Breadcrumb #666

FELENE M. CAYETANO

Dear Nicole,

Thank all the gods and the ancestors that leap years come every four years. In between these times I don’t reflect on your suicide, your brother’s tears, your mother’s questions, your father’s broken soul that sagged along with his cheeks each time I saw him thereafter. I thank Sunti Gabafu hama ahari for this small mercy of four years in between the visceral muscle memory of the pain from losing you that no amount of sessions with a balding middle-aged white male therapist immediately dispatched by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles could quell. For multiple leap years I relived your premature death, the subsequent premature funeral and years of questions unanswered. If the leap year found me in Los Angeles, I would post myself physically or metaphysically by your grave talking to you about what the last four years of my life were like.

Did you hear me catching up with you? Did our other classmates visit you? Did you care that I usually brought flowers I’d picked up from the manicured lawns nearby the cemetery? Did it matter that in the later years I no longer cried? Did you miss me when I stopped visiting? 

The first leap year I deliberately decided to override this reflex to visit, I felt guilty. I felt like you would visit me in my dreams and curse me out for not being a good friend—I was twenty-five. You’d been dead for twelve years and I’d kept your birth and burial days holy. My parents used to tell me to leave the dead at the cemetery and my younger self always wondered if they would visit if I, their child, were the one in the grave. These thoughts and my own traumas that made that possibility closer than they knew kept me up many nights. A ceaseless battle with depression and a hormonal imbalance ensured that I was constantly tired, but also perpetually unable to sleep at length. I learned to use this gift wisely to work multiple jobs, freelance, maintain high grades after high school and even publish three books. So much has transpired in these sixteen years!

Ok, the biggest news is that I’m a mother of two sons. Mothering them continues to be the reason I’m grateful that my suicide attempts failed. I used to joke that I was such a failure; I even failed at ending all my failures for good. I can laugh now about it, but you know the long list. Somehow, around the age of twenty-six, I finally started to get life right. This coincided with my decision to leave grad school for a year and return to Belize to keep an eye on my ninety-two-year-old grandpa. At first, my parents were concerned (frankly, so was I) that grad school would be another incomplete journey in my life. I loved staying with my grandpa! He was at a stage in his life where he was absolutely blatant about the people and circumstances that he had encountered. I admired him greatly for this. After all the failures, I felt I had no margins of error for detours and mistakes. I was still tentative about whether to move to California after grad school or return to Belize where I’d have to face culture shock in the land that birthed me. From that year with my grandpa I learned that whatever decisions I made I had to do so knowing that in sixty years, they would still have an impact on me and my family as his did for him and us.

“My parents used to tell me to leave the dead at the cemetery and my younger self always wondered if they would visit if I, their child, were the one in the grave. ”

I returned to grad school then moved back to Belize after a total of nineteen years away. Looking back, it’s easy to see that some of my depression came from a type of homesickness that never left. Nowhere in America really felt like home. In New England, I felt the social and ethnic differences within my peer group who tried to pin a Blackness on me that wasn’t my own. On the West Coast, I carried the weight of being disconnected from my culture because of not meeting the unspoken immigrant expectations of my parents while they watched my friends realize theirs. Actually, when I first moved back, Belize didn’t feel like home either. I started my dream job in the city of Belmopan, almost two hours away from Dangriga where I lived with my grandfather. It’s not two hours in traffic between Gardena and San Bernadino, instead it’s two hours on a winding scenic mountainous two-lane highway in an old US school bus that may stall or may be speeding beyond unposted speed limit signs. I knew those buses well. For the four years of high school I’d boarded one each morning for the one and a half hour commute between my pillow and my desk. In them, I’d learned to write and sleep through all conditions. I mostly slept on the bus ride to work unless a cousin sat beside me in which case we would talk about births, surgeries, marriages, family drama, and deaths as the bus dodged potholes and paused to pick up passengers along the highway. I opted to move to Belmopan instead of commute four months after my return when my grandfather died. The sprawling city of Belmopan was and is quite different from the town of Dangriga. Belmopan is inland, Dangriga is seaside; Belmopan is ethnically diverse, Dangriga has mostly Garifuna residents; in Belmopan I had no immediate relatives while in Dangriga I had my grandfather, siblings, and a developing relationship. We eventually got married, but it didn’t work out. What worked was that we maintained a union while living apart and we brought two sons into this world who are fiercely independent, athletic and funny. They keep me young!

