On September 19th, I woke up earlier than usual. I had a nightmare and I couldn't fell asleep again. I felt somewhat nervous and anxious. I had a bad feeling and I started to read the news on my cellphone, to get rid off that bad feeling.
Against my need to alleviate myself from the nightmare, almost all of the news were related to the 32nd anniversary of the devastating earthquake that destroyed a lot of buildings and lives in Mexico City in 1985.
Back then I was just a child, but the news gave me the chills and I started to remember how I experienced that earthquake.
It was such a surprise to realize that I avoid to think about it.
I guess it was so awful that I never think of it. It's not a conscious act.
I guess I repress all those memories related to that event.
Then, in a few months, I was about to celebrate my fifth birthday, but I had a few weeks on the first grade of elementary school.
Then, as I prepared myself to take a shower, I remembered.
My dad was not present at that time. He had left home earlier and he was at Insurgentes Sur Avenue, waiting for a Van of the company he worked for. On the previous months, he had been sick. He almost had a nervous breakdown and the physician suggested him to not drive his car. He had a silver Volkswagen.
We lived in the 5th floor, in a small apartment.
When the earthquake started, I was having breakfast, just about to go to school.
Suddenly everything started to move and I thought that I was ill because of the breakfast.
My mom hugged me and told me not to worry.
It was a nightmare. Some things hanging on the walls of the apartment fall apart and broke.
It looked like the earthquake was never going to finish.
The building moved like a small boat drifting on the gigantic sea.
The movement was fierce and unpredictable.
It lasted just about two minutes, but nearly 20, 000 people died.
A lot of people lost everything, in just about two minutes.
Mom took me to the school and dad called her later.
None of the buildings around our apartment, looked damaged.
We were fine -dad and mom and my brother and myself-, but scared.
I had to stop reading the news, 'cause I was already worried and sad.
Late that day, at the University -and in the entire city- we had a simulation of an earthquake evacuation. Everything happened as it was supposed to happened.
I was alone -my colleagues were occupied at another buildings of the University- and it made feel strange and abandoned.
When the simulation finished, I still felt somewhat anxious and nervous -as early in the morning-, but I went back to work.
My office is located on the 3rd floor of the heaviest building of the University.
I was about to send documents for a CONACyT announcement. We needed money for research.
At some point, I took a break.
I was reading a paper of Neurobiology of Learning & Memory.
It was an interesting study. Authors wanted to evaluate how sleep restriction affected both short- and long- term memories in Aplysia. Besides, they showed how a sleep opportunity of just a few hours, reverted the negative effect of sleep restriction.
Simultaneously, my colleagues were talking about René Drucker -he just died a night before- and I was curious about what they think of him as a scientist. I have a published paper with him, and he also was advisor of my advisor.
People, usually not related to neurosciences, saw Drucker as an important scientist.
They don't even know that his most recognized papers are those related to his studies on sleep mechanisms in the cat, rather than his studies on Parkinson.
My colleagues said that he was once invited to a Parkinson conference and that he was not really welcome by the specialists. They even kinda hated him and thought he was so arrogant.
I saw him once at a conference in an annual meeting of the Sociedad Mexicana para la Investigación y Medicina del Sueño, and he was really rude.
He spoke of an old study -never published- about the relationship between depression and nicotine. It was supposed to be an awesome experiment with depressed women, but I thought it was weird that Drucker -or his student- decided to left it unpublished.
Another possibility was that the paper, in fact, would have been rejected from an indexed journal.
He treated my advisor so badly, like if my advisor were his slave.
Nonetheless, when I had to do something with Drucker, he wasn't rude at all -he was present in my candidacy examination and I had to look for him several times-, but I refuse to accept that people are not dumb and that they don't read but have an opinion for everything.
People are convinced by appearances.
Suddenly, it started.
It seemed a light earthquake at the beginning, but it became violent soon.
It felt like if an enormous worm crawled rapidly, moving everything at its.
We left the office and just stopped in a security area, with other researchers and students.
As the movement increased in intensity, a wall fall to the ground and then a window broke.
