Regresando

Stepping off the bus, she felt the cold, familiar pressure of the oxygenless air in her lungs and she smiled. The familiar swarm of taxi drivers and kids selling gum, chocolates and dead batteries still advanced in formation, ready to abuse the dazed inhabitants, weary from the twelve hour night bus from Lima.  The familiar bilingual buzz as words from around the world rose into the air, unheard, misunderstood or just ignored. Grabbing her backpack from the baggage hold, Charlie made her way to the main terminal where she saw Graciela sat on a bench, asleep, swaddled in an luminously coloured blanket. She stood above her for a moment, noticing how the wrinkles around her eyes had deepened over the last eight years but relishing the opportunity to watch her lying stationary without her usual decoration of children hanging from every limb. Waking with a smile, Graciela stood and threw her arms around Charlie, releasing the familiar wave of frying oil with the faint undertone of whisky.

They walked into the town. The camionetta was broken, still.

The rising sun refracted like mirrors between the snow-capped mountains that embraced Huaraz, illuminating the sleeping town beneath. Whether it was the altitude or her excitement at witnessing this once familiar spectacle, Charlie’s heart beat out of rhythm. 

As they reached the Plaza de Armas and turned left onto the once familiar street, Charlie stopped abruptly. Graciela let out a small sigh and continued walking, unlocking the gate to the shelter. Opposite, where once was a open space of land, a playground, now lay a two-storey supermarket. Plastic bags had wrapped themselves around the trees that lined the road that once housed make-shift tyre swings. Discarded trolleys lay in the ditches at the road-side that once provided ideal pit-stops for home-made cart races.

Coming round, Charlie went to stand at Graciela’s side. “They said we needed to keep the tourists happy so made a supermarket. But no one came. They ran out of money. Closed. And now...” she finished, gesturing across the road. She had never looked so old.

As Charlie went inside, she saw the familiar trail of painted handprints along the floor, up the walls. Echoes of their owners still resonated through the room. As she pulled down the wooden ladder from the ceiling, she noticed the missing bottom rungs. Laughing at the secret of their disappearance, Charlie simultaneously tried to repress the memory she knew would only exacerbate the sense of mourning. She hauled herself up to the dim room. A single candle had been burning on the small table, leaving the familiar faint smell of citronella.

She opened the shutters and climbed over the corrugated iron wall to the roof. A thin layer of sandy dust still rested on the threadbare hammock still hung from the two washing poles. Lying back, she missed the form that once would have lain next to her. She missed the looming yet comforting presence of Huascaran, the way the sun always lingered a second longer on its peak before descending into the valley below, to be replaced by an almost blue moon. He was now obscured by Wallmart, its neon lights infiltrating a sky once littered with the constellations that illuminated the balcony where they had once slept.