It's been two months since I migrated to New York City. I've dreamed about it since I was a teenager, and about three years ago, when all the doors started to close on me in Mexico, I began to decree it: every day, at a certain time - always the same - I repeated out loud that I was going to live in this city - until it happened.
The persecution I suffered in my country - and that accompanies me wherever I go - forces me to be cautious and not reveal how everything came together to make this dream possible, as well as another for which I spend my life: writing. I will say now, when an impatient sentimentality takes hold of me and I am going to let it out, that the stars aligned and here I am, two months after arriving, with a very heavy suitcase and little money, not knowing very well what I was going to face but with all the emotion that could fit in this small but well-balanced and well-lived body.
I put my body to it, yes. I put my body to my dream. At my age and with the uncertainty of not having savings to keep me afloat if something went wrong, to keep my daughter there in our country - she, who says she doesn't want to emigrate. I did it because I felt that if I didn't do it, I would be suffocated by regret. I did it because time passes, and the ungrateful one does it more and more often when you're having fun - as the song says - but also, and above all, when you start to get older.
So I came, and this mystical body, but also that of writing, found itself in a city in high contrast, like one of those dissident posters from the sixties: the skyscrapers, the brands, the cars. and the most luxurious stores in the world coexist in this densely populated space with the thousands of rats and cockroaches that walk happily and unpunished through its streets, with the garbage accumulated in plastic bags and with the homeless who have lost their connection with reality or perhaps have created another one in order to survive. New York smells of weed, garbage and pip and these days pumpkin. She is an elegant woman, who is always in fashion, wears designer clothes and the most expensive jewelry, but does not bathe.
It's also the city where it doesn't matter what you wear, how old you are, who you hold hands with or who you make out with on a park bench, no one will stare at you. It's the city where dancing with a girl 20 years younger than you is a great way to get a girl to dance.