A Thousand Hours, by The Cure

Remember when you were a teenager? Every time that you went to a party, a bar, or a reunion or just to drive around the city, you were waiting for something to happen. Life was elsewhere but within you (at least what you thought it was life). Remember those parties in those big houses at Pedregal, Altavista, Tlalpan, Tepepan or Ajusco. Sometimes the floor was all wet because it was raining season, but sometimes you ended all covered in dust because it was the opposite. The cover price wasn’t cheap, but you had the option of “hacer una vaquita” with your friends and some other guys in order to save some money. Drinks weren’t expensive, but they weren’t elaborated with the best alcohol though. What did you care? You didn’t drink anyway, nor got high. Still…sodas weren’t free and sometimes, after the party, you felt like eating something. The music in those parties was good (maybe the best); you thought it was because everyone in that scene appreciated it (not as much as you, of course) and not because it was hip to listen to it. You thought your generation was about to make a change and you wanted to be part of it (on your own terms, of course).

There were lights and shadows all over the place, people dancing, singing, laughing, talking, kissing, drinking. There were light and shadows, and in between them; there was you.

Remember that everyone seemed to be having the time of their life with very little effort; they had the friends, the talk, the means and, of course, …the girl. It didn’t matter that you knew every Pixies riff on every album, on every song; it didn’t matter that you were dressed as the youths in Manchester were; it didn’t matter that you’d seen many underground films (apart of all those others, Indie or mainstream, that you were supposed to have seen because everybody had and you were not the kind that stays behind, of course). It didn’t matter that you knew you could feel differently than those others; the thing was that you didn’t think that you had the sort of spark that those others had and you wanted that intensity in your life. But somehow you knew that if you tried to get it, you would have to sacrifice “something” and that would make you as vane as them, at least too your eyes (of course). And then what would happen if you get to know the girl, what would she think of you?

Remember that you firmly believed that someday you were going find the spark without having to sacrifice a little bit of your soul? That such encounter was going to take you far beyond those others and away from your world. That was why you kept going out every Thursday, Friday and Saturday with that spiritual strength, with that will. It didn’t matter that you knew that perhaps you had to wait a thousand hours and that sometimes you felt like you were sinking in despair. Well, that was what you thought and how you felt everyone from those nights, from the moment you closed the door of your house as you were leaving until the moment you used your key to open it again, once you had returned and got straight to bed to fall asleep.

Remember that you thought you knew better…

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