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

• • •

Breadcrumb #657

DALLAS WHEATLEY

I was raised sharing black raspberries on hot summer days with anybody who wanted them.

I grew up surrounded by animals. My neighbors raised cattle, my family kept cats and dogs, we chased squirrels out of our barn and watched black snakes sun themselves in the road on a hot day. Bears would visit our trees during the dry season. And we all feasted on raspberries.

I miss the simplicity of sitting beneath the shade of a cherry blossom tree, feasting on sun baked black raspberries, and watching the birds find materials for their nests in the hay field next door.

I miss sharing them with my dog, who loved to pluck them from the thorny bush herself. Pruning the shoots away so I could still be outside in bare feet, feeling the grass between my toes. Watching the deer lick dew from the verdant blades in the early morning mist.

We always had too many berries, and though it plagued my parents, I loved being able to share them with the local wildlife. They were ours, not mine.

The bushes became sacred. You left technology aside while attending them. You picked the fruit for yourself. We never once collected them to sell or freeze, because they were best when eaten immediately. What we left, we left for the animals.

I now make smoothies from frozen raspberries grown on a commercial farm based in Maine. They're tart and underripe, nothing like the perfect specimens I was raised on -- berries that would burst in your fingers if you pinched them too tightly, turning your nails purple as a mark of your viciousness. I know better than to share these sour red stones with the world around me. They're just a shadow of the ones I grew up loving, a reminder of a memory long gone.

Giving those berries to the deer or birds outside my apartment would be an insult to not only them, but how I was raised. We deserve to share the fruit we harvest ourselves, the bushes growing in rocky clay soil at the base of an ancient mountain as we greet each other from afar.

I never once called animal control at my old home in Appalachia. Those animals lived there just as I did, and we fed on the same fruits in the same seasons. But years later, when a bat got into my apartment in the middle of a busy town, I felt afraid -- not for me, but for the bat.

Why was such a small thing trapped in my apartment, so far from where it should be living? Was it hurt? Sick? Too young to know any better? Or simply lost? And then I worried for my rabbit -- if the bat is sick, will it make my rabbit sick? How do I get the bat out without catching some illness myself?

The more time I spend away from nature, the more afraid I become of what used to comfort me. I grew up around animals, both wild and domestic, and never once felt fear for my safety. But now, a single tiny bat can send me spiraling. And it haunts me, knowing that I will not outlive my grief of what I have lost.

I was raised sharing black raspberries on hot summer days with anybody who wanted them. But those bushes are now gone -- uprooted by my own parents who considered them a nuisance -- and the animals have hidden themselves away. I am still searching for them as I have searched for myself: quietly sipping at a raspberry smoothie.

• • •

Breadcrumb #651

ALLISON PUNCH

Every writer has the same story they keep telling, on repeat, in different disguises, until they get it out of them. My queerness began as a fiction. 

It was the fall of my senior year of college. That season was one of the best of my life, crisp jean jacket days, an old home in Kerrytown I shared with five women who are still some of my closest friends, with a farmers market down the street and a neighboring home of boys I’ve not kept in touch with, Michigan football, and a slow, earnest coming out process. 

I fell off my bike on the sidewalk off Huron Street, a busy road connecting my parents’ neighborhood to the hospital, campus, and all the way down to the Lurie Terrace retirement home where I waited tables for my first job. I was always running late in college and the day of my creative writing workshop critique, I tried to cut over onto the grass to avoid slow walkers. The sidewalk and grass parted, uneven, my front tire caught on the concrete, and I flew forward. What I remember most about this fall was the way my travel coffee mug and water bottle left my backpack, simultaneously hit the sidewalk, bounced with a loud crack, as the pedestrians I was cutting off rushed to retrieve them, asking if I was okay. 

I scraped my hands and shins; my legs bleeding underneath my tights. I arrived to class five minutes late and sat in the small, U-shaped classroom with wounded hands palms down on my lap. My classmates critiqued my piece as I listened silently to advice, agreeing or justifying my decisions in my head as they spoke. 

In the summer of 2016, I attended a panel in a warm, crowded room at DC’s LGBTQ literary festival where a panelist bemoaned, “we need queer stories told of life after coming out and before death.” The co-panelists nodded, audience members snapped in affirmation, I furiously tweeted the quote – all of us in agreement about the need for diversity of queer lit. There’s more to queer life than coming out, I rage! 

