Crónicas de un gato a medianoche
- ️Sat May 11 2024
"On that beach, only sadness and resentment floated. On that ground, languished a girl and her broken wings."
—"Alas arrancadas", excerpt from Lila Gaela's first-ever original not-poem.
Crónicas de un gato a medianoche (Chronicles of a Midnight Cat) is a collection of short poems and poetic prose (both original and derivative of other fictional works) authored by Lila Gaela. The anthology was published in Wattpad in 2018 and was continuously updated until Gaela took down all of her works from the platform in 2021. Fortunately, an archived version of one of the entries, "Demon's Madness", can be found here
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Gaela describes her one-shots as Surrealist with a tinge of Impressionism; however, they are probably better described as drawing more from the Symbolist and Modernist movements. She calls them "not-poems" because their prose is driven by musicality, a sort of loose rhythm, and imagery that resembles a decomposed poem more than normal prose.
The anthology is split into three sections: "Desde el fondo de mi alma" (lit. "From the Depth of My Soul"; aka her original short stories), "Actual poems", "Winx Club short stories", and "Other one-shot fanfics".
Tropes:
- Bilingual Bonus: "Irises infectas"Translation is grammatically wrong in Spanish, as there's no plural form for the word 'iris' (the colored part of the eyes). However, Gaela used it to make a bilingual reference to the flowers known as irises because they are part of the one-shot's imagery.
- Chains of Love: Justified. In "Seré buena"Translation, the suffering brought by mental illnesses is described as thorny vines trapping the protagonist. Her love interest is willing to stand by her side to help her heal even if that means she too gets snared by the aforementioned vines.
- Rain Aura: Poignantly subverted in "Cuerda floja"translation. The character notes that being so high above the city means that the light rain soaking her doesn't produce mist (which is a metaphor for her past suffering) but a breathtaking myriad of colors.
"And the mist. The mist has disappeared as if the altitude scared it away. As if up here, it was no longer able to numb my mind. As if it could torture me no more."
- Shout-Out: The opening paragraph of Crónicas de un gato a medianoche references José María Eguren's poem "(R)eyes (r)ojos" word by word. Gaela uses it as a shortcut metaphor for weary eyes while keeping the original's Bilingual Bonus. It also makes an allusion to one of Homura Akemi's witch transformation stages in Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion —specifically, when spiderweb-bleeding red moons replace Homura's eyes.