Como a mi chihuahua: a racing heart and the bus waiting

Before declaring love, it explains. The song starts as a confession, with a string of things it's going to tell you: why it doesn't watch the news, why injustice affects it so much, why it lives disconnected from the real world, why it can't stand seeing anyone cry.

And my favourite: why it prefers to find out about major disasters on Twitter two months later. It makes me laugh because it's exactly what many of us do to protect ourselves, arriving late to bad news on purpose, when it hurts less. During those first lines it seems the song is going to be about someone too sensitive for this world.

The little dog twist

Suddenly, it turns. It stops talking about the world and addresses you directly. It asks whether you feel it too. Whether when you see them your heart also races, at a thousand miles an hour, just like the narrator's. And that's where the chihuahua appears (the title means "Like My Chihuahua"), that tiny dog that trembles with its pulse sky-high all the time. It's a ridiculous and incredibly tender image at once, and it explains better than any soppy metaphor what having a crush is.

The pang comes right after: you wouldn't give a single kiss, not even before catching the «guagua». That word for bus, so Canarian, gives the scene a specific landscape. I imagine a bus stop, someone with a chihuahua heart and the other getting on without saying a proper goodbye.

At the end there's one last line, the most personal one, and it explains everything. If everything hurts so much, if the news is unbearable and the world feels so far away, there's something that works as a remedy: «tu risa es el antídoto contra mi soledad» ("your laugh is the antidote to my loneliness"). All the sensitivity from the start makes sense. That person isn't simply fragile. They've found something that holds them up.

It's a song for declaring yourself without making a fool of yourself, or making a bit of one, which has its charm too. For sending to the one who never gives you a kiss at the stop.

The full lyrics are further down. Listen on Spotify