Medellín
By Yuly Restrepo Garcés
I’m only visiting. It’s dawn and you’ve fallen dead asleep on top of me, on your stomach, your head between my breasts. Outside, a vendor pushes his cart and announces tamales from Santa Elena. Pork, chicken, bacon, he says. He’s the first in an onslaught that will bring avocados, tomatoes, ice cream, jellies, flowers, papayas, pressure cooker rubber rings, and brooms through my aunt’s street. I can’t sleep. Last night you came over to my aunt’s house, and we drank a lot of beer and talked about our Catholic schoolgirl days before I moved to America. I was in awe of how much you remembered of a time you spent in a drug haze. My aunt said you couldn’t go all the way back home in your state, so you stripped down to your underwear and lay in the bed I’ve been sleeping in for weeks, my temporary bed until I have to go back to America, and I lay next to you. Soon after, I felt your hands under my t-shirt, stroking my back, my breasts, and right away I turned to you. Here we are as we were the first time I came back to visit since moving away and after so many visits in between when we did none of this. Last night, when you said, “Embrace me tight,” my heart bolted not away from me, but right to the quick of me. I wonder if you can hear it now as the grey light of morning enters through the window, with your ear as it is, poised against my chest.
*
When I visited three years ago, you had been sober ten years. Not a single drag from a joint or drop of alcohol. Now we meet outside a museum where the featured exhibit is a series of painted replicas of nature-scene stickers we used to collect in an album when we were children. Poppies in a field, amebelodons, yellow ducks, a wild boar, a sperm whale. You open your backpack to show me a joint, two small bags of white powder, a few spheres floating in liquid inside a vial.
“Why did you bring that?” I ask.
Last time I visited, your hair was natural brown and went past your shoulders. Last time I visited, you spent four hours in the gym every day. Today your hair is short and peroxide blond and shaved on one side. Tattoos cover your arms. You ran five kilometers before you came to meet me.
“Because you’re the only one who’ll do this with me,” you say.
You’re right. We take a cab to a love motel and inhale poppers and drink wine and make love. That’s what I want to call it. There’s a jacuzzi and a stripper pole in the room, but all you want to do is lay your head next to mine and tell me stories of your childhood, when you owned the only chemistry set in your small mountain town and exchanged your classmates’ school lunches for a go at it. You didn’t like the healthy food your mom packed—green apples, salads, natural juices with no sugar. Theirs were potato chips and bologna sandwiches and sodas and candy bars.
Before we leave, you vomit in the toilet, on the floor. I flush down the white powder. I wonder what else I’ll have to do so you’ll want to stay with me longer, as if I’m not the one who will leave in the end.
*
We’re sitting at a bougie pizza place where you used to work, with servers and toppings like plums and lentils that have been soaked in coconut milk. There’s still weeks until goodbye. We haven’t made love yet. I’m not under the impression that we will.
I let you order whatever you want. You know what’s best. I can’t get used to the sight of you drinking, but you down four glasses of wine, one after another. You sit against the wall, from which a portrait of a mermaid on a desert island looks down on you as you tell me that a couple of months ago, when you got fired from another fancy restaurant, you came home to find your dad ailing, saying he knew he would die soon. You’d never wanted to die yourself as much as you did then.
I want to keep listening, even when the things you say break my heart. A very long time ago, you’d thought sobering up meant you could have everything and give him everything, but in reality, you say, in reality there’s no recompense, is there? So why do it? Why stay sober? I want to say, “For us,” but what right do I have? I’m only visiting. So I do the next best thing. I try to remember every moment, capture every object you’ve touched and surrounded yourself with, save the color of your voice in my memory for the deep longing I know is ahead—itself a kind of addiction.
About the Author:
Yuly Restrepo was born in Medellín, Colombia, and came to the United States nearly twenty years ago as an asylee. Her writing has previously appeared in Catapult, PRISM International, Natural Bridge, and Zone 3. She is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, a MacDowell fellow, and an assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.