18+ · For adults only.
I went to Loja for the Festival of Living Arts because a friend said the street shows were free and the city smelled like coffee and wet stone. I took the night bus from Cuenca with a small backpack and a ticket for nothing in particular. I wanted to stand in a crowd and clap for strangers. That was the whole plan.
The rain started before the bus even cleared Saraguro. Fine Sierra rain, the kind that does not argue — it just settles in. By the time we rolled into Loja I had already decided the parade would be a washout and I would spend the evening in a café near Plaza San Sebastián watching people shake umbrellas in doorways.
I was half right about the rain. I was completely wrong about the evening.
The umbrella
Calle Bolívar was already filling when I walked down from my cheap room near the plaza. Families claimed doorsteps. Teenagers sat on the curb with painted faces. Somewhere up the avenue toward Cabo Minacho, drums were testing themselves. The festival’s opening parade — the one with the painted-float theme everyone had been talking about — was due at dusk, and Loja was not going to let a little water cancel it.
I had no umbrella. A person under a black one paused beside me as if they had been waiting for that exact fact.
“You’re going to melt,” they said, in Spanish with a Quito softness around the edges. Not from here, then. Neither was I.
They tilted the umbrella without asking if I wanted it, which should have annoyed me, and somehow did not. We stood shoulder to shoulder while a school band went by in plastic ponchos, and then a float that was trying very hard to be a famous painting, and then dancers whose sequins caught every street lamp. Rain beaded on everything. The crowd cheered like the sky had done them a favour.
“I’m only here until Sunday,” they said, as if that were important information to give a stranger.
“Me too,” I said.
We did not exchange names on Bolívar. We exchanged a look that meant the café after, if you want.
Plaza San Sebastián
The café we found was two streets off the parade noise, with a window that fogged every time the door opened. We ordered coffee that came too hot and too strong, the Loja way. They told me they had come alone for the German circus company and a play they could not get tickets for in Quito. I told them I had come because my life in Cuenca had started to feel like a spreadsheet.
Outside, the stones of Plaza San Sebastián shone. A small music group set up under a tarp near the church and played something with guitar and a voice that cracked on purpose. We went out to listen. The rain had thinned to mist. Their sleeve brushed mine and stayed.
“Is this okay?” they asked, quiet enough that the music almost covered it.
“Yes,” I said. Then, because clarity matters even when your pulse is doing something stupid: “I’d like that. Tell me if you change your mind.”
They smiled like I had passed a small test neither of us had announced.
The balcony
Their hostel room was higher than mine, on a street that still caught the echo of Bolívar. The balcony was barely wide enough for two plastic chairs and a dying fern. We brought the leftover coffee up in paper cups and sat with our knees almost touching while somewhere below a trumpet practised the same phrase over and over.
I am not going to catalogue what happened when we went inside. You can imagine enough. What I will say is this: we asked, more than once. We laughed when the fern tipped over. We stopped when one of us needed water. The rain came back harder and turned the tin edges of the roof into a drum, and for a while that was the only applause either of us wanted.
Afterwards we went back to the balcony because the room felt too small for how awake we both still were. They pulled a blanket around both our shoulders. I asked if they wanted to talk or be quiet. They said, “Both,” which made no sense and made perfect sense.
We watched a late group of festival-goers splash through a puddle and salute nobody in particular. Loja at festival midnight feels like a city that has decided sleep is optional.
The morning
In the morning the sky was a washed blue and the mountains around the city looked freshly edited. We walked to a bakery, burned our tongues on fresh bread, and checked the festival programme on their phone. There was a free clown show in a plaza at noon and a ticketed dance piece at seven that still had seats.
“Come to the clown show,” they said. “No pressure about the rest.”
I went to the clown show. I also went to the dance piece. I also spent another night on that ridiculous balcony, asking and being asked, while the festival kept pouring music into the streets whether anyone was ready or not.
Sunday they took a bus north. I took one west. We did not promise anything we could not keep. We exchanged numbers the way adults do when they know geography is rude.
Sometimes, when it rains in Cuenca now, I still hear that trumpet practising the same phrase under a Loja balcony. I do not know if that is romantic or just a brain trick. I know I clapped harder at every free street show for the rest of the festival, because standing in a crowd had stopped being the whole plan.
Names and identifying details changed. Reader stories may be edited and dramatized.
Got a story that still makes you blush? Send it to us at sex@moodchillin.com or through our Share Your Confession page. Every story is read by an editor, stays anonymous, and is in the running for our monthly best-story prize. Adults only, consenting adults only, and change the names.
Not applicable (reader fiction; dramatized). Local colour checked against FIAV parade route notes (Calle Bolívar, Plaza San Francisco) and Loja rainy-season climate.
Cover photo: PHOTO: “SANTA ANA ST.” BY DAVID MOSQUERA / PEXELS (PEXELS LICENSE), EDITED