IN MIAMI

A month had gone by since my arrival to Miami, every day of which I spent in bed, sleeping or staring at the wall, ignoring my family, showering only when my head itched and eating only when I couldn’t put it off any longer. Food tasted so different it was hard to swallow. The only thing that tasted the same was bread and butter so it became the staple of my diet.

I gained 8 pounds that month and my forehead looked like a cheese grater. Good times. Looking back now my grieving strikes me as dramatic, but when I dwell on it, when I really pay attention and remember I realize my pain was real, so real that I can still feel it. Some part of me will always be that girl that came here unwillingly. After weeks and weeks of almost catatonic indifference, I snapped and broke down at Sears (where else, right?)

My mom had just left to go back home and take care of all the last minute details of her coming here. My sister in the meantime was taking care of her preparations to go to Spain. And there I was trapped in Miami, my mom left me here, alone! To say goodbye properly to my sister, why couldn’t I? If I had to say goodbye to her then why do you get to say goodbye now? Two days after my arrival to North America the law that made my dad rushed me here fell apart because the US couldn’t afford to survive without the tourism industry. I called my dad delirious with joy. I could go back home and then we could discuss maybe, maybe coming to the U.S instead of Spain. My dad said no. I was already here, my mom had been thoroughly brainwashed and my dad refused to spend another thousand dollars for a ticket for me to come back. I was here to stay. Traitor, traitor! My eyes said to my mom while we were in the airport dropping her off. I wouldn’t even hug her goodbye, she cupped my face while I remained still, and broken hearted she left me there in the loving care of my aunt and uncle.

I wanted to yell at her to come back. I wanted to tell her I was sorry I was mad. I wanted to stop her from leaving me here all alone. I wanted to yell at her for not having any money and letting our lives, our future and our destiny depend so much on dad’s money. I wanted to yell at her for ever marrying him. I wanted to yell at her for being a housewife. I wanted to hug her goodbye and tell her I’ll miss her. I did nothing and said nothing when for a last time she turned around and waved.

After dropping her off at the airport my aunt and I went shopping to Sears for a new blender. Welcome to America, Lesson # 1: Things broken cannot be fixed in the land of the free and home of the brave, they are always replaced. You can come here escaping religious, political or sexual persecution. You can come to the land where dreams come true. Give me your hungry, your tired and all that, but if your blender’s blades are broken you are fucked, get a new one! Welcome to capitalism. Off we went to Sears to get a new blender.

I zombie-d into the store, not seeing anything and not recognizing the girl in the mirror as myself, I made a derisive comment in my head about her fashion sense when I noticed it was me… wearing jean shorts and white sneakers with no socks. Eeeeek!!!, “How the mighty have fallen”, I thought. I shrugged mentally. I couldn’t muster enough energy to care and kept walking. My aunt kept talking, trying to bring me back to the land of the living by sheer volume of words. I missed my mom terribly, I regretted my stupid pride that now felt cold in my chest when before had kept me from crumbling. She was my only link left from home, and with her gone I felt like a castaway, adrift and drowning.

I felt like Punky Brewster must have felt when her mom abandoned her in the supermarket, motherless and alone, future uncertain and no one who cared. I walked to the music department trying to distract myself from the abject loneliness I was feeling and being as I was in Miami, a merengue song came through the speakers of the store. An old-school merengue that had been popular in my pre-teen years and was the first song I ever danced with a boy. No girl forgets that. Everything suddenly hit me like a tidal wave. The pain of leaving, the sense of betrayal at my mom’s caving to my dad’s wishes, the sudden terror at the thought that I wasn’t going anywhere and this, the land of the gas-station-at-every-corner was my new home, I was stuck here in Cuba... I mean Miami.

I was hit suddenly with the resentment, anger and almost hatred at my dad’s selfishness; I was choked by the sense of helplessness I felt to be subject to his whim of sending me here just because he could, I was hit with the shame of being such a burden to my sweet aunt and uncle, ashamed of not having even tried to make conversation with my cousins even though we were sharing a room. I was filled with dread at having to learn a new language. I was swallowed by my agony of not saying goodbye to my sister and not knowing when I would see her again.

