My cousin Xime Ruiz Merino is calling me: – Moquita, I liked your tweet. – What will happen, because I only write nonsense, I tell her with conviction that I can only write what I feel, what my fear, my forgetfulness or my madness dictate. – The one who says: “Watching the news is an act of resistance, trembling courage, powerlessness.” Watching the news is the worst way to start the day, it’s early to feel that tearing, aching, unworthy pain. I see the floods and I think, what more can heaven do but weep? I thank you for the call and when I hang up the phone, I am overcome by that terrible feeling that I live in the dark, that I do not know where I am going, where we are going, where the country is going.

Writing to untie the knots, I say to the favorite students of my personal storytelling workshop; writing is an act of courage, I tell you with conviction that it is so; To write is to be part of the world and see it with different eyes, I tell you with faith. But what I didn’t tell you is how to write when your fingers hurt from the pain. I didn’t tell you how to write when your eyes, hair, and soul hurt. I didn’t tell them because I don’t know, because my brain is numb from so many pods.

I can’t stop watching/reading/listening to the news. An earthquake occurred in the south of the country. The pictures of the accident on the island of Puná are outrageous. I can’t believe that big lazy shrimp businessmen are making their fortunes out of that poor little town built haphazardly.

I see my beloved Guayaquil submerged, turned into a dirty and sad Venice of the third category. What will happen when the water recedes? When garbage, rat poo and city sewage dry up and spill onto the roads. Nausea prevents me from thinking, but words like leptospirosis, dengue fever, dysentery stick into my brain like poisonous stings.

– Not even God wants this earth, the wind, rain and icy air that tear our bones respond in chorus.

I hear a comment about stealing twenty cars from a dealer’s warehouse and a mother declares, “I knew my kids were on the wrong track.” He says this with a strange, deadly, humble calm, confirming that one of the three heads found in the black sheath was that of one of his children. Now I feel a pain in my navel, near where life begins. The pain rises to the chest, to the lump in the throat, to blurred vision.

I read about a landslide of hundreds of meters above the five quarters of little Alausí and it takes my breath away. For God’s sake, the fox pissed us off!, I say to Santi.

Officials say that people were warned, that they should have left. Where to go out? How to get out? Date what? I don’t know if one day we will understand that poverty binds, oppresses, paralyzes and makes it impossible to make decisions. And not just any decision, but to take everything and move. Get changed?

What have we done to the country? I ask them out loud to the wind, to the rain, to the icy air piercing our bones as we impatiently wait for the National Assembly to declare (with the holiday included) Chocha Day with Chulpi and I mean Púchicas!

– Not even God wants this earth, the wind, rain and icy air that tear our bones respond in chorus. (OR)