I used to wonder whether you would age in the afterlife or remain the same age. At a certain point, I concluded that you would age as usual. In high school you would have looked like your sister but taller, light brown with stylish thick curly black hair that would have people wondering whether you were half-Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban. You were always such a good listener; probably all those Sunday school lessons would have kept you compassionate and fun-loving. By now, I imagine that you’d look a little more like your mother, before your death erased her joy. The only way I remember her now is grief-stricken. You would have likely discovered contact lenses in high school and maybe continued to be a cheerleader or found a team sport. I’m not sure what your hairstyle would be, but I can’t see you keeping it as long as in your youth. I keep mine shaved these days; it takes less time to manage. 

Aside from working, I use my free time to write, bond with my sons, ride my bike and spread the message that life is worth living. Peace, joy, and self-love were on the other side of trauma, loss, failure and uncertainty for me but I had to live to reach here. These days I’ve been concerned with building a school for the arts in Belize and wondering whether to speak up for immigrant children here and in the U.S. My immigrant experience is so much different than theirs but I feel like telling them that all the sacrifices, unspoken expectations and fears will make them strong enough to succeed at almost anything. Would my participation on the advocacy side further divide my focus away from my purpose? Would giving all youth artistic outlets and access to their culture and history not be more beneficial? For now, I’m staying in my lane. Taking action more than talking about it.

Writing and theater saved me. I remember being teased for my accent in those early Los Angeles school days. My fifth grade classmates were mostly Americans with their American concerns. I was missing the scent of fresh fire hearth food, the sound of my chickens and the feel of sand under bare feet while playing marbles in the yard. Through reading, I stepped into new landscapes and soon found that through writing, I, too could create worlds for myself in which I could be invisible yet larger than life. Later, the stage gave me new possibilities, even as just a nameless part of the chorus. Practices and performances with diverse youth from hoods around Los Angeles expanded my awareness and made me realize there were other struggles beside mine. I learned that my peers were also using the stage to transcend their realities or pressures. That transcendence kept us safe, motivated a few to keep a respectable grade point average and led to a salvation that we now reminisce about as adults living full lives mostly off stage. 

I used to deliver a monologue about the impact of your suicide. Whether it saved others from making the same decision you made, I’ll never know. What I do know is that those tears I left on countless stages were libations to the gods and ancestors who would eventually help me release the weight of your loss.

This month marks my thirteenth anniversary as a librarian. I love working in the national library. Working there has helped me fill in the gaps of Belizean history that I didn’t get in American schools or through independent research, pre-repatriation. The world is currently in different states of facing a public health crisis caused by the outbreak of a disease called Coronavirus. Because of the many evolving symptoms that come with the virus and the risk of death for persons with pre-existing health conditions, people are living in a state of fear. The disease is spread through contact with an infected person or on surfaces they have touched. At work, we are doing what we can to shift services to a hybrid model that will minimize face-to-face contact. At home, the boys are meeting with my parents online to complete school work from the books they last used in March since the school year was cut short. In Belize, we’re out of our homes working full time while the schools remain closed, but in Los Angeles, most people are working from home. To get my mind off the pandemic, I’ve been writing, learning, and exercising. Has it worked? Yes! Especially when I’m writing about a completely different time in the past or future so that the climbing number of persons ill or dying affect me less. 

Maybe when I get to Los Angeles, again I’ll visit you with a handful of scented flowers from those manicured hedges nearby, fold my scarf in half and sit on it to read you an excerpt of my first screenplay.

Your friend forever,

Felene

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