The sun on Friday was amazing. Life is more or less back to normal in Mexico City, seventeen days after the earthquake that everyone here describes as the "strongest" and most "violent" they've felt since the 1985 disaster. The anxiety is unifying.
Put on autoplay and watch the compilation videos if you fancy reliving the trauma.
Such a weird place, this city.
You walk two blocks and see ten different startling things. So much good food literally anywhere the eye lands. It's like a contact high just walking around. A pulsating energy. People are kind, and also ready to be rude again when warranted. The sounds are back; barking, honking, laughing, whistling, living.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but today it finally felt like the city was back. And yet ...
The signs of the disaster are still everywhere.
This is on Amsterdam in Condesa. The sign says "No Foto," as if those of us who come upon this place are not united in its mourning. I sat here for a while. I just had to sit down on the ground for a bit, I guess ... In the hardest hit areas, so central to what D.F. these days considers itself to be, every other block has a building with a ribbon of police tape around it, indicating a site that is uninhabitable, or should be.
The corruption, speculation, abuses, and real estate crimes are piling up. In the every day, the walking-around has been altered.
Part of the drama is a silent realization.
We always sat around and talked about what happened in 1985, but did so with a safe, fictional distance. We were prepared now. It'd never happen again, come on bruh. Sept. 19, shittily, hit Mexico terribly a second time. How?
Now, UNAM is saying a mega-quake is expected one day in the ocean off Guerrero.
From where I sit and wander, in these pockets and corners where every other structure it seems is riddled with cracks and broken surfaces, the D.F. citizen is reminded that this certainly could happen again, at any moment, and almost surely will. Behaving accordingly, for now, will be the ultimate test of what this megalopolis becomes after the calamity of 2017.
I won't get started on the states. Morelos, Puebla, Oaxaca, Chiapas. Entire towns made of light adobe structures were essentially destroyed. Much of the destruction remains uncharted. People are left wondering what all this means.
Somehow in the anguish and sadness of the last two weeks I missed this image. The church atop Cholula, a 16th Century landmark on a green-covered ancient and little understood pre-Hispanic pyramid known as one of the largest in the history of the recorded world, is done:
Aquí otra vista de la Capilla de los Remedios tras el #Sismo en Puebla. Fuerte golpe para Cholula. pic.twitter.com/kbUPHPz3d0
— Fernando Canales F (@FerCanalesF) September 19, 2017
Puede que fue un berrinche de Coatlicue?