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.
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!
On an ATVM in the Dominican Republic.
In this road kids offered flowers and ran beside the boogies for as long as it took to get a dollar bill. I took this pic before I saw them.
I have been wanting to write pretty much every moment of every day since I started working.
Waves of stories plague my mind and I have to take my eyes off the excel table on my computer screen and stare at a corner of my cubicle for just a second, just to feel their touch and then, inevitably and always with regret, I have to let them go to continue whichever mundane task I have to waste my brain with.
Those excel tables translate into the ability to have adventures and experiences with my girl and I am truly thankful. But my boss is crazy and that’s made some days. I don’t mean crazy as in I say she’s crazy just because her attitude is wrong or the way she treats others is horrible, but crazy as in she’s sick with anger, resentment and low self esteem and needs lots of help. And probably love too.
And I’ve been wanting to write about how my little girl loves to sit with my ninety three year old grandma in her bed and look at magazines and my hearts feels so full I have to hold my breath at the thought.
I wanted to write about that house’s street corner. How it looks so bland and boring now but twenty years ago we talked about it at least once a month because cars kept crashing on it, breaking the gate and hitting the house, basically parking inside the living room.
The other day I had to make a call to the customer service department of the company I worked for several years ago and the guy that gave me the orientation sounded very much like the trainer from hell that I had there and thought I should write about it because, he’s still there being miserable.
And I was thinking the other day while driving that when I was in college I used to hit the signal light stick with such power it sounded as if I was going to break it and now I barely touch it and that must be some kind of life parallel.
A couple of days ago the gossip dude at work came up to me just to ask me if I have a boyfriend and I said no one in that building should ask me that question so he said “oh, it was going to be in your interest but ok” and I somehow reached into my pocket of sass, unused since approximately 2008 and got out a “oh! Is someone giving me money?!” And everyone that looks at me knows I couldn’t care less about money but that shut that dude down like BURNED. He turned around to say “this one thinks she’s the smartest cookie around here!” And now he limits his interactions to the appropriate good morning only.
I definitely had something to write about the night we had a tropical depression coming through the island and at some point during the night I woke up with my heart racing because the rain was pounding on the windows and the wind was blowing and I felt fleeting despair. It took me about twenty minutes to control my body from going into full on emergency mode. During the day gas stations had been full with hour long lines from everyone filling their tanks. Water and non-perishables ran out in some supermarkets because people remembered how there was thirst and hunger on the days after the Hurricane Maria. A few moments later while I was trying to convince myself I could sleep the power went off and I prepared myself to deal with the power generator for weeks. The power came back about an hour later and it was morning when I stopped waiting for it to go off again.
But alas, I haven’t written the stories that knocked my brain and thus, this must make do.
de monte y mar 