Women screamed and they put me nervous. I thought the building was about to collapse.
I thought of my wife and cats.
They were also inside a building, but in the 5th floor.
When it finished, I left the University.
My cellphone didn't work, so I couldn't communicate to my wife.
The street was chaotic. People walked across the avenues.
Traffic was at its highest. No public transport, no taxis were available.
I had to walk for miles.
As I walked I felt worst. I didn't know how my family was.
All I knew came from the radio. News said that several buildings had collapsed.
Nearly three hours after the earthquake, I got home.
The building was OK, so my wife and cats.
Today, I went back to the University.
One of my colleagues, asked me to accompany him.
I've been so scared -I developed a nervous cough- and I haven't slept well.
The building of the University in which I have worked for the last three years, it's so damaged that authorities have declared it is uninhabitable.
Today a couple of colleagues and myself, fed the animals.
I was so scared. I couldn't stop thinking what if another earthquake started precisely when we were inside the building. It was so extreme.
The building is so damaged, that most of the researchers who worked in there just decided to sacrifice their animals.
I was so nervous and scared, but I remained inside the building for almost two hours.
Everything changed for us in a couple of minutes.
I don't know when I'm going back to normal.
Cuando Pase El Temblor
Short before I received my PhD, my wife and I had to move from the apartment where we used to live. It was a small place, but it was located in a nice neighborhood. People was nice and respectful. They never had noisy parties late at night. They didn't listen up awful music at a very high volume. They didn't mistreat pets.
We had to move to a cheaper place 'cause our homemade was about to increase the rental and we wouldn't have enough money to pay it. My scholarship was about to finish, and we didn't want to acquire debts. Even when my advisor believed that I was not a truly productive guy -not to mention that he was convinced that I didn't have my own ideas-, all I wanted to do was to publish more papers than I needed it to get my degree, and so I ran out of time. I could focus on the writing of my doctoral thesis to obtain my degree as soon as possible, but I wanted to have more papers as first author.
(So far, I'm the only one of his graduates with the record of more papers published as first author -as a student, obviously-, in his lab).
Fortunately, my wife also had a job -then she worked in a maritime import and export company- and we survived for almost a year with our savings and her money.
From that time, when we moved here, I had to put up with my advisor and his crazy mood changes for almost half a year more.
He wanted me to stay in the lab endlessly, with a ridiculous salary.
It wasn't even the third part of the rental I had to pay month after month.
We moved in here, on August, 2013.
This apartment is located in a cheap neighborhood, just a miles away from the airport and one of the biggest avenues of the city. You can hear the planes crossing the sky all the time.
You are immerse in the horrendous city traffic all the time.
We live in the 5th floor. Since there are many factories near the building, heavy trucks circulate along the avenue all the time. When this happens, the building moves and it feels like if you were in the middle of a slight earthquake.
Sadly, you get used to all these issues.
Also, people is noisy and disrespectful in this neighborhood. They have noisy parties and they force you to listen to their loud music all the time. The rule seems to be that "adults" have at least a couple of kids, at least one car and at least one pet. The rule seems to be that they throw the trash in the street and that they mistreat all human beings. They behave like if the most important thing in the world was to reproduce and to have a car.
My wife got the apartment for us. She knew someone who used to live in this building.
One of my wife's friends is the owner.
Due to the terrible stress I had to deal with in the lab for almost my entire postgraduate studies -my advisor seemed to be a very gentle and a nice guy, but when I published my first paper he became aggressive and tried to humiliate me as much as he could-, I started to use drugs.
For almost three years, I used to smoke pot and tobacco and to drink alcohol, desperately.
I needed a maintenance dose of everything.
I used drugs in such an awful way, that I ended up with health problems.
Apart from that health issues, several times I developed psychosomatic dermatitis and I was about to have a nervous breakdown.
When my wife and I moved to this apartment, I was almost an alcoholic.
I drank and smoked on a daily basis, to the point I couldn't stop nor do anything else if I hadn't drank or smoked. I was tired and depressed all the time. I had some sort of purple haze within my brain, like that Jimmy Hendrix' song.
