When my daughter asked if her boyfriend could spend the night, I said yes.
He and his mom had a blowout argument and she ended up telling him to get out of the car they were sleeping in. Each night, they'd park at the Walmart up the road.
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A lot can happen in ten years. You lose a baby, or choose to lose a baby, though at the time, it doesn’t feel like a choice, more like a pre-ordained outcome. You spend time blaming everything outside of you—your OB, your job, your husband. Blame comes easily; it’s a ready distraction from the blame you hold close to you, like a secret: you were not brave enough, not in love with the baby enough, not selfless enough. When your water broke months too early, you panicked, you decided against hope.
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I went to college in 2014. I am the eldest of four kids, thus, the first to leave home. Growing up in a Latino home meant the vague expectation of pursuing higher education. In my house, our parents said if you were not working, then you were in school. My parents were not raising a bunch of bums. Mami y Papi instilled in us the importance of working for our own. If we wanted something, we had to work for it. I learned this quickly and, at the age of fourteen, had my first, legal job.
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In early March 2020, my children begged me for a pet.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered their request; our lives were too busy. But the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, and the departure of regular school, work, or sleep schedules impaired my better judgement. My children sensed my vulnerability.
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I should have seen the signs, long before she fell so far and so hard. Instead, I just kept pushing. “You can do this, sweetie, just focus and try harder.” Seemingly innocuous words, I thought. Encouraging words, right? Wrong.
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Before bed, I text myself a reminder to write in the morning about the time I visit him near Crested Butte in October. It is my first understanding of how early winter comes to the mountains—the marvel of fall suddenly brought to its knees by the first violent winter storm.
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I sit on my couch as social distancing becomes a hashtag and debate whether 7:30 pm on a Saturday night is too early to wash off makeup. There are things I can do in my apartment. I can finish the jigsaw puzzle I started months ago or read an unread book in my library.
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I drove Bennet to the airport as he left our six-week-old marriage for his nine month tour of duty in Vietnam. He was dressed in a clean starched Army uniform. I was dressed in dread. After waving to the plane until it was a tiny dot in the overcast sky, I walked back to my car feeling as if he had died.
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"You are a solitary," observed the attorney I had hired to draw up my will. She had asked me to list the family members and friends to whom I would consider leaving my worldly goods. Both categories were skimpy. Thus by her lights, my very small circle of significant people in my life qualified me as a "solitary," which would present not a small challenge in disposing of those aforementioned possessions.
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“Hi, I’m Bunny, how are you?” she said. Her name caught my attention. “Bunny” is “an informal name of a rabbit, especially a small, young one” in the dictionary. I looked it up; those days, I carried a pocket size English dictionary with me.
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Praying during the first grief-soaked month following my father’s death felt rote to me. Awkward. I had taken on the obligation of saying the Mourner’s Kaddish every day for at least a month before realizing I had forgotten how to pray. A professor in college who gave me a C on a paper about James Joyce’s Ulysses said I was like a blind woman trying to describe a painting in front of her. That’s how it felt saying the Kaddish.
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The last time I went to the church of my childhood, I wore my collar—my hot, plastic, clerical collar. I felt obvious and tender in it, like a burgeoning zit, like everyone would stare. And yet, I wanted them to stare, I wanted them to look at me and be amazed.
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We held our hands in prayer. “Te lo pido, señor.” That week, it was my turn to visit Marco at the Elizabeth Detention Center, a contract detention facility in New Jersey used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrants determined to be “suspicious” or “illegal.”
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I am seven years old. It’s time for communion in my United Methodist Church in a small town in mid-Michigan. After watching communion by intinction happen for so many years from the sidelines, I am excited when my mom tells me it is okay for me to line up in the center aisle with her and slowly shuffle forward, waiting for my time to tear a piece of bread off the soft, white loaf and dip it in the grape juice.
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The coconut palm in the field behind my house worships the wind. Its feather duster head sweeps low, bows to the earth like a holy roller in ecstasy, and then snaps back skyward—defiant—in an elastic, resurrecting leap that blasts the law of gravity.
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I was on my hands and knees trying to hide a twelve-piece dinner set under my single bed when I heard Mum calling from the bedroom next door. She’d been in bed for two days, suffering from either a bad back or codeine withdrawals. I pushed the crockery behind a box of stainless steel cutlery and some gingham tea towels I’d bought from Woolworth’s the day before.
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I lost count after the first ten, twenty, seventy-five, a thousand. I remember the first time. Driving with my sisters, one of them said, I’ve had sex with a woman. Stunned into revelation, I blurted, so have I. But she was kidding. Entrapment, and I fell for it.
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Paris, City of Love, where we lay our scene of adventurous study abroad college students. Me and the girls were out in a little bar late at night. The lights were cool, a featured musician was playing acoustic, and my friends and I were ready for some dessert.
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The day I came out? I’m sure it’s not uncommon to come out on multiple occasions. I expect the circumstances in which I came out are a bit unusual though. To understand that takes context: My girlfriend was once my neighbor—at a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—where we lived with our husbands—who were studying to be pastors.
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The first time that I really tell someone, the words belong to her, like me and everything else in the world around us. We are alone, and I don’t remember where the rest of our friends are or maybe we aren’t alone and all of our friends are with us but I can only ever think of her.
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