Trip to my mind By Johnny Escobar Salazar

A performance in a carnival manages to capture his attention while he holds a beer in his right hand and contemplates a hole in his left pocket; he regards a confrontation between clowns and mimes who fight to the rhythm of a fickle and rather mesmerizing music. His look becomes more and more distant while he looks at it; he’s getting partially deaf and his mind is being barraged with some flashes… “There she is… her smiling and dancing reggae, at a San Andres’ beach, under an intermittent lamppost while my drunken eyes make the city-lights dance around us as multicolor fireflies. Then, a palm-tree covers us… so the night.”

It was July, 2005; the time of my graduation in high school and the trip to San Andres with some peers. By that time, I had an affair with a lovely girl whose rogue guise, dark-long hair and red lips used to have the power of viciously stretching my diaphragm just with kindness and sudden caresses. Going to that parallelepiped we euphemistically call “high school” was actually interesting because of her, her smile and random kisses we had far-off the regards.

Though we’ve made some plans for our stay in the Caribbean, just a week before the trip her boyfriend decided to go with us. He was an outstanding drinker; a good guy who was unfortunately seen in a contemptuously way by most of my fellows after he accidentally crashed an old lady in 2004… the lady died.

She sat next to me in the plane -the audience applauds euphorically- trying to avoid the pictures our fellows were taking because her mother didn’t know she was going with her boyfriend.

- “So… we’re gonna stay for a whole week! We could… sporadically… run into”, she said with a rogue smile.

- “I bet we could… that would be great, honey”, I finally answered pretty reluctant.

- “Don’t answer that way, sweetie… come on, I wanna take a pic of us.”

- “I thought you were avoiding evidences.”

- “That’s not evidence! I just wanna keep a pic of my lovely friend and me.” She took the picture.

My mate -the Michelle to whom the Beatles used to sing- is next to me enjoying the performance, though she argues she suffers coulrophobia. I interrupt my memories by looking at her and ask:

- “Is your invitation to Armenia still available?”

- “Of course! I’ll call my cousin to inform that you finally decided to go.”

- “Ok.”

- “What did change your mind?”

- “I just… want to share some time with you… and your fellows.” I look at the unusual contention and the flashes keep on coming to my mind.

We arrived to San Andres around eleven, at night. We all drank some Vodka from the free bar at the hotel and went to the beach, two blocks away. On the way, I was thinking about what Jess told me right after she took the picture: “he’s having a dreadful headache. We arrive to the hotel and he keeps there; we can go to the beach together and have some fun, thus.”

Darkness was covering the whole beach except some meters in the edge which were illuminated with a green light of a wooden lamppost. Some guys from Tolima were there, dancing reggae and drinking some beers. Among them, there was a girl with short dark hair wearing scarlet fishnets, so much kind of a punk look.

She heard me talking about my desire of parachuting and she interrupted me by saying she was from Flandes, “the capital of parachuting in Colombia” as she argued. Then she introduced herself; her name was Andrea Franco. We started talking, drinking and dancing, and time flied as fast as though it was a frozen white stork going to the south. Jess was there, occasionally looking at me inexpressively, I just ignored her. Jess stayed just an hour, she left by saying she was going to the hotel because her boyfriend was rather ill. The green light of the lamppost became intermittent thirty minutes after she was gone.

Around three in the morning, my and Andrea’s fellows went to the hotels. They were really drank. We stayed alone, drank and hornies…

The contention comes to its end; mimes are the winners and his mate applauds as though it was her own fight. They continue walking on through the streets enjoying that particular mad carnival.