i’ve never waited for a lover.

i’ve never waited for love.

i’ve never waited to be loved.

i’ve never waited to be confided in.

i’ve never waited to be trusted.

i’ve never waited to speak my mind.

i’ve never waited to find a resolution.

i’ve never waited to listen.

i’ve never waited to love.

i’ve never waited to be present.

i’ve never even waited for the future.

i’ve never waited to change my life.

but i have been scared.

i’ve been scared to love.

i’ve been scared to be loved.

i’ve been scared to listen.

i’ve been scared to understand.

i’ve been scared to change my life.

i’ve been scared to make choices. to decide.

i’ve been scared to give.

i’ve been scared to run.

i’ve been scared to stay.

i’ve been scared to live.

but i made a plan. and maybe the plans didn’t pan out. but that’s ok. i still had goals. and i still had a plan.

i didn’t wait for the life i wanted. i didn’t wait for life to catch up.

every second, i make the life i want. do it. and live it. every second. every moment.

i can’t see 10 miles down the road. but i know what i want to see when i get there.

Once in a while, when I retrieve new voicemail messages, the lady machine tells me: “Your message from xxx-xxx-xxxx will be deleted from your mailbox.” I can choose to press 7 to delete or 9 to save.

I always press 9. Sometimes, I listen to the very first message he ever left. The deep voice. The cute chuckle. I remember where I was when I got the call (a museum). What I was doing (walking in the grass). What I was feeling when I found out it was him (I barely knew him but my heart went thumpthumpthump). Sometimes, it feels like a mistake to have ever uttered a word (“Why did I just say that?” “Why didn’t I just say this?”. Sometimes, it feels like luck – to have had the privledge to know someone like him.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would feel like to press 7. Somewhere between heartwrenching and mournful?

I think it would feel like they died.

. . . . .

there is a cross dissolve.
a black between scenes.
i want to love you deeply
without the quick edits
but i got lost in the sequence.

Its been a long time. Fistfuls of it.

Someone once asked me whether I miss anyone. I miss my tio Sergio. I miss my dad, Mike. I miss myself as a 5 year old girl. I didn’t have the same concerns and worries I do now. Did I have any worries? Bubble gum, scraped knees, and a pet hermit crab. Those were my worries.

Pigtails, learning how to ride a bike, and buying 5¢ candies from the lady around the corner. Baby baseball games at the field up the street, the creepy mansion on the other side of the loop, and pretending to be a Charlie’s Angel on rollerskates. Picking big fruit from tall trees, feeding bread to ducks at the park, sucking my thumb while mum rocked me to sleep. Those are the memories I want to remember.

But I have to think really hard about them to remember. Really hard. It makes me wonder whether some of them are memories I wish I had.

What I remember effortlessly are the sad ones. Mum and I running away when I was little. Mum crying every night and me not understanding why. Me trying to make new, 6month friends in another new place in a new language. Metal buckles screaming through water hitting my skin. Cuts and bruises in the shape of shoes. Being jailed inside a concrete house. Being locked in a dark room for days without water or food.

I think that’s when I got a little crazy.

Back then, I thought I’d come back here and remember the sweet. But once I got here, after a decade of being gone, I remember mostly the sour tenfold. Somebody fucked with this place while I was gone. Nobody warned me. No note. No “hey, by the way…”. No preface.

Only change. The deep blue funk kind.

The neighborhood is different. Its cleaner but at the core, its seethier. Dirty. Dingy. Somewhere during those years, it lost its way. Most of my old neighbors are gone. Some went to jail. Others are dead. The rest sit on their porches in rotting white shirts and watch people like me walk by.

An old man sat on his porch with his old dog on a leash. I couldn’t tell whether it was Lanso. The end of the dog’s leash wasn’t tied to anything. And the dog could’ve been dead. Both it and the man looked ahead with these big, droopy, cloudy eyeballs.

Who the fuck is that? He didn’t say it but his eyes did.

What the fuck happened here?

Man, ain’t that the damn truth. In old folk Boricua Spanish, it was the wisest thing I’d heard in years.

There is no pristine white anymore. Moss covered from rain. You can see the direction of drain water that constantly fell down the side of houses. Thin on top, mack-truck wide below. It looked like they cared once. Not anymore.

Around the bend, huge trees grow straight out of sidewalks. Roots bulging from concrete. You know they were brought there as babies by wind, birds or shuffling feet.

I know, I know. My roots are stuck too. But what do you do when you don’t have wings?

I almost laughed at myself. I half expected a full-leafed branch to slap me por la cabeza and say drink el redbull. I got lied to though. It didn’t work. Maybe for you? You’re lighter. You can already move.

All the little houses have steel bars around the windows. Some are bent. All are rusty. No one opens them. No one trusts enough to open anything here.

Some of these homes are colorful like in San Juan or in the French Quarter of New Orleans. But they aren’t surrounded by happy people. They’re vacant, old, rundown, broken. Tore the fuck up.

