murmuros del alma en un suspiro
alex vidal pérez
El Despertar del Sueño Americano
I stepped outside of the airport, and I already felt at home. The hot and humid climate from the Dominican Republic was as exasperating as I remembered it, so much so that it forced me to take off my once cozy, worn-down black hoodie to stand the heat of the day. The people around me walked hurriedly, either looking for their ride out of that place or escaping the scorching weather. In front of me were cars of all colors and models, motorists and police having senseless arguments, and small food stores for hungry travelers. Some of them sold ice cream, local snacks, and alcoholic drinks like there was no tomorrow. The scene was reminiscent of an old Western movie, with the local vendors and agitation in the air as palpable as ever. I already know how the scene goes; it’s funny how some things never change.
My parents rented a car from a local company, which in theory was cheaper than the ones online advertised to tourists. My father drove through the busy highway with “Periódico de Ayer” playing like a serenade for our very ears. Héctor Lavoe’s powerful rhythm accompanied us through the rest of the way, and his voice mixed in with a symphony of the trumpets and bongos. My eyes focused on the world outside of my small bubble of joy. Tall and imposing palm trees lined up across the highway, some with olive green and tartar brown coconuts, and others with their widespread leaves swaying from the salty breeze.
Beyond them lay the Caribbean Sea; its waves with blue and white hues crashed against the sharp rocks with power almost with a sense of self-righteousness. Sea waves choose their own path regardless of what us humans would like them to do. They are free-spirited, a kindred force in all its splendor that we should not dare to reckon with. A couple of fishermen could be seen on top of the rocks, boasting only long rolls of transparent nylon thread and a sharp silver hook. They did this for a living; catching fish, selling them, bringing food to the table, and living day by day. I wondered what it was like to stand by the sea and contemplate a life beyond that island, where fishermen fished out of want and not out of need. A life where fishing was more of a hobby and less of a matter of whether a family eats that day or not. I could imagine, if only for a moment, what that would mean for those who never had a choice in the matter.
This reminded me of when I was younger, and I used to dream of living in the U.S. When I watched shows on TV such as Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, I thought of a reality where I could be just like them. I could live in a big suburban house, go to pool parties, and not have to worry about getting my phone stolen right outside of school. I wanted to have a life where there were extracurricular activities at school, and I could stay late and have fun with my friends. Growing up, I did not have such a life. I could only glance from afar, like a member of a nonexistent audience, at what could’ve been mine, if only I wished hard enough.
At that moment, I forgot about the life I had created in the U.S. It made me wonder if the only life I’ve ever had was the one I left in my homeland at the ripe age of 12; if the one I created is a bad dream I would wake up from at any moment. Any moment now.
The year is 2015. Kim, my best friend at the time, and I sat in an empty classroom during recess. We were between the ages of eleven and twelve— the prime age where you are aware of the things that could hurt you, but not quite old enough to do anything about them. We started to do this thing where we would stay inside our relatively small classroom and just talk, play made up games, and simply exist peacefully while we ate our lunch.
“¿Cuando dijiste que te ibas?” She asked.
“No se. Mis padres dijeron que tal vez este año o el otro.” I answered and shrugged my shoulders with doubt.
Kim and I used to be close. We told each other everything, and that included telling her about my possible one-way trip to American soil. At this point I still believed in the façade of the American dream, one that I hadn’t yet woken up from.
“Te voy a extrañar mucho cuando te vayas,” she gave me a sad smile, and I returned one back. Children do not shame their emotions like adults do, they just feel, and they let those feelings be known. They let them be found.
“Y yo a ti.”
After that conversation we continued to eat and joke around as usual, not knowing that a year later, I was leaving for good.
My family and I finally arrived at our Airbnb an hour later and unpacked everything from the car. It felt weird the first few times I had to do that. It started when I was 15, three years after leaving my homeland without knowing when I would be coming back. I was able to return after a long wait, though it was never the same afterwards. I had to go back to the land that raised me and stay in temporary places, with temporary baggage, and meet temporary people, then leave and come back to the same life I found myself escaping from. It felt like crawling through Coraline’s tunnel and getting to a different place that looks almost the same as the first one, but something is distinct. Uncanny.
“Do you like it? It looks like the apartment we had when we used to live here, don’t you think?” My mother, bless her soul, didn’t know my heart was mourning.
“Yeah, it does.” Sometimes I even dream about living back there, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue. We never had those kinds of conversations, they never led anywhere.
The year is 2013, and my family and I had recently moved to a nice apartment in a residential neighborhood called, “El Dorado.” It was the first time we ever lived in that kind of area, one that felt safer and more isolated from the outside world. I was not thrilled about leaving my last home and my friends behind, but I was just a 9-year-old. There was nothing I could’ve done.
“Dime, ¿Te gusta el apartamento?” My mother asked as we started to settle in.
“No. Está lejos de mis amigos y de todo.” I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling upset. “Aquí no tengo con quien jugar.”
My mother gave me a solemn look at my response.
“Ya verás como harás nuevos amigos.” She smiled at me, maybe in hopes of alleviating some of my discomfort.
“Sí, ajá.”
The next day we visited my dad’s family. We shared anecdotes, caught up on our lives, and had a few laughs here and there. It was an ambience I wasn’t that familiar with, though I’m usually not as familiar with them to begin with. They tended to be hot-headed, stress-inducing people. The kind that will make you curse at the sky and hope for lightning to strike you down. Not all of them caused us such distress, but enough to make us shorten our visit time. Two of my youngest cousins and I were on the balcony of what used to be my grandma’s house, before her illness took her away. The paint was ragged and scribbled all over, the floors that carried martyrs were now broken and lacked structure, making them look raw and disheveled. The pillars that held the house together looked as if concrete-eating termites mauled them, and the vanishing paint looked strangely discolored. It’s funny how some things never change.
In one of our conversations my youngest cousin