Here I am waiting for Melissa to finish with her root canal. Poor girl got depression and didn’t brush her teeth for a few weeks. Now we’ve gone all over the towns of Zipaquirá looking for an emergency dentist, open on a Sunday—the holy day in this Catholic region. After taking a little bus (buseta, sounds like bruschetta), we found a dentist open in a nearby town. Well, we met him at his home. After a couple of hours, he came into the office to greet us. In the meantime, we walked into a cafe next door—a “hobby cafe” it’s called—where they have games you can play for free. We were just getting started on a Casper the Friendly Ghost game, where you try to haunt the other players, when the dentist texted saying he was ready.
Now I’m sitting in the lobby, waiting for the oral surgery to finish. The door is ajar and I can hear the churning of the tools in Melissa’s mouth; the sound of the water tube burbling like a little ocean wave crashing on the shore, and the dentist talking incessantly in Spanish—perhaps a talkative attitude appropriate to social Sundays.
The day before, Melissa had arrived outside Cafe Francesca to meet her family and me for a night exploring the Christmas lights that had been arranged on the hill leading to the underground Cathedral of Salt.
Melissa’s long hair, curly and dyed orange, was covered in a black baseball cap where two fabric horns had been stitched on. She looked like a demon pixie. I asked her where she got the hat because I want one too. She made it, she said, and laughed. I asked if she’s ever been to a cosplay festival; no, but Bogotá does them. Indeed, her little sister Isabella had made an incredible costume of her favorite anime character—a young demon girl whose mouth is bound with a bit like a horse’s, to keep the demon girl from feasting on her innocent family.
It’s telling that both girls love demons.
I wonder what the cause of her depression had been, but the consequence was clear enough. Depression is all well and good until the effects create more pain than the pain which brought on the depression.
Depression to me is an anesthetic, one that dulls your senses and tells you to hide, to sleep, to stop—just like the instructions to a wounded animal. The psychological wounding leading to the dulled state of depression; surely it is the pain of unresolved tensions in the heart. Hate for those we love, sacrifices made that we now regret, the judgment of the world which wounds the judge, for she is powerless to enforce any justice.
But depression is surely a kinder response to these tensions than aggression. I wonder if the depressed sink into themselves out of empathy, and the aggressive—they dull their pain by unleashing it on others.
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