You died...

If I close my eyes I can still see your smile. The strangeness of death is that even though I saw you laying in a coffin and I know, in my logical mind, that you are not physically here with us any longer, there is still a part of me that expects to see you one day back home in the Bronx.

It seems impossible that I won't ever see you again, that I will never bump into you at some gathering of old friends.   Who would've thought you'd be the first of us to go?
There's a gap in the circle now, and time is ticking away for the rest of us.

There are too many memories to put together in a time-line. A few people taught me that knowing someone for a long time doesn't really mean you know them. The web of connections we are all a part of is undeniable. How did most of us get so lost? When did we wander away from what our moms dreamed we would be? I know your mother had dreams for you, she died when you were too young and that propelled you down a road I'm not sure you ever came back from. Last I heard, you weren't doing too well.

We all came together for your wake. It was strange to see us all together after so many years apart. People flew, drove for hours, took buses and trains to say their last goodbyes. People said really great things about you. I couldn't walk up too close to the coffin. Seeing you there caused me to feel panic. How could this have happened to you? It made me feel vulnerable like any one of us could be next. I could be next.

It has been well over a year since you died. Every once in a while I remember something you said or did, that big smile you had, and I worry. Which one of us is next? I hope you really are resting in peace. I won't forget.

The "Not Good Enough" Stigma

Do you remember the first time someone made you feel like you weren't "good enough"? Or the first time someone compared you to a sister, brother, cousin or friends son or daughter? I don't really remember the first time it happened but the scars it left are still there to a certain degree.

I grew up in a single parent household, even though my younger sisters father was living with us ( he was like a drunk zombie as far as I can remember) we were pretty much on our own, my mom and her three ducklings. The stigma of this was felt early on as I heard aunts and uncles who gathered at the kitchen table at my grandmothers house talk about my mom and "him". He wasn't my father, and they made sure I knew it, and even though I hated him most of the time, he was the only "father" I knew. He was always very critical of us. He once sat my older sister in our bathtub after she had peed her pants in school, and left her there for hours until my mother came home. He used to tell my mother that if she'd only beat us we would behave. We were not bad kids, and if we did cry it was because of something he had done. He used to tell us that we would never be good enough for anything except to mop and sweep, He would laugh a little after he said that to us. There were many things he did, he was a monster.

If this wasn't enough we were also a bit overweight growing up. My older sister got it the worse because she told on him one time and it shattered our lives in a way I don't want to share. Afterwards she was the focus of our family because she hurt loudly and in color, while I just stayed quiet and ate my food. So we weren't the smartest or the prettiest out of all our cousins. We weren't athletic or outgoing. It seemed we were in black and white while everyone else was colorful. We were the too chubby, too dramatic, too much for too many people, children. Why couldn't we be more like this one? or that one? Or why was our hair nappy and theirs was straight? It would be easier to make your hair straight than to teach you to love yourself and that big hair of yours. They didn't say it out loud, but their adoring eyes that never saw me admired everything in others that I was not.

Teenage years were a bitch let me tell you. Looking back I wish I would've have known that I was pretty. I was! I was sweet and smart. But I was also damaged. I was invisible to most. Not the boys though, boys noticed me, or should I say boys noticed my body. Too many booty comments, too fresh. There was no middle, either I was ugly fat and useless or I was pretty sexy and only good for one thing. I could've used some sort of buffer in between. The potential I had was lost then. If I was to become something great while I was young like that, then all of these people who made it hard to pull myself up made sure that with every criticism, every micro-aggressive statement made, they nailed my soul to the ground, kicking me as they left.

These roots of my experiences are taking so long to uproot. I turned thirty years old and that's when I was really able to give the middle finger to a lot of these feelings and memories. I will continue to hold up that finger until all of these motherf***ing scars are gone.

30s Lens

Every time someone tells me a story about themselves from their teenage years I think of Al Bundy. Remember him from that 90s late-night show, "Love and Marriage"? One of my favorite memories of that show was when he would tell his, what I call, "peak of glory" moment of his life; the time when he made 4 touchdowns in a single game. He tells it with such pride and nostalgia, you can almost feel his disappointment with how his life turned out.

I don't know what it is about now being in my 30s, I have these moments where all I can think about is the past, my "glory days". I would have been more confident, kissed more boys, smiled more.

I can't go back, but I want to give some "color", to my memories and see them now through the
"lens" of an adult mind. I am not totally sure that the memories I have are accurate, there is the possibility of missing pieces or things that never really happened, but I'll try to do them justice.