I used to put my thoughts to rest.
They would begin with a capital letter, swirl around commas and end up in a pretty period.
And then there was space in my brain for new words and for things, and for doing because the thoughts had been neatly put away.
I have no time to tidy up these days and my thoughts keep circling the edges of my head. Over and over, the same words, the same feelings, run over me for hours with no end.
It’s exhausting to think the same thing six hours straight.
Stopped at a red light, besides a six car line, I observe things that I don’t think others do. I notice which car carries a child, and where is a whole family. In a few seconds I have figured out, if I need help, which car I would approach.
Not that I need help. I just wanted to have that figured out. It makes me feel ok.
Having a gallon of water also makes me feel safe. After the hurricane, drinking water at hand makes me feel like the day is fine. Sometimes the day is not that fine, sometimes the day almost sucks, but if there’s a gallon of water at hand, I can’t complain.
Others can. If someone at work doesn’t like their food, they can complain. That’s fine.
I have to hold it in. Inside me, all the feelings are safe.
My friend lost her father and I can’t call her because if I do, I’ll cry. She’ll feel the pain, but I’ll cry harder. I can not let her hear me crying her pain.
I hold the sadness and the anger and the frustration. Until one day it all begins to trickle down the tips of my hair.
I stop my car and I cover my face from myself. I cover as much as I can so I can’t see me crying my feelings and I cry them one by one until I’m exhausted enough that I can’t bother to punish me for it.
At some point, there’s nothing left to hide and I carry on. I observe.
We got an email about a coworker who has a missing sibling. As soon as I could get up from my chair I went to her to tell her everything is going to be fine and hug her.
Then I cried.
I found a bag full of girly things in my desk. I couldn’t believe I got a gift. I went to the office of someone I suspected, unsure if I was going to be inappropriate, but I asked her, was it you? And she nodded. “Cause you’re so nice”.
So I went to her and hugged her for a long time. And I cried.
A girl that has been assisting another area came up to me to say goodbye because it was her last day. She also said thank you, even though I didn’t do anything other than befriending her. She said she was not good at goodbyes.
So I got up to hug her. And I cried.
All the feelings.
I’m on season 4 of Gilmore Girls. This is where a lot of crazy starts to happen (it sounds funny after having just watched the episode where Lorelai invites Luke over to watch Casablanca, and Marty naked in the hall lol) and I’m bracing myself for it. Last night I saw the episode when Richard enters business with Jason and I think I remember he turns out to be a rat, that’s gonna be hard in my feelings.
Also the Gilmore Girls marathon was on this last week and a lot of people were tweeting along, it was fun to have a few on board in the rewatch!
So my recorded notes the last couple of weeks:
Wanted to have this chronicled:
I feel an obligation to write something about what’s happening in Puerto Rico.
I know I don’t have one, but I feel like I have to. I’ll be using words from the flood of information that we’ve been drowning in this week, both because I’m too empty and tired to make up my own and also because some have been so piercing that they deserved to be shared.
As you might see from the titles of the news, the people of Puerto Rico want to governor to resign. This because:
1) This week we had the luck of reading a leaked Telegram chat (apparently this is an app resembling Whasap that the government uses) where the governor:
refers to women as ‘sluts’ and makes vulgar remarks like “I want her to suck my dick”
makes fun of overweight people
clearly states that the government withheld help received during the hurricane so he could control it and distribute it as he saw fit, taking all the credit for the goods as if the government had paid the cost
made fun of the dead people being buried
basically shows how he presented himself as one thing but turned out to be another completely different
he shared this chat with various advisors, all equally trashy as he is
2) His Secretary of Education robbed millions of dollars from the Department of Education. When his father was the governor of Puerto Rico one of the biggest scandals was the conviction of his then Secretary of Education for corruption, so deja vu.
3) His Secretary of Health robbed millions of dollars from the Department of Health.
4) We knew he had schemed in disfavour of the people, but we either gave him chances or didn’t had actual proof of the schemes. Now we do.
Our hearts are broken, but our spirits are intact.
They say we should be scared because if he leaves everything will be a mess, the economy will suffer, tourism will get hurt, shit will go down.
But this is the same island that had a category five hurricane strike right through it. We had no water, no power service, no hospitals, no medicine, no food, no roads… that hurricane took many things from us, and one of them was the fear of not having any of those things.
They say we should be scared, but nothing hurts us more than remembering four thousand six hundred and forty five persons died because he didn’t want to help us as we deserved, and then he MADE JOKES ABOUT FEEDING THEM TO THE VULTURES.
They say we should be scared, but nothing will take more money from us than the group of white collar thief’s sucking the money out of our funds.
They say we should be scared, but we are done being scared, we are fucking angry. We know our power. And they should be scared.
My cousin came to visit a few weeks back. He has been living in Florida for almost 15 years.
He sat in our living room and we laughed and talked and of course, the hurricane came up. He sobered up and said “oh my God. That was a horrible week. I had such a horrible time.”
And I almost slapped him. “YOU had a horrible week?! Bitch, you will not sit there and tell me that you, back at home with your power and your running water, and your hospitals open and your not destroyed surroundings, had a horrible week. Shut up right now, I’ll tell you about a horrible week.”
