{"id":31818,"title":"Pasar La Noche En Blanco","description":"Pasar la noche en blanco (spend the night in white) is a colloquial Spanish expression, meaning not to have slept the night before. This is a fitting description for the sleepless nights of Semana Santa in Jerez de la Frontera, and some of the penitentes who spend their days and nights dressed in white.","content":"

You walk the same route you always walk:<\/p>

past the panader\u00eda with its fogged glass,<\/p>

the man inside nodding without smiling.<\/p>

<\/p>

Past the woman in the doorway with her cigarette,<\/p>

who calls you guapo.<\/p>

<\/p>

You photographed her once,<\/p>

and she remembers you<\/p>

with a kind of dignified inevitability,<\/p>

the way old neighbours remember the shape of your back<\/p>

as you carry groceries up the stairs.<\/p>

<\/p>

Because you walk the same route<\/p>

you always walk.<\/p>

<\/p>

This week, Semana Santa, Holy Week,<\/p>

doesn\u2019t so much arrive as insinuate,<\/p>

creeps in sideways,<\/p>

a chaotic squeeze like death itself,<\/p>

half sacred, half absurd:<\/p>

<\/p>

plastic chairs dragging across stone,<\/p>

children sticky with candle wax,<\/p>

gawping at hooded penitents,<\/p>

craning their necks for a better view.<\/p>

<\/p>

You clutch your coat like protection<\/p>

against something elemental,<\/p>

though it\u2019s only the late spring wind,<\/p>

and it all glides past:<\/p>

<\/p>

invisible men breathing heavy<\/p>

beneath pasos, unseen, straining.<\/p>

<\/p>

And I remember being asked<\/p>

to carry this burden,<\/p>

as all things happen, late one night in a bar,<\/p>

half-joking, half-serious,<\/p>

the way obligations are often bestowed.<\/p>

<\/p>

But COVID had other plans,<\/p>

and the momentum was gone,<\/p>

like a bus you swore was coming, but never came,<\/p>

and the next bus driver is then finger waggled<\/p>

by a masked vigilante abuela.<\/p>

<\/p>

I lost the connections, the casual ties,<\/p>

those minor chords of community.<\/p>

<\/p>

So instead I listened to the music:<\/p>

ugly, deep in brass,<\/p>

an open wound,<\/p>

like a heart that\u2019s broken and still keeps pumping,<\/p>

not tragically, just insistently.<\/p>

<\/p>

You go home, forget to drink water,<\/p>

and sit in a chair that feels too soft,<\/p>

the kind of chair that swallows you whole.<\/p>

<\/p>

The night has no opinion.<\/p>

<\/p>

The panader\u00eda shuttered,<\/p>

the cigarette woman gone.<\/p>

<\/p>

Tomorrow you\u2019ll walk the same route<\/p>

you always walk.<\/p>

<\/p>

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