1991. It was the spring after Angela’s passing, and the nuns kept organising small gatherings with both the boys and the girls’ schools. As I mentioned before, it was a good 15 km between the schools and only for that school year did we had co-ed events. Since the christmas posada was a hit, the nuns thought it would be time to organise a dance party.

I was in the second year of junior high school, which we call secundaria in México. Three years, from 12 until you’re 15. The first years had to buy the soda, we had to buy refreshments, the third years were on decor and music detail. I really didn’t feel like going, even if both my parents were goading me to go.

It felt weird, I thought, for some reason still in mourning over a person I never met. I didn’t feel like socialising at all, but we still bought the food assigned to us by the organisers: two bags of ruffle chips (cheese and onion, natch), and a homemade onion dip. It was a friday afternoon, as those parties called “tardeadas” were merely kettled between 3 and 9 pm. I was back from school, and playing Ultima VI: the false prophet, an old DOS game that I was absolutely addicted to. The music, the pixelated landscape, it offered me a way out from the bullies and from the mourning.

My mom came around, sat and read the manual for a long while. “Whoever wrote this is actually very wise” she said, as she put down Lord British’s diary -the solution book- and then gently tapped the table. “Let’s take the stuff to the school”. We called a cab, since she didn’t like to drive and we arrived to the party.

As we approached the black gates, my mother kept insisting, as subtly as a hammer to the face, to stay. “I’ll turn the computer off”, she assured me, and I thought about it, since I always saved the game whenever I could. We were a few metres from the gate, where the nun and two organisers waited. From the corner of my eye, I saw a thrasher bird, looking at me with curiousity, from the top of a bougainvillea tree. I was distracted and I half heard the nuns talking to my mother about the party, about the impact of Angela’s passing had, and how us in the boys’ school were settling in.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stick around? Your dad can pick you up!” my mother insisted, and the nuns and the organisers were kinda sorta goading me to stay with friendly faces. I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t face it. It was all still too much for me. We said goodbye and we took another cab back home, and I noticed the thrasher bird following me with its eyes. The music was good, though.

Back home, I patted my boxer dog as he wagged his tail from his comfy bed. He slobbered a little bit over me, as usual, and went back to sleep, as the warm day had exhausted the poor bugger. I kept playing, feeling in another time, in another world. What if maybes flew in my head and the song blasting from the speakers still resonated in my head. No way to know it now.

13 years later, I was playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and a track from Bounce FM sampled the song. A quick search gave me a result: The Source featuring Candi Stanton. It’s a darn weird way to find a song I liked, back from a time where I didn’t listen to much popular music, but I liked that reunion. It was then featured on Layer Cake, a movie I saw with one of my best friends, and then resurrected by Florence and The Machine’s deft cover.

-Sam J. Valdés López