I mentioned that we had to shower outside, we had to collect rain water, we had to ration potable water because we didn’t knew when we were going to be able to get more. We had no phones, so we couldn’t call anyone. Communications were so badly affected that the governor, having the highest tech in the island, was giving out wrong information because news traveled so slowly from one place to the other.
He knew all of that. I said “but what you don’t know, what you can’t see, is the fear. It was a lingering fear, one that ran so deep sometimes you couldn’t put your finger on it.” What’s this feeling that covers us like a veil, at all times? Oh, right, we are scared.
I would go outside with Little J and literally physically guard her as she walked because suddenly any fall that could result in an open injury was terrifying: hospitals were mostly closed, but the ones that were open were very risky to go to. Most had no generators for the first weeks, or only had them for the first days, so bacteria and infections hijacked entire wings. People would go to be treated for one thing and suddenly got an infection and just died because basic medication was so scarce. I’m a hysterical mom, so we didn’t played outside much during that critical time.
Emergency agencies seemed to be something that didn’t exist. We needed medication, no one could get it. We needed water and food, it took weeks for people to receive it. When we started getting news from outside, it looked like help was not coming because ports were impenetrable. I mean, all that big water.
I heard the president say that only 30 people died in a conference room, right before throwing paper towels (PAPER TOWELS) and I couldn’t believe no one corrected him. Portable military freezers were filled with bodies without logging information because no agency could keep official records in an effective way, and we saw that in the news, so how didn’t he knew?
The missing list was on the hundreds within the first week after the hurricane, how didn’t he knew?
We had reported deaths of asthma patients who couldn’t power their nebulisers within the first few weeks, and how didn’t he knew?
We had a break out of influenza and leptospirosis in october, how didn’t he knew.
I’m not a crier, but I cried every day. Well, it was mostly every night. Tears would just come out from mental exhaustion, frustration and terror. All the what if’s clouded my mind and for the first time in my entire life, I couldn’t sleep well, no matter how tired I was. I started waking up and staying awake for hours, mostly before sunrise.
So, no. I’m not forgetting any of what happened, or anything that’s been said. By anyone. I will not forget.
I will not forget.
“Mamá behind those mountains is Puerto Rico.”
“Darling, Puerto Rico is hugging us right now.”
“How you mean?”
“It is hugging us with the breeze, and the sky, and the sound of the trees and the birds, and the shadow, and all this green.”
Close your eyes so you can feel it. It is right here and right inside your heart.
At twenty three I could make up a story out of thin air as easy as I was breathing. Words would flow out of my hands, and out of my mouth and out of my soul so easily, so freely, so true.
It was second nature to create little words out of tiny ideas. One thought would keep on untangling forever and I relished it’s own will with glee.
Then I spent more time with images and then in my early thirties, I mixed the two. And then I got ashamed of it all. Ashamed of the magic I used to make stories, because magic was not decent, hard work and anything that wasn’t related to decent hard work was shameful.
My brain shut down all the magical corners and all I could get from it, outside of work, was silence. A profound and dark silence. I lost all my moods around that time too. Normal jokes that would usually get a cackle out of me, didn’t tickle me anymore. But for my Baby J I kept a bit of my creative going.
I seeded that bit and it started to bloom after I moved out of a miserable relationship that sucked me almost dry of all me. To my surprised, it bloomed. It’s first leaves where just newfound laughter and words. I began to talk again, make conversation. And little by little I got me back, not exactly as I was before mind you, but a whole of me. One that recognises itself again, one with a voice and a brain full of magical corners – different, but magical.
So now my brain is full of ideas, and sometimes they come up at random moments. Like today I was driving and thinking of Dragon and how much I did love him, enough to write him the most stories and how I could still write him a few more. I don’t know anything about him now, but I can still remember his touch and the way he made me giggle with joy and that untangles into a story, or three.
And I dreamed a character a few weeks ago and she was so amazing. She came up quietly passing by and smiled going away without a bang, but I thought of so many different things for her to do.
Maybe I’ll go write some of those.
A few hours after the hurricane we were able to turn on a radio and I started scanning every single millimetre of the dial trying to find a signal.
You know those movies about the end of the world when they suddenly realise how fucked up they really are because no radio works? That was the scene. Except my little girl was in the room with me and I couldn’t show in my face what my heart and my mind were feeling. No matter how many times I went backwards and forwards, the only sound I could find was static and I had to tell my girl that was ok.
That’s what keeps coming to my mind today whenever someone mentions the Tonight’s Show recording in Puerto Rico. I’m sure everyone has a similar memory because at work everyone would just start crying whenever we showed each other the clips.
If you have never experience what it is to live in a place that isolated, to know that it was up to you as a community to bring everything back up, you have no idea what it feels to watch this:
My eyes tear up because my island, my beautiful maiden, she’s looking so much better now! Look at those green mountains! Look at those smiling faces!
Jimmy said it in his show and I just want to remind you; we are ready for you! Come show up and enjoy this magical little piece of heart called Puerto Rico where every party looks a little like this:
Have a great one peeps!
de monte y mar 