Most of all I was horrified at finding myself in a public place wearing jean cut-offs and sneakers. That dam broke and there was no stopping it. Tears came like the flood. I was literally weeping right there between “Rap” and “Sounds of Nature”. People looked at me funny and finally my aunt found me there, sobbing my bratty heart out. She there-there me and walked me to her car where she asked me to wait after giving me the keys, sweet trusting soul she is. I sat inside the roasting heat of the van, burning the naked back of my thighs with the scorching leather.

"Serves you right for wearing this atrocity!" I thought to myself. I refused to turn the A/C on. A penitence for being so weak, for letting myself be brought to this slow-cooking hell. I would immolate myself with the blistering heat, a victim of my pain, a supreme example nay! A symbol! To people all around the world suffering the anguish of expatriation, I would be their beacon! Their… Ok, Fuck this! It’s too hot. I turned the A/C on and felt life returning to my shriveling limbs, the cool air traveling between the tresses of my hair that now looked like a Brillo pad.

I cried silently some more.

IN EXILE

I didn’t utter a word during the four hours of travel. I waved goodbye to my home from the plane, the city shrinking before my eyes, thinking stubbornly that I was going to be back, that I would walk those streets again a month from now.

We finally landed in Miami Airport (which in and on itself deserves a chapter in my story) not very welcoming with its thousand people walking around, bumping each other and the custom agents treating people as if they were criminals (a little late for that don’t ya think?). I felt myself be hugged and kissed by my aunt and uncle whom I hadn’t seen in four years since they moved to the USA running away from the Colombia guerrillas and the many deaths they had brought to their family. My cousins smiled at me and I tried to smile back. We got to the car after getting lost in the gigantic parking lot, the size of it overwhelming my already overloaded emotions and giving me a peek of USA’s excesses.

Nausea was rolling in and out of me like waves, my face losing and gaining color with it. My uncle only driving at 45 miles per hour but I could see only blurs of light. I looked around the window, trying to find something familiar even though I hadn’t been there before, searching for the familiar shadow of the looming mountains, not knowing, not expecting Miami to be as flat as a pancake, I could find nothing. All I could see was the bottomless distance, nothing to get in the way of my searching eyes and the light of the houses miles and miles away.

 

My body had a tingling sensation; I could feel my skin prickling with the rush of blood and my heart pumping so hard I could hear the roar in my ears. I was getting dizzy and found myself gulping for air, realizing I had been holding my breath. My misery knew no depths; I could hear my uncle and my aunt talking animatedly with my mom and my cousin laughing while the other sketched in a pad. I got distracted by her pictures and the characters that came to life before my eyes. The slam on the brakes brought me back to reality and all of the sudden the knowledge of being here was too much to bear.

"I need to go to the bathroom" I croaked. The van was silent. Everybody listening to the first words I had spoken since jumping in the stupid plane that brought me here. God I could’ve argued harder, I could’ve fought dirtier, I could’ve told my dad he was a bad father, which always worked before! I could've ran away, I could've stayed at my friend’s house. Anything, anything was better than this foreign smell, and the noises and the freaky flatness. Everything was better than this horrible humidity that was making my hair do things I didn’t know it was capable of doing. "We are close to home now" My uncle said with his raspy smoker voice even though he doesn’t smoke. "I reaaaaally need to go" I said. 'Is not home, is not home!!!!!' I screeched in my head while my face remained impassive. I was having trouble breathing and feeling anxious, my mom’s and my aunt’s laughter felt like nails on a chalkboard. The silence of my sketching cousin felt like a wall I could lean on. My stomach rolled and salty saliva pooled in my mouth. I knew swallowing would mean throwing up in the car, so I sat there with my mouth full and my head pounding so hard I could feel it in my sinuses. A tear clung to my eyelash and in the blissful darkness of the car I rubbed my eyes. My uncle finally stopped at a gas station taking his sweet time to park. I had the door open before he had fully stopped.
 I jumped out and ran into someone. The dirty guy looked at my boobs and said something dirty and walked away. My uncle jumped out of the car to - I assume defend my honor- and I swallowed.


