Observations From Above

Editor's Note: This piece is a work of creative non-fiction.

I've done almost nothing today. The sun is so bright now that the ink on these pages is harsh, and hard to look at. I didn't even bother to dress, and I'm sitting up on this balcony in the same jeans from yesterday that crashed and rose from bed still slung on my hips. My breasts are wild and untamed, covered only by a worn blue flannel and wisps of unwashed hair pulled free from my ponytail by the seaside wind. I feel dirty and warm, and calm and full and pensive. The sun is shining down from directly above me and today, I've seen something in the waves of little colored houses that I hadn't noticed before. Almost entirely in front of me as I sit with the water to my right and the tourists to my left is a terrace with a white banistered lookout, an exact match to the one I'm defacing by using as my seat. It's perched on top of a smaller cerro than my Alegre, with bare rock exposing its crude foundation. As I look at it now, I feel as if it's just appeared. How could I have never noticed, for the hundreds of times I've climbed up to this very spot, and stared for hours at the landscape? There are tree preserved there, marking the highest point of the plaza, rivaled only by the proud red, white and blue of the Chilean flag wrestling the wind spitting at the sea. There's a building with an orange copper roof blinking against the shiny sun, and a blond couple walks lost in each other along its perimeter. It bothers me that the railing is the same, as if mine becomes less real because of the existence of a duplicate. I don't have time to pursue this thought further before my head is interrupted by the arrival of an old friend.

I hadn't seen him in over a month, except maybe from a distance just yesterday, straying around one of the farthest corners in the city, as if he was headed out of this salted place. But now, here he is, bathed in sunlight before my very eyes. He looks skinner than the last time I really saw him, but he wears the same goofy expression that always covers his small face. His coat looks filthy, speckled with small stains and absurd patches where skin's exposed. Despite this, he looks at me, happy, so I don't worry. Before I can manage to get out more than a "Hey, Buddy", he collapses to the ground, his head resting cockeyed toward the South American sun. I thought it better, perhaps, to let him rest a while before catching up. So I slip down off of the railing, and fold myself next to him on the concrete with respective distance. I close my eyes and tip my face to the sun as he does, and let my head navigate the mysterious plaza that shows up three months into my contemplations. I can hear the gulls and the sea crying as if an afterthought, and the city roars with them, in harmony with the rise and fall of the hairy chest of my sleeping streetwalker.