Many queer people will tell you it’s easier to tell those who you don’t know, especially when you’re first coming out. My liberal, college town was also my hometown. I would cautiously create an OkCupid profile, only to delete it once I saw people from high school. 

“Many queer people will tell you it’s easier to tell those who you don’t know, especially when you’re first coming out.”

I have so many memories of loneliness from college. I spent nights under the twinkle lights of my dorm room while my roommates were out with boys, thinking I had high standards or couldn’t find the right guy. I drunkenly kissed boys at parties and remained a virgin. Sophomore year, I developed a crush on a curly haired girl with an eyebrow ring who gave me butterflies. One night, I confessed my crush to my best friend in the gender neutral bathroom down the hall from her dorm room, only to never speak of it for years. 

I can still feel myself holding back from sharing details in my writing. I’ve written and deleted the scene in the dorm bathroom over and over, not sure if its because it doesn’t fit in the essay or if I’m ashamed to share the way I closeted myself. 

Senior year, the loneliness shifted. I couldn’t ignore the small but mighty crushes on long-haired femme girls in my women’s studies classes. I spent evenings quietly reading Jeanette Winterson and wondering if someone would notice. I knew now what I had been avoiding for years: my loneliness was distinctly queer. I didn’t know how to place my queerness within my understanding of myself, or how to move forward. I remained quietly closeted, consumed with the question of why I didn’t know sooner. This question still shows up in every single piece I write. 

My final fall was when I took my first college creative writing class - where I fell back in love with storytelling, and also where I first wrote my queerness for the first time publicly, sharing the pages for the class to read. We went on a field trip to the art museum, and I found myself staring at photographs of rolling sand dunes, unable to write about anything other than women’s bodies. I know now what that experience meant - I was horny. 

I’ve been trying to expel my coming out story since before it began. Queer literature is oversaturated with coming out narratives, yet for so long I sat with my queerness close to my chest, held in silence like accepting a workshop critique. 

And yet. Here I am writing another coming out narrative. Here I am because the story has still not been written out of me. 

I started with the sidewalk, with the way my tire couldn’t quite hit the concrete, the way I flew off my bike, scraped my hands, sent my coffee mug flying. I can’t get the image of that sidewalk out of my head and want desperately to write some metaphor about falling from the bike and fall the season. The way I wrote my story quietly in a class full of strangers before I shared it with those closest to me. But instead, just like that fall day, I get up and carry on, hands open this time.

• • •

Breadcrumb #649

KATELAN FOISY

All the days, they faded away.  They faded the way a sunset fades, first vibrant, streaking the sky then slowly becoming muted as the night creeps in. The smell of dead roses permeates the room. I haven’t washed out the vase, only sat it in front of a painting applying layers. I think of you as I laminate these layers. You're layered in a way I dream about often. The seasons are changing, Autumn leaves are falling to the ground waiting for the bones of winter. Hay tantas capas en el invierno.

Winter days pass too fast. I feel them slip by as I dip brushes into paint. It all feels like a jumbled motion to move ahead. I want to be in Mexico. We're in the 'tween weather now; snow and rain, the space that falls between seasons. I'm in the space betwixt two lives and cities. I miss the days I would spend all night reading, listening to the droplets and anointing myself with oils. Those were the evenings when the moths came. Small moths entered first. They kissed the doorways and camouflaged with curtains. Then they became bigger. The large wings flapped against flickering bulbs. They always carried messages. Rikker dovo adrée tute’s see — keep that a secret.

“I miss the days I would spend all night reading, listening to the droplets and anointing myself with oils.”

Moths, moths, moths.

When I was a child I dreamed I’d live in Paris, speak French, and dress in all white, smoking slim cigarettes from my moth colored chaise lounge. Sometimes I'd dream of being a starlet in Mexico and Italy. My house would be filled with rich fabrics and hand painted partitions. I never wanted anything new, I always wanted imprinted memories. This itself imprinted the path to cameras and film.

