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Not gently. Not with coffee steam or birdsong. She wakes me like a car crash in slow motion, like the smell of burning sugar and bad decisions, like a text sent at 4 a.m. that you can’t unsend but can’t stop reading.
And for the first time all week, I laugh— the ugly, real laugh of someone who remembers that to be awake is to be a little bit damned, and a little bit free.
The Wake-Up Call of the Damned In the half-light between dreaming and drowning, when the world is still a wet stone turning in the dark, she comes— Pendeja. Not a name, but a brand. A slap of morning light across the teeth of sleep.
Puta. Not a curse, but a crown of broken bottles and bruised roses. She wears it like a war song, hips swaying to a rhythm that cracks the pavement.
“Get up,” she says. “You’ve been sleeping through your own life.”
And I do. Because pendeja —foolish girl—knows the truth I hide under my pillow: that I am also foolish, also ruined, also holy in my wreckage. Because puta —whore, yes, but also queen of the unwanted— sells her tenderness by the hour and still gives change. Because she wakes me, and waking is violence, and violence is the only alarm clock that works on the dead.
