It’s the bare-chested pudgy bellied fellow waddling with a beer in one hand and a Redbull in the other, the young father riding with a small child on the handlebars while yelling obscenities to the bus behind for almost hitting him. It’s the gap-toothed man selling bottled water on a silver platter with the arch of a butler’s palm in the middle of a busy intersection, the guy who hops thru the backdoor selling packets of caramels for change to feed his family. It's the wheatgrass stand telling me the next batch is up in five minutes then showing up in twenty, the girl with the perfect earl grey eyes at the organic market who makes my heart skip a beat every time she smiles. It’s finding out the braided neighborhood waterman who says "konichiwa" to me every morning has a YouTube channel where he dresses in drag and an oversized baby diaper, the fact that an entire crowd of children get together on a holiday Thursday to beat the shit out of a doll with the name "Judas" scribbled onto its vest pocket. It's the tattooed gentleman who skips onto the bus with a grin and a giant plastic pillow-sized bag of roasted cashews, the girl at Lojas Americanas using the back of her earring to open the SIM card slot to an iPhone. It’s the gray-haired grandma at the supermarket telling me that I’m buying some weakass Chilean wine, the cacophony of car horns playing for a crippled elder holding a “thumbs-up” the entire time he’s inching across the street. It’s eating bacon popcorn drizzled with condensed milk while walking down the strip of transvestite prostitutes, the homeless man who refused my leftovers because he’s a vegetarian. It’s the old woman in Maré who grabbed my arm for absolutely no other reason but to give me a smile, the fruit vendor gifting me two bananas cuz I asked him for the price of one. It's the kid at the gym fighting to get his drug-addicted parent out from beneath the freeway underpass and back into the home, the soft coos of a young mother wiping the tears of her child from the sound of fireworks. It’s the struggle and the heartbreak, the love and the hope. It’s the perfect fight.
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