A few months after we arrived to this apartment, the owner of the apartment moved with us.
She lived with us for almost half a year. She's younger than my wife -she's the youngest of her friends- and she had a very close relationship to her parents.
She needed a place to live in 'cause her parents had moved away from the city and she just had been accepted to study in the School of Medicine. It was her second career.
All my life I have been a lonely guy and drug abuse had strengthened my need to be alone.
So, when that woman moved to live with us, it was a truly complicated situation to me.
(It was so complicated, that I couldn't even write in the entire period she lived with us. Not a single story, nor anything else. I even left my blogs).
Almost on a daily basis, her parents visit her in the apartment.
Sometimes, they even came to the apartment with her sister and her small son. Everyday was like a cozy Sunday breakfast.
The worst of all was that they -the entire family- never warned us -not to my wife, not to me- that they would go to the apartment. They simply did as they pleased.
I couldn't stop thinking that they just didn't care about me. I felt that I was invisible and that my opinion was useless, but -as it happened with all the annoying issues related to the neighborhood- I had to get used to it.
I had to adapt to their lifestyle.
(Wasn't it too abusive?)
After an ordinary day in the lab -then I had a pos doc position at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-, I got home, wanting to drink and to smoke, or wanting to write and to listen garage punk , or wanting to read a book in silence, or wanting to play the guitar, or wanting to watch porno -in resume, wanting to do all the things that I was used to do for almost 6 years, the time my wife and I were married and living together- but the apartment was, as I mentioned, some sort of a cozy Sunday breakfast.
My personal space was occupied.
My wife's friend settled in my studio, so I couldn't use it.
When she wasn't slept, she was talking in there with her sister and her mother.
They came precisely when my wife wasn't home.
Her father was watching TV in the living room. Even if I tried to focus on writing -and to avoid alcohol and tobacco, 'cause the small nephew of my wife's friend was running everywhere and I didn't feel free to use drugs-, her father insisted to talk to me.
(Apparently, he thought I was wasting my time on Facebook, or something like that.)
It was a truly complicated period to me.
Not just for these issues, but 'cause them never had seen me as an adult.
They don't even know, nor care about what I do -I suppose they think that I'm like a teacher in high school-, but they were always speaking of the father of the kid and all the amazing things he did in his job.
I still don't have kids nor a car, and apparently they think that both things make you an adult.
When I finally had a moment alone, I drank as crazy and I tried to write, or play music, in my studio. But my wife's friend was kind of distracted and dirty, and she used to left her underwear lying on the floor or on her bed.
If I was really high at that time, I couldn't stop having impure thoughts.
I had to quit writing and to left the studio immediately.
Her underwear put me really mad and furious.
Couldn't focus on anything else but her underwear.
My wife's friend left the apartment almost three years ago.
Obviously her family stopped making a Sunday breakfast on a daily basis in the apartment.
Drug abuse provoked me a gastric problem, to the point I had to have surgery.
I feel free, again.
I returned to my lonely habits -except that I don't drink nor smoke- and I stopped arguing with my wife.
(We had a lot of problems, when her friend's family used to come on a daily basis to the apartment).
Last night, out of nowhere, I had a weird dream.
I was at the University and suddenly my wife's friend appeared.
She dressed her classical lab coat of a student of the School of Medicine.
She smiled and then invited me to the movie theatre.
I asked here if I could invite my wife, too.
She said "No" 'cause she didn't want to worry her.
Even though I thought she was flirting, I accepted.
When we were about to watch the movie, she stared at me.
We were sitting next to each other, almost in front of the screen.
The flashes on the screen illuminated my wife's friend's face.
Her lips were so fleshy and her eyes were possessed by desire.
I thought she was about to kiss me, but she just put one of her legs around one of mine.
The touch drove me wild. It was like an electric trim.
Her leg was warm and it made me feel so excited and guilty.
I woke up.
Dunno why, but I remember my wife's friend each time I hear one song of Clics Modernos.
I'm almost able to see her dancing while the music elapses.
Mainly with the first chords of the song.
This is the song:
Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo
