I am sitting on the edge of the bed, eating a bowl of Flips while watching an episode of Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff and Mitch Horowitz. An alarm goes off, one we had never heard before. Seconds later: the deepest, most visceral panic I have ever felt in my life, the loudest screams I have ever let out, death brushing past us so closely that it felt like a nightmare, not reality.
In two minutes, La Guaira was left in ruins. The lives of thousands ended, and the lives of thousands of others turned into misery. Two minutes that felt like two years. Two minutes of destiny’s sadism striking against us. Two minutes that will remain a trauma for the rest of our lives. Two minutes that stole hours and hours of sleep from us. Time is nothing but play-doh molded by our senses.
All the neighbors down on the Ground Floor. “My phone warned me” was the most repeated comment amidst the collective cacophony. An alarm, coming from a cell phone, reaching your ears, waking you up into awareness: this is your life, and if you are lucky, you will get to continue it; what are you going to do with it then? For many, it was death; for others, a rebirth. A sign that things cannot continue the same way, both on a macro (collective) and micro (personal) level. Little girls I had never seen in my life pet Lisa, who is terrified and has peed herself. Meanwhile, Maggie managed to hide so, so well in my mom’s closet that we couldn’t find her when we went down, not even when José went back up to look for her. Where the fuck is Maggie? I looked toward the building’s window from the Ground Floor amidst so much confusion, voices echoing outside and inside my head. What do we do? What do we do?
The last major earthquake in Venezuela was in 1967. We found out, the hard way, that our country has a seismic cycle every 60 years. But we didn’t just find out; this was already known, it was even announced by seismologists days before. Either way, it was going to happen, and nobody was prepared for this. The coast of La Guaira was not prepared for this. Our brains were not prepared for this.
By nightfall, everything took on a different tone: friends turned into ghosts. The body felt like jelly. The cascade of information was infinite. The absurdity of it all; undeniable. The feeling of disbelief over this massive punishment wouldn’t leave my mind.
After that, my body flickers, throbs; I can feel my blood circulating like never before. I am alive. From 3:00 PM onward, my day changes, my body changes, my mind changes. And as the hours pass, the shaking returns to me, and there is no place that can keep me steady, because even though the earth is firm, the shaking now lives inside of me. Rest is impossible.
And my hypermania manifested: the way I react to all the adversities that have been piling up over so many years of living in Venezuela. Something has to be done, for others, for myself, for whatever. Staying still is unacceptable. Something has to be done. A torrent of ideas unfolds in every corner of my head. While trying to protect my sanity (an action I’ve already let go of, because it’s a fight against myself), I flood myself with information, looking for friends and friends of friends on last-minute, vibe-coded websites about the earthquake. The “Located” tag fills me with peace, but it’s hard to believe until people actually show up and give signs of life, literally. Without thinking twice, I donate money to friends who were active in rescue efforts; because of the pragmatism of the action, because material reality takes urgent precedence in this situation, but also to ease my guilt for not being among the ruins in La Guaira pulling people out with my own hands. Something must be done, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what else I can do to help, but contributing something is better than contributing absolutely nothing. This was not the time to run numbers and calculate the weight of those expenses down to the millimeter; it was a time to preserve life and nurture it. Something must be done, but I don’t know what to do. Helplessness, despair, and manic hyperactivity constantly clashed in my head and my actions. Impulsivity: an old, very Sagittarian habit that I had been weeding out of my life returns with full force.
Screens fill with rubble, with photos of the missing and the dead. The screen shakes and takes us back, over and over, to the worst moment of our lives, from every possible perspective. The screen shows us solidarity and opportunism, like a yin yang of our human condition. The screen shows numbers next to engagement icons that mean nothing, yet for some, mean everything. The screen fills with requests for equipment for rescuers, of people putting their bodies on the line because those who should be taking care of us don’t; screens fill with Pago Móvil info to buy water and fund funerals. The screen, the screen, the screen, shows us a reality, many realities. The screen pulls us in more than ever because we think we can do something about all of this, which is true; all the payments to help are made through the screen, all the information about the missing comes through the screen, all the pleas for help come through the screen, we learn about Tsunami (the rescue dog) thanks to the screen. At the same time, on that very screen, there are people lying, taking advantage of the situation, declaring living people dead, spilling unprecedented hatred and massive ignorance, making noise with mystical delusions and political agendas. Now everyone is an expert on God’s punishments and HAARP. You lift a burden off your shoulders by blaming something, when that “something” is simply and purely the planet we live on. These are ways of explaining reality, giving meaning to every event when sometimes there is none, because yes, sometimes life makes no sense, and getting constantly beaten up by it is just one of many surprises that our shared destiny wants to throw at us. We Venezuelans are excellent at being on everyone else’s agendas, annoying when we actually need help ourselves, useless if our suffering doesn’t fit into binary categories of good and bad. And yet, in a situation like this, they manage to make the discussion political instead of human, not about the value of life, not about how we care for each other and need to be cared for, not about how in 2 minutes the course of every Venezuelan’s life changed. Whether it’s for better or worse doesn’t matter, as long as there is someone to blame. Motives and explanations are useless if they remain static just to justify the events. What comes next: the rescue of human life is the most fundamental thing; then there is the future of all of us, which should be provided by government responsibility. To no one’s surprise, we are not, have not been, and I think we will never be cared for by the government we didn’t elect. We have a whole lifetime ahead of us to claim and denounce. The urgency of now, of the people who were left without a home, without a relative, partner, or friend, without their belongings, without work, without money, without food is where the energy should be focused. As John Lydon rightly said, “Anger is an energy,” and that energy from all the rage, frustration, and outrage has to be directed right now toward what is useful and pragmatic, toward the preservation of life, toward concrete help for those who need it most. Everything else is absolutely useless.
And if anyone understood the energy of rage, it was me. For the stupidest possible reasons, the neighborhood board decided to activate the elevator the day after the earthquake. Fine, using it or not is on everyone’s own problem. But a few days later, they came up with the brilliant idea of locking the emergency doors, and not only that, but removing the latch from the door so that when you open it, there is absolutely no way to leave it propped open. This is what really fucked me off. The first time I went down and saw it closed, a ball of rage swelled up inside of me, a ball of rage that made me doubt my own rationality. And so it began: first, I mentioned it to my mom, who has a close relationship with the board. She said she would bring it up, but she didn’t. The next afternoon, a neighbor came by; I mentioned it to her and she agreed with me, yet she didn’t do anything either. I went back down, and the door was still closed. I went back up, grabbed a sheet of paper and a marker, wrote the following, and went down to tape it to the door:
“KEEPING THIS DOOR LOCKED PLACES ALL THE INHABITANTS OF THIS BUILDING AT RISK.
IN MOMENTS LIKE THIS, THE PRIORITY MUST BE TO HAVE THE GREATEST NUMBER OF CLEAR EXITS.
I TRUST THAT THE BOARD AND THE NEIGHBORS ARE TAKING EVERYONE’S SAFETY INTO CONSIDERATION. THE LOCKED DOOR IS A RISK. LET’S PROTECT LIFE.
LORENA ♡ 34-D”
No reaction whatsoever, neither in the neighbors’ group chat nor from the board. Nobody backed me up in my initiative to preserve our lives in an emergency. Nobody did anything. While I was showering during the 15 minutes they turn on the water for us a day, the building’s psychopath, who they say was walking around with a whistle and a machete, knocked on our door and yelled things at my mom. I got scared, but I was completely naked; I tried to get out as fast as possible, but by the time I did, he was already gone. He was the only one who approached to support me, very much in his own way. That made me doubt my sanity even more; if the only person who agrees with me is a man walking around with a whistle and a machete, crying, drunk, and singing, then my concern makes absolutely no sense.