I love the flicker of Super 8 film, the way it flips and sputters adding layers of time to moments captured. I love knowing those moments will never happen quite the same ever again, even if reenacted, or part of a routine. I like knowing in a moment’s time that you can capture past present and future all at once. I like to think of memory as the flickering of film or the flapping of a moth’s wings against night air. My memories are in soft focus. Your face blending into the backgrounds like pastels. I no longer remember the crisp details of time or the seasons as they change. You've become like a ghost to me: unseen but heard, making me soft and surreal. We’re invisible creatures only known by melody, words, and images. Always the same faces, always the same shapes morphing continuously. Memory has a distinct taste. It's kind of like red but softer. You make me a romantic.

• • •

Breadcrumb #643

HILARY GILFORD

Two women separated in years by the span of a generation work among the raised beds in the small but flourishing garden. Unstaked tomato plants tower and sprawl, while eggplants and banana peppers struggle to grow, fighting for a bit of space and some sun. 

The older woman, the girl’s step-mother-in-law, crouches among the eggplants pretending to look for weeds while her companion chatters casually, hose in hand, moving from one plant to the next, eyes lowered with intention as she waters at the roots as she’s been shown to do.

The hurt feelings from the past have been shelved and the woman reflects, with some humor, the time the young unmarried couple was expected to dinner—the time she baked bread and prepared gluten-free macaroni and cheese with the young woman’s sensitivity in mind. As the hostess, she had refused to reveal the menu ahead of time but knew that her withholding was in protest of the girl’s bad manners for asking. A battle for control. The young woman’s response—a text right before dinner announcing her plans to eat at her friend’s house instead of with them—was galling. And so, the woman was grateful when the boy still came to break bread. The abandoned relish with which he devoured the food she put in front of him flushed her with warm purpose and soothed her pride. 

“The young woman’s response—a text right before dinner announcing her plans to eat at her friend’s house instead of with them—was galling.”

The woman thought about the two decades she’d been in the boy’s life. She had never claimed herself as his mother and she imagined the thin veneer of her position diminished her, even in her own home. There was the dinner when the girl brought her own food and the woman felt goaded into a confrontation that she swallowed. She knew forcing a choice would threaten the hard won place she had in the boy’s life. She knew that if this were a competition, it was one she had already lost. 

There can be winners but only if there is no loser, she told herself when the couple got engaged. The girl is young and you are the grown-up. You do not know her story. If you are fortunate, she will share it with you. She will share it when she feels safe with you. You can afford to be generous. 

Backed into a tender tangle of vines and fruit, the woman finds a genuine weed. She plucks its scrawny roots from the soil appreciating today. 

Once the couple married, she had to remember not to let old judgements—and her fear of abandonment—shut them out. She invited them to spend weekends at the house. Their status as a unit had anchored them and they surprised her with courteous, mature guest behavior. She did not remind them of the time they drank all her beer and excluded her from their late night movie watching. 

When the young bride expressed interest in the garden—saying that she’d never grown anything before—the woman pushed her skepticism aside, welcoming the company. She remembered to be curious without judgement and asked what the girl would like to grow, pick and eat. She would not make a joke about the girl’s eating habits. 

The woman bought the plants that would be placed into the ground and she waited with anticipation of the next visit. She added fresh compost to last year’s soil in the raised bed she designated for the girl. She marveled at the crushed eggshell that remained from last year while everything else had become a dark richness offering possibility. A thought occurs and she adds a trellis. The tendrils of the fledgling plants will seek its support and climb their way to the sky, lugging the weight of leaves and burgeoning fruit.

The weekend visits relax something tightly held in the woman’s heart and because hope is blooming within her, she buys gardening gloves for the girl, choosing pretty ones she would like but would never buy for herself. When the girl does not wear them, the woman doesn’t take offense. She understands; the girl does not need her to buy her things. 

She restrains herself from pulling the weeds in the designated bed and she does not harvest the kirbys even though she is bothered by waiting one more day until the girl arrives—it will be one day too many for the perfect cucumber. She reminds herself, the girl doesn’t eat these vegetables but they are hers to harvest. Her little (or maybe big) victories. 

When the girl shares her story, the woman does not interrupt with stories from her own life. She pretends to pull weeds from around the eggplants as the girl continues to talk, continues to share the troubling details of her life as if she were recounting a grocery list. 

Time stops and the woman knows, this moment is her yield.