There was a baseball field at the corner of my street. At the end of it, there was a little townhall building where residents had meetings and families felt safe enough to take their kids to afterschool activities. The field always had little league games. Its mostly brown now. Littered. Dirty. The dugout spot hasn’t had any coaches or kids in it for a long, long while. Remnants of beer cans, very old dreams, and plastic soda bottles live there now.

Everything here, time forgot to change its ticktockticktock forward. There are no more children. Just los viejitos and middle agers. Both remember what it was like when people cared.

What the fuck happened here? Its like a ghost town except the people are still alive.

Man, ain’t that the DAMN truth.

(re-edited June 20, 2010)

Oftentimes, I forget that I’ll be officially turning 30 next week. I grew up with the thought that your time in a tummy was already 1 year when you’re born (they do this in some parts of Asia and my mum was in the habit of telling me I was a year older than everyone else thought). So, technically, I’m 30. But to most people, I’m still 29.

(Snip: I’ve now been “officially” 30 for almost a month – this post was obviously started a bit ago.)

I find it funny that the only way I seem to remember my birthday is from reminders of others – particularly the nearer it gets. In June, I was very much aware my birthday would be in a month’s time. Two days prior to the actual date? Nada. The day of? I was reminded by a phone call at midnight from several friends as they placed the call on speaker sang to me. There I was, with one of my friends helping him practice taking flash photographs in darkness and, after the call, all I could really think about was this: What exactly was different about me NOW? Did I feel older? Look older? Had I learned anything that I didn’t already know one minute prior to the midnight chime?

Not really. I still had the same thoughts, same opinions, same friends, same family, same desires. Except one.

I really enjoy getting older. I always look forward to the extra year and sometimes think about what my life will be like in 2 years time. In 5. In 10. It isn’t often that I take “The Future” into account. I have always looked at my life as it was in the current frame of space and time since I was a teenager (perhaps this is why I think I can deal with harsher things with a bit more immediacy than some? Who knows.).

But sometimes, I do look ahead. I’ve been told by some that this can be a good exercise in evaluating where one would like their life to go. I try to find the appeal in this. I like not knowing. I like not writing an ending before a beginning. I don’t pretend to know how to shape the future even though I’m well aware what I do today will affect tomorrow. THAT I most certainly can think about to no end. But that’s about as far as I think my mind feels comfortable going.

That being said, my attempt at thinking of “The Future” comes in the form of a list (I like these). Given all the things I’ve experienced, there’s obviously much more I’d like to do. I worry sometimes that I’ll get to be a certain age and realize I’ve not done everything I’ve wanted to do or that I’ve really gone through life having done not much at all.

30 Things During My 30th Year:

1. Sky dive
2. Complete the first 5 chapters of a photoessay book
3. Graduate (and never, EVER return to an academic setting as a student)
4. Make two of my favourite short stories I’ve written into a short film. In progress!
5. Purge every single one of my belongings that I can live without.
6. Pay off the only credit card I have in my name (I’m so close!).
7. Inspire and educate others. Of every age.
8. Be an even better do-er. (How does one type that word correctly?)
9. Be better about communicating to my family.
10. Reach out to my siblings I’ve never met.
11. Finish my family tree. It would give me more insight into the most secretive people I’ve ever encountered.
12. Be more in touch with how and who I was 25 years ago (children truly hold the secret that adults yearn to know).
13. Understand people less in the beginning and allow them to show me who they are (this one sounds awkward, I know).
14. Finish the songs I’ve been working on for the past decade. And record them. Officially.
15. Edit all my (creative) writing pieces and self-publish them. Finally.
16. Get reacquainted with past mentors. Acquire new ones if need be.
17. Write more handwritten letters. And send them.
18. Send a message in a bottle.
19. Make a time capsule that represents my 30th year of life and open it on my 60th.
20. Most of the emotional sides of me (including my minds. Yes, plural) are like a house with a locked door. And I swallowed the key. Its gotten better over the past few years. I’d like that to progress to the top of the peak this year.
21. Drive to a secluded field. Lie down on a blanket. Look up at the stars all night. And just be.
22. New places to travel (for just this year): South Africa, the middle of America, Tierra del Fuego (for some reason, to me, it seems like the edge of the earth), Haiti. A visit back to “La Isla” and a visit back to my New Orleans.
23. Send one letter to each person in my life that means the most to me. And tell them why.
24. I’m blunt with a lot of things. Though I don’t like hurting people’s feelings because of it. I’m working…understanding that as an outcome.
25. Develop the most kick ass digital workflow for all my work both offline and online.
26. Paint more and archive every single one of my doodles. Feel less ashamed of how childish they look.
27. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life in a physical sense (death). I feel guilty because I feel they may not have known how important they were to me. I’m trying to be mindful of everything I say, how I say it, and why. But I must show love more often, especially to those who really deserve it.
28. Work on knowing my limits by understanding my weaknesses and embracing my strengths.
29. Learn how to accept a compliment. And not feel awkward nor guilty about responding with a thank you.
30. Re-examine the importance of quitting something that isn’t worth it.