The Smoke

It gets so hard. So hard to move and breathe with this heat in North Carolina weighting me down. I stay here in the afternoons paralyzed by the thickness of the humidity, listening to my Mexican neighbor’s sad rancheras which he plays at high volumes in the dark of the night. Sometimes I wonder if my life would be the same anywhere else: here, in Buenos Ayres or in Havana, on the days when reality is as certain as three times three being five, or madness, or a dog.

My Mexican neighbor lives upstairs from us. Every night when I come back from work I see him sitting by himself in the balcony without his shirt on, listening to the radio, a set of Christmas lights hanging from the edge of the balcony even though it is August. And he waits for it to rain or maybe he just waits. There is nothing as painful as seeing him wait against a closed door in an open balcony in the dark of the night, with no lamp in a window and Christmas lights in August. Drink me to sleep tonight.