Love-Drunk Hood

1.         Carmela found Julio on the pee-ridden corner of 45th and California.

2.         Spit and mucus oozing out of his mouth while earwax painted his ears.

3.         He reeked like a garbage can that hadn’t been taken out for years.

4.         The lack of clothing on his back highlighted the lack of flesh on his bones.

5.         When Julio saw Carmela for the very first time in his life, he froze.

6.         As she headed straight at him he pretended to fall asleep on the very same sidewalk that could cook raw eggs on Chicago streets.

7.         The same sidewalk whose ebony legs beat the crap out of Julio over the last couple of summery months.

8.         The sidewalk that could pickpocket people’s dreams right out of their naive, unguarded wallets.

9.         They both loved and shared that very same sidewalk which planted them into the hood they were trying to break free from.

10.       As they unknowingly crossed paths, they welcomed the very cracks that would tear them apart they learned to fall in and out of love with everything they knew.

11.       The disparities in their paths like unique, unfilled potholes that lay around, dark and invisible, collapsing deteriorating pavements.

12.       Their hearts sped up like racing street cars, like hidden drive-bys and roaring gun cries that followed them around every day of their lives.

13.       The same sidewalks and street corners where Hermelinda and Paco, married 50 years that summer, ran la tiendita de la esquinita with every kind of Vitners bag and imported Coca-Cola product one could ever crave.

14.       The same tiendita de la esquinita that every Paco and every Hermelinda lost as gentrifying cultures implanted bullet holes in the epitome of their souls.

15.       Corner stores where traviosos and cabronas run loose.

16.       The same traviosos that Julio became as he rejected maternal sun, paternal drugs and school as something fun.

17.       The same cabrona that Carmela became as she learned to speak up against drunken papi whose broken dreams subjected mami a tool in his nightmarish hyper-masculinity.

18.       Everyone depends on the falsehood of the American Dream that was never made for any papi, mami, cabrona or travioso who ever dreamed.

19.       Falling in and out of love with everything they grew, everything they knew about those very cracked sidewalks that founded the unstable hoods and every unknowingly, love-drunk fool that grew from them.