Latex

And after a devil-sized drinking reunion, just in the middle of Downtown Vancouver, I saw them again. A reunion that, according to me was not going to happen, because of my weakness and lack of sleep. It was a Friday after school. All week long I had been surviving with the help of coffee and in a constant state of zombiefication which I still don’t understand. I really didn’t have great amounts of work, there was simply something inside me that made my movements weak and clumsy, and my walking slow and confused. There were moments in which I simply stayed lost in a white, blue, green, or black limb of my laptop’s screen.

Ok, after that devil-sized drinking reunion just in the middle of Downtown Vancouver, I saw them again. And I say devil-sized because it really was. In fact, every drinking reunion in Vancouver on Friday is, irremediably, devil-sized. If the responsibilities end at 4 p.m. or earlier, at that time we are in the most-voted bar asking for the first pitcher. That night we started a bit before 4 p.m. in one of the cheapest bars of the area. There were all kinds of chats. That we’re so fucked; That we all need to sleep; That we should go to Vancouver Island next weekend; That there are some motherfucker friends with black vibes; That I am a socialist and that if I inspired my look in Che Guevara. They’re writers but oh, they sure talk.

Well, after that devil-sized drinking reunion in the middle of Downtown Vancouver I saw them again. I’ve already seen them a few weeks ago. It was Saturday or Sunday, there’s no other way. But in a Saturday or Sunday I realized that Vancouver was a city of condoms. Just like that. There were condoms everywhere. There was a pink one stuck on a fence by the Waterfront; There was a yellow one thrown on the street on the way to a pizza place that sells 2 slices and a coke for $3.50. There were many others thrown all around in Gastown, transparent, rotten, fresh. They were everywhere, like Saba in Y Tu Mamá También. But there was one that got my attention. It was in Melville St. It was a condom in an intense yellow color that looked as if it was just dumped on the sidewalk, with the ring bending towards the street, dripping semen. The semen strained by a small crack in the pavement. For me, it was like an image taken from The Wall.

Then, after that devil-sized drinking reunion in the middle of Downtown Vancouver I saw them again. There they revealed before me, in a road parallel to mine. Everybody walking around Downtown, stepping on them, kicking them, dragging them along, and suppressing them. They were there, but they didn’t move. People moved them. They didn’t let them establish their condomistic colony. Among those streets under construction, the condoms were victims of uncountable abuses.

But, when turning left on Melville, I had no choice but to stop and admire. From a crack in the pavement, close to the sidewalk, came a thin green stem that ended in a strange flower. On top of the flower was, clean, with no bothers, a condom in an intense yellow color.