Lucky Strikes at the Edge of the World

This piece began with an AI writing prompt, but I wrote every word. I've always wanted to write but never knew where to start. Now I use AI as a tool - a writing coach, a creative spark, a patient guide - to help me develop my craft. The technology supports the process, but the memories, emotions, and voice are mine. This is how I'm becoming the writer I've always wanted to be.

I was always cloudy and incessantly poetic in my thoughts. They would shoot out of my head seemingly disparate, they would grow like vines, attaching themselves with their thin and fragile tendrils to metal fences, and concrete walls, and trees, to anything and everything, forever reaching for the sky; or like tentacles curious and incapable of being still, touching everything, learning everything. They served as sword and shield, telescope and compass. I loved observing. I loved learning. Everything was magnified, always.

It was an afternoon like any other in my teens, another dozen people killed announced in the newspaper, the sky was clear and the breeze was cooling. We had bought Lucky Strikes and Andatti coffee, walked past the taxi point – always jumping off the side of the ramp, never taking the steps down. There were the taxi drivers that were always there. There stood the eternally empty red phone stand. We passed one block. We walked on the road, the sidewalk was constantly interrupted by ramps for cars to get inside their houses. You wouldn’t see anyone in their yards. Everyone stayed inside unless they had a reason to be outside. Or no reason to be anywhere. We passed another block, the security guy’s booth - always empty, marking, with the help of the shared beige and cream colors abandoning the gray and brick, the beginning of a new place. The big sign welcoming us back: “Hacienda Linda” – I don’t think I ever saw the “Vista” there. There had always been a tree covering it no one ever bothered to trim. I always thought the colors were ugly. I did not have the language to explain why the lime-green letters looked so ugly against the light cream wall. It was the pretense of it all, that desperate reach for elegance that only revealed what it tried to hide. The kind of ugliness that comes from trying too hard to be beautiful, from trying to be something you’re not.

We turned right and followed the long street toward the very end of the hacienda. To a wall, an unremarkable cement wall fencing off the side of the hill. There was nothing but untamed shrubs and forgotten things on the other side of that wall except for the houses at the bottom of the hill. It was a window between all the almost identical houses where we could see the outside. From here, at the top of my hill, we could see everything. Below us, a canyon. On the left, a highway slashing the landscape in half, stabbing the hill right in front. More left was the US behind a rusty metal fence. That fence always reminded me of the quote about poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. Straight ahead, anchored by statues of Jesuit priests and on a street named after Hernán Cortez, were the roundabouts stretched out like a race track. Surrounded by the supermarket, restaurants - fast food and taquerías, fabric and hardware stores. Everyone here makes something.

On the canyon below us was another neighborhood, but their houses weren’t all the same. Their houses were made by the people that lived in them. They dotted the street that rivered at the bottom of the canyon, sprawling up the sides like vines, growing through every possibility. They made paths where paths were needed.

It was dusk. The sky was impossibly colored and saturated with its own essence. Everything stood atop the wall that divides everything that was of what will be. The houses had warm yellow lights. The cars lighted their paths.

I could hear the ocean, I swear I could hear the ocean—though maybe it was just cars on the highway, their endless passing slowly morphing into waves. Or maybe the difference didn't matter here.

We had Lucky Strikes and Andatti coffee, these small rituals of adulthood we had no right to at fifteen. Too young to be old. We had nothing to worry about, and everything to talk about. It was weightless. The weightlessness of the vastness of what could be or, more accurately, the expansive freedom of not knowing what will happen. The freedom that only exists in us as children when not knowing is wonder and not anxiety, when having questions is curiosity and not doubts, when every sadness feels infinite and every joy feels permanent. There I stood, at the edge, my thoughts touching everything — the lights below, the darkness above, smelling the sweetness of Lucky Strikes and tasting the bitterness of Andatti coffee. The ocean.

This would never be painted. No one would ever record this. Nothing here is worth preserving, is worth traveling to, is worth reflection. It’s a passing moment in a passing place. You would not visit. But I loved it. I loved thinking about it. I loved how everything here was never what it was. How we could die any day but died every second instead. How nothing stayed the same except our stubborn insistence on remaining. Over and over.