The Town of Babylon

by Alejandro Varela

I’ve noticed that the longer I’m here, the more trapped, unmoored, and implicated I feel. Time bends back so far that I can’t be certain of when everything is taking place. I also feel incapable of communicating effectively with my surroundings.

I don’t hate this town. I’m uneasy in it.

everyone would rather employ a local paramilitary to uphold the illusion of safety than sit next to one another on a bus.

Unlike earlier waves of immigrants, today’s masses are here because this country, their final destination, is responsible for their miseries back home. If not for all of the coups, dethronings, assassinations, covert missions, all-out assaults, drug wars, disinformation campaigns, faux-unity NGOs, pipelines, bilateral treaties, trilateral contracts, regional trade groups, Coke commercials, moonwalks, Peace Corps, missionaries, scholarships, brain drains, kidnappings, bribery, fraud, Academy Awards, and Avengers movies, they wouldn’t have come here.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of the extremist practices that we condemn elsewhere today.

It wasn’t clear to me how Jeremy fit into all of this. It seemed our relationship had temporarily obfuscated reality. We were neither gay nor straight. We’d been too busy being in love to compartmentalize ourselves. After him, however, everything changed. All of my defenses vanished, leaving me perpetually crouched, ready to run or hide.

In college, I wasn’t only surrounded by resources and wealth I had never before imagined, I was privy to them. The possibilities of life were suddenly concrete, and my hometown felt like a rejection of all that. Going back wasn’t only a rewinding of the clock, it was a devolution.

I was thinking of white supremacy as a massive anvil, and of how hard it is to grow beneath that kind of weight. But my thinking somehow transformed into assumptions, of the kind that only add more weight.

We’re not made this way. Maybe in some families children don’t worry about their parents and parents don’t assume that every call is a distress signal. But not in ours. There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn’t stretched tall and people aren’t perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don’t have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I split the difference. I remain faithful by masturbating in my childhood bedroom while thinking of my high school boyfriend. Later, I send my husband a see-you-soon text.

Dealing with sexual orientation is easy relative to other identities. My phenotype still requires me to submit to a battery of poorly crafted anthropological questions—too pedestrian to list. My political persuasion, too, is another slat on the rickety bridge affixed to the edges of this town.

On those occasions, I feel a deep desire to get to know this place better. Desire and effort are essential. It won’t happen accidentally, the way it does in the city, where the density throws our differences into stark relief, forcing us to decode and demystify our incompatibilities—city-dwellers aren’t open-minded as much as we are inured to one another.

And maybe this is how the town will eventually integrate, which would be typical of this country’s history: you can only truly participate by first giving up part of yourself.

as afraid as I am of global warming, there is always room for more fear.

“Hey, don’t be this way. I’ve had two loves in my life: you and Marco. And I know without a doubt that Marco is it. And I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize it.”

Henry and I talk more now than we ever did when he was alive.