My stomach rejected everything, the salty saliva, the dirty man and his roving eyes, the salty smell of Miami and its sticky humid air. I projectile vomited on the sidewalk and felt my ears ringing. I kneeled on the floor without feeling the gravel denting my hands. I thought and felt nothing while retch after retch wracked my stomach. Empty of food and feeling I sat back on the floor, the cool feeling of the metal door of the car a balm against my hot cheek. I didn’t notice until later my cousin holding my hair. "Airplane food" Someone said.

I blinked the tears away, refusing, as if my life depended on it, to let them fall. I felt miserable but better. I avoided the pity looks in my family’s faces and took the bottle water someone offered. I avoided their glares and sat there as if picnicking next to my throw-up. I stared at the lit sign of Chevron until it blurred away.
Welcome to America.

TORN AWAY FROM HOME

What to do? What to do?! God, to say I panicked is a giant understatement. I ranted, I pleaded, I was rational, then hysterical, I tried talking, I tried yelling, but the fact was that with or without my cooperation my then tiny ass was going to be on that plane come April the 28. I guess I could’ve said no, I could’ve done whatever I wanted! I was 18 years old and by law old enough to make my own decisions. In reality I was an 18 year old college dropout that had never done a day of honest working in her entire life, didn’t even know how to operate the washer machine, let alone find a way to live on my own in a unstable country with no money.

So I plotted (my favorite hobby that I guess I inherited from my dad) and figured that even if I came here, I wouldn’t stay for long, my sister would never allow my dad to send her to the US and my mom wouldn’t want to go without my sister so I was safe. This was just a trip, a short vacation.

Little did I know that my father for the first time in his life would put his foot down and say he would not finance a trip to Spain, and left my mom with the option of staying home with things as they were, or come to North America.
The day before the trip I was still treating it as a vacation and excited about the shopping and beaching. My mom came to my room and sat down and told me this was IT. This was me leaving; this was me saying goodbye to home, to my friends, to my two Weiner dogs, to my mountains, this was it. I sputtered. What? I wasn’t going to get my way? (Welcome to grown up life Mel, as it happens that would be the first of many, many times in the next six years that nothing would go as I wanted it) I was pissed!, all those times when I got what I wanted and what I wanted hadn’t been that important and this time, when it meant everything I was going to fail?. What about Karol? I asked wondering about my sister. "Don't worry. She’ll come". My mom said.

How wrong she was. Oh how little we knew my sister and her stubborn nature and how little we know of her convictions and how committed she was to her plans to go to Spain. She wouldn’t go. I didn’t know that when I had said goodbye to her 2 months before when she went to school to Colombia it would be the last time I would hug her and touch her and hold her hand for five more years.
So there I sat, on my way to Miami, Florida. Capital city of the world’s immigrants. Leaving everything I knew and loved behind, friends, and family, first love, pets, corners, my Avila, my valley, my mountains, my streets and malls. Leaving myself behind. No one would know me; I would be another immigrant, another wet back, even if I didn’t cross the Rio Grande. Anonymity promised to swallow me whole like I was nothing. I would not go out to places and run into people I knew anymore. One of my first lessons here was that, I learned I would painfully miss that small pleasure of seeing a familiar face in a random place in the streets. I learned that I would be no one, no one. The knot in my throat was chocking me. Being as proud as you can only be when you are 18, I refused to cry, the lack of breath making me dizzy. If I breathe I’ll cry, if I cry I won’t leave.
I thought of making a scene. My dad wouldn’t drag me by the hair. I looked at my mom from the corner of my eye, she totally would. I discarded that idea, raking my brain for a plan. I had to do something! I couldn’t go; I didn’t want to go, not to the US. Not here, not with gringos (no offense). This is not what I wanted. Oh God, please help me! Please, please help me!

I think the only reason that I finally walked into that plane was the many times I repeated in my head the conversations I had with my friends when I said goodbye to them, how happy they were for me and how much they wished it was them.
This is good (right?). This will be good, we’ll be good. I tried foolishly to convince myself. U.S.A is good. U-S-A! U-S-A! I chanted to myself.