlucky, lame and elderly. Static hobos and tramps yelling at the invisible fist of a furious god that has forgotten their names along with the smell of sewers and their unfair diet of more privileged people’s leftovers.
Zigzagging cockroaches that serve as the blissful seasoning of the boulevard’s flavor of deterioration and decorating the abandonment issues of many avenues and their late, solitary hours.
     Not all people live their nights with their eyes and thoughts pointing towards putridness and mortification and I don’t get to see this every time, but tonight I am forced to watch it directly to its crumbling eyes, to the importance of its grim events and lethal notability, its beautiful degeneracy that’s ugly but worthy of contemplation.
     Nocturnal life, a rotten, dangerous, terrifying mess, bizarre to the unknowing and easily impressible and belligerent to the curious pseudo-daredevils. A place where the promised safety of urban life withers away, such acts of loitering, spoilage, decadence and risking is witnessed by the hot concrete structures built with empty windows and already rusting emergency exits. 
     Nocturnal life takes everything that simply shined in broad daylight and gives it to the shadows of the desperate, treacherous and uncaring. It’s a time of dry emotions and wrenching sights; Nullified letters of official papers flipping mad but in vain, recently reset human principles floating away at the presence of these ticking minutes, too distant to change it back, too close to ignore. 
     Nocturnal lungs work differently, shivering because of clean footsteps taken on them, a face of desensitized upcomings thrown out for selfish vessels of humanized blight in normalized cold, shattered glass resting in them as bones for the barefooted lovers who meander for red, pink and green hopes, upholstered with reclining floors and twisting ceilings in a mental vortex of illusive, self-induced and intravenous lies. The inhabitants of purer souls, residing in broken fates, sleeping in tarnished psyches.
     Restless lurkers in the middle of the street glance back at the ominous, slow lights of the passing taxi cab in which I rest inside of, for they never know at what moment a hit and run is going to be put in practice, they tie their shoes, if they have them, they tighten their pants with their hands, if they have them, and place their skulls in front of their humps and between their shoulders, shoulders similar to those of a Central American desert vulture. Zombified bone-snappers with their arms recently pierced wander to their close walls and function as the cannon fodder of paid vigilantes, scared by any type of light.
     These dark hours hide themselves in slovenly and gawky silence under the carcasses of abandoned cars. The ride offers me a view swarming with unwarranted and directionless pictures of jungles of filth build in concrete, created without passion and used with indifference. 
I stare off the window and focus on the insides of the cab. My body it’s gradually sinking in the gangrenous, old seat. Sorrows from the exterior jump inside the cab, shaking off the mood from stale to a horrid and shameful one. The stars penetrate the ride’s sentiment in a perpetual feeling of despairing sense, assuring the rawness of the moment, the air asphyxiates my skin with its tempered coldness and low humidity.
     The breath of the driver manifests itself with the sound of a tired smoker with a smell of gastric acid. The clearing of my throat bounces on the windows, seats and mirrors, ending inside my ears. The seatbelt sticks itself to very select portions of my skin, the wheels groom horribly the environment with a whistling sound of certain unfixed issues in a worrying way.
     The cab, a nightmare for the socially awkward, the asthmatic and the claustrophobic with obsessive compulsive disorder. Embarking into such situation and transport usually results into a full disconnection of proper and fluid communication to a stranger based on conditional formalities and unadvised, interrupted cadence of sentences, forming a levitating ball of disassociated mixed feelings. 
     The night lets me ask her what it’s happening inside her entrails, but she only answers vaguely and leaves me with my imagination to fill the blanks: 
     A bathtub filled with ice cubes and a person with a scar in it.
     Exceptional screams of celebration syncopated and stopping at the start of an irrational fight.
     A man letting go his blood and his life along with his wallet.
     A burning dumpster of unknown contents insulting the clear sky giving it fetid clouds of smoke. 
     A pagan ritual involving a dagger of great economic quality and value.
     A girl meeting the harrowing, forced end of her naivety.
     A hungry thief with a red shank but twenty nine pieces of silver richer. 
     My stream of thoughts is interrupted by the presence of a bump in the streets that the driver didn’t notice.
     The nightly wind sneaks through a thin crack on the front window, it touches our faces giving us a gentle message of goodbye and good morning as the dusk appears, ready to put some order in the streets once more with its judging light, revealing yesterday’s ventures and putting to sleep most of the roaming dangers and stains.
     The light hits the street; poor men and women in need that were waiting for the sun along with their buckets and bags, ready to start their daily practice, begging for food door-to-door for them to get by one more day, dogs barking to each other and to upcoming strangers in the entrances of their houses in a paranoid and ungrateful manner, bold cats without luck smeared in the streets, hidden losers of bloodshot eyes going back to sleep in the hot floor and hot air, an almost empty but opened church with the kind of people entering that get offended over simple sentences such as ‘’Frozen Hell’’ and ‘’Burning Heaven’’, clear thinking old men smoking in their porch, expecting nothing but the eventual and intermittent passing of taxis and the boulevard’s faint and crisp sounds, insomnia induced brains and haunted hearts of people still awake in their beds, hugging painfully their blankets, being dragged back to the memories that they would rather forget once and for all.
     The taxi stops.
     Irritated, devoid of joy and numb I arrive to my house, I pay Charon for the passage.

Mochomo

Pica la picardía recorriendo mi cuerpo por una ardida mordida corriente corriendo desde mi pie llenando de satisfactorio dolor pero no hedor en el corredor en el que camino con tristeza sin belleza. Este sentimiento es un evento que yo siento solo pues te cuento que a la quien quiero este sentir no le corresponde, se esconde y adonde esté me responde: “Está bien”, hiriente equivalente de: “Busca a alguien para que me cambien, pues no quiero ni de perro faldero ese sentimiento ni contigo ni de testigo”.

La mordedura como locura me altera y llega a mi cadera, ahora me desespera expresar mi afecto que con la que esta picada me infectó sin importar mi defecto de imperfecto aspecto y por costumbre de ser estúpido para compartir, pervertir y persuadir. Maldito insecto que inyectó directo a mi cuerpo esta sensación de emoción y seducción con su prometedor mordisco.

Diría qué me pasaría si llegara de mi cadera a mi cabeza los efectos que me joden emocionalmente, pero desgraciadamente con mi torpeza y tristeza de soledad y en gravedad los efectos ya me habían afectado desde dentro del cráneo desde el principio, por ser un esperanzado, un colérico patético picado en el pie.

Cauterizar

Con llama resuelves rápido una herida agobiante. Sin dolor no se quitan los dolores. Con dolor se aprende a cerrar dolores. A dolores concluyes penosos humores, rumores, vigores y mayores lectores que buscan que te arrastres en una herida expuesta para poder criticarte ampliamente. Por eso, con dolor deshazte de tus dolores.

Edgardo Anduaga (Hermosillo, Sonora, México, 1997). Organizador del colectivo sonorense literario “La Retaguardia”. Parte del consejo editorial de proyectos muertos como Fanzine Literario Mónica Lewinsky y la revista Muridae. Poemas suyos han sido publicados en Ágora Colmex, Loser Zine, Linotipia, Trepanación, La Gaceta de Lenguas y Letras de Querétaro, entre otras. Actualmente es estudiante de maestría en Literatura Hispanoamericana, colaborador en logística en la Marcha del Orgullo LGBTQ+ Hermosillo y stan 23/7 de la saga Silent Hill. Le hace magia negra a su cabeza y aspira a convertirse en un vaquero espacial colecciona-sombras.