The board asked my mom and the neighbor to talk to them about the situation. At first, I told my mom I would go with them, but a few seconds later I regretted it and told her it was better if I didn’t. But if Muhammad won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammad. Half an hour later, two of them were sitting on my living room sofa, treating me condescendingly, the way you treat a child or a crazy person. One of them said, “Well, the other day I saw three suspicious-looking men who looked like they wanted to break into the building.” Who were they? Did you ask them, or did your prejudiced, Karen gene fail to activate in this emergency? Did you take a photo of them? Is there even any proof that this is true? Why do we have security guards and cameras if we aren’t going to follow up on these supposed threats? That was the drop that spilled not just the glass, but the entire tank of rage I had inside, and my reaction was to bring out my inner devil and gutturally scream at them, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, to leave the fucking door open. I insulted them in a thousand different ways, told them to go to hell, and ran away terrified and in disbelief of my own reaction to my room, where I cried, screamed, and doubted my rationality in José’s embrace. Someone who doesn’t care about the lives of all the neighbors in the building deserves neither respect nor hypocrisy. What they did is one of the cruelest things I’ve seen in my life. Some people change in tragedies, and some people double down on their neuroses and cause more harm than necessary. I don’t regret it; they deserved it. The good news is that now the door is open. Anger is an energy, I managed to make it so that all the neighbors can enter and leave the building without using the elevator.
What comes after this for the country, for us, for me, for you, for her, him, everyone? It’s hard for me to understand; lately, everything goes back to normal so quickly. That was also my first impulse: to push forward, keep grinding, and exhaust myself while having all kinds of symptoms, weird reactions, and bizarre visions of reality. These states make me feel so lucid that I feel crazy, or so crazy that I feel lucid. I haven’t stopped doing things, trying not to end up reliving that moment, which is the first thing I do every time there is a pause or silence. I wish it hadn’t happened, but I don’t have the power to turn back time. Things happen, and in the next instant, the future appears. Every single second after surviving is the future, and based on that, I make decisions.
I have no idea how we are supposed to deal with this as a collective, and honestly, I don’t know if we are doing it well, poorly, or both (surely both). We’ve seen all kinds of things; even caimans in La Lagunita. A tragedy of magical realism, but a tragedy nonetheless. I don’t understand how we can hold so much pain, anger, frustration, and confusion. No wonder we’re all going to be crazy, and everyone will react according to whatever the madness of their trauma dictates. There is so much that seems inexcusable to me, and at the same time, I don’t know if I’m the best person to judge it. We all lived through this together, and at the same time, across all places, the thread of our identity connected us. And that is strange, to me at least, it is strange. I feel close and distant at the same time, wishing for all of us to be okay but carrying so many reproaches. I try to understand that the destructive is always louder: both in how information circulates and in the way we get hooked on a topic, glossing over the truly heroic acts that a huge part of Venezuelans did and continue to do. I didn’t do everything I would have wanted to, but I did what I could.
These tragedies make you closely examine the life you’ve lived, when suddenly the thread between the beginning and the end of life itself is left hanging, about to snap, but for some reason or great fortune, it tenses and grows stronger. And everything is suddenly right on the surface. It’s starting to become clear to me where I want to be and where I don’t, what I want to do and what I don’t, what I allow myself to do, say, sing, create. To be autonomous with my ideas and decisions. To appreciate the freedom in my life, which manifests in many ways, despite living in a place that wants to suppress my freedoms.
Once again (those who read me and have known me for a while will guess this), I’m getting off social media. The good thing is that now I have more spaces to exist, they’re just quieter, different. I’m getting tired of delivering the same old spiel. I don’t know about you, some of you tell me you feel the same, but it’s not good for me to be there. It’s not good to be measuring everything that comes out of me and its value with a number, or communicating by reacting to a message, or not being able to strike up a conversation from a reel. That minimalism of communication leaves me feeling very empty. I don’t want to see others through my judgment of how they want to represent themselves on social media; I prefer to talk to them, if they want to talk to me. Seeing what someone does is not the same as talking to someone about what they did, you know? I deleted the perfect app for musicians to promote themselves because it was the app that made me cry and feel bad about making the music I make. I deleted the app where my entire family can gossip about what I do to judge me behind my back. Instagram stays because it is the ID card of our times. Unfortunately, they managed to make it seem like if you aren’t there, you don’t exist. But if I barely opened it before, now I’ll open it even less, and in my new home screen setup where I hide absolutely everything that digitally perturbs me, it isn’t there unless I search for it. Still, those who read me know me; maybe next year I’ll come back as an influencer for psychiatric medications. It’s like the people who have to present a certificate of life to collect their pension: if you don’t show that you exist out there, suddenly people forget you do.
And yet, the world keeps existing outside. And I go deeper and deeper inside, so deep into the desire to implode. And the inside and the outside grow further and further apart, meters turning into kilometers.