LAGRIMITAS

Was there any day when I was not to supposed to be on guard, waiting for the next catastrophe: suicidal intentions, alcoholic parents fighting each other, beatings for no explainable causes, some relative with a nervous breakdown, the brother in law in jail, the sister of the neighbor who was killed by the stepfather when she rejected his sexual advances? Was I to be blamed for not having been at home, when so many of those events took place? Was there going to be any night, when there was going to be peace, rest and be able to go school the next day, ready to learn? The town was small and my sister and brother’s teachers were years later to become my own, and knew the history of the family and made room for my continuous, unexpected crying outbursts that lasted until high school. Some of my peers, the bullies, called me “lagrimitas”. I stayed away from them, a difficult task in a small town. After repressing those experiences for so many years, many decades later, they seem to be affecting me again, finding it very difficult to leave my house, waiting for the emotional explosions to come back, to cry without apparent reason.