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<\/a><\/p>\nCALLE LA RONDA, QUITO<\/p>\n
I knew it was going to rain soon because it rained every afternoon. \u201cLluvia,\u201d I repeated in my head, trying to force my brain to think in Spanish and to remember the difference between lluvia<\/em>, rain, and llorar<\/em>, to cry. He was wearing a knit white sweater, to him it was always sweater weather, and in mid-thought\u2026 \u201cPero, no estamos tristes\u201d he said, then took a sip of his canelazo<\/em>, lifted his arms, and made a partying motion. Reflexively my body tensed, my brain blanked. I couldn\u2019t remember whether or not I was sad.<\/p>\n We were sitting in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Calle La Ronda, the only one open. He had wanted to show me a museum depicting Quito\u2019s history with wax figures, but it was Sunday and the museums, along with nearly everything else, were closed. In front of the restaurant, meat was cooking on an open grill and a sign advertised $0.75 canelazos<\/em>, a warm concoction of aguardiente<\/em>, fruit juice, and spices. From where we were sitting, I glanced uphill to Mercado San Roque, a large wholesale and retail food market. My master\u2019s thesis was about the various flows of value that move through the market, a project I hoped would demonstrate that urban and rural spheres were not actually distinct but blurred and blended. However, immersion in fieldwork had begun to break down boundaries far more personal than the abstract urban or rural. I found myself having difficulty determining whether my body and mind were moving through the past or the present, reality or fantasy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PARQUE ITCHIMB\u00cdA, QUITO<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t remember whether or not I was sad. We were sitting in a hill-top park with a view of the whole city center. The Centro Hist\u00f3rico contained many worlds, there were hostels, luxury hotels, spacious apartments for the emerging middle class, and subdivided flats where two or three migrant manual laborers shared a room with only one bathroom per floor. There were wooden-walled cafes with marble tables that served espresso and wooden-tabled restaurants with peeling wallpaper that served comida t\u00edpica <\/em>and only had instant coffee. Gringo tourists, latino tourists, Ecuadorian mestizos, and indigenous migrants all moved through the streets; the scales, speeds, and purposes of their lives coalescing and contradicting. These worlds, separate as they seemed, violently collapse in on each other, creating a chaotic imbroglio of indigenous, colonial, and neoliberal histories.<\/p>\n My head resting in his lap, I asked banal questions, \u201cY \u00bfqu\u00e9 es eso?\u201d pointing from one area to the next, \u201cY \u00bfqu\u00e9 es eso?\u201d He told me a story about a colonial phantasma, one of many, that had been woven into the urbanscape:<\/p>\n They say a ghost mother wanders Quito\u2019s Centro Hist\u00f3rico neighborhood, wailing for her lost child. La Llorona was raped and impregnated while working as a maid. She drowned her newborn, the product of sin, and now haunts the streets to punish adolescents engaging in forbidden love. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n NEW YORK<\/p>\n The first boy who raped me is on a TV show now. He has his own IMDB page. If I\u2019m being honest, I was just looking at it and watched a trailer for a movie he was in about non-monogamous New Yorkers. It looked good.<\/p>\n I can hardly even remember the experience anymore. I\u2019ve spent so much time processing and crying and ignoring and flashbacking and dreaming and fantasizing and fucking about it that what actually happened and what layers I\u2019ve added on have baked together. I don\u2019t cry about it anymore, except very infrequently when I\u2019m drunk. I don\u2019t really fuck about it anymore \u2013 although that proved a useful and healing practice \u2013 but I still have the rape fantasies, the desire for someone else to come along and rape the rapist out of me.<\/p>\n I often can\u2019t remember when to feel joyous or depressed, I often don\u2019t know if I\u2019m sad. The past, the present, reality, fantasy, pain, and ecstasy have become convoluted, messy, and inseparable.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n CENTRO HIST\u00d3RICO, QUITO<\/p>\n The Centro Hist\u00f3rico was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO in 1978. UNESCO\u2019s website reads, \u201cQuito, the capital of Ecuador, was founded in the 16th century on the ruins of an Inca city.\u201d The ruins of an Inca city. The violent and exploitative process of colonization that ruined the city is conveniently absent, left out of the official cultural heritage while paradoxically absolutely necessary to it. The Inca and the indigenous people before them evanesce behind an architectural history in which the built form of the city is seemingly sanitized of its inhabitants.<\/p>\n To the east of the Centro Hist\u00f3rico, barrio La Libertad climbs out of the valley, up the Andean slopes. Pastel pink, yellow, and blue houses line the hairpin curved road, thinning with each ascending topographic line. On one of the neighborhood\u2019s high points, Cima de la Libertad, sits Museo Templo de la Patria, a museum commemorating a battle for independence from the Spanish Crown. On top of the museum\u2019s building, a large vibrant mural depicts a pair of brown hands breaking free from their chains, in the background two chromatic indigenous men hold weapons while two dull mestizo men hold plume and paper. That the indigenous people working the feudal hacienda system were largely unaware of the formation of the independent Ecuadorian state or that the indigenous people who did fight in the \u201cindependence\u201d battles were coerced and manipulated appears unimportant.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/3_Mercado.jpg\")
<\/a>But instead of working on my thesis, I was ordering canelazos de naranjilla <\/em>with this sweater-wearing boy. I had put out a call through my Grindr profile for artists, for punks, for the broken people, the sad people. He liked that. He wasn\u2019t sad though, he was a dancer, full of energy and kindness. He teased me about my Spanish, but he was patient and liked to wink at me while I haphazardly slurred words and muddled verb tenses. We passed time together in an amalgam, a physical and mental space of relation and confusion between English and Spanish, North America and South America.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/4_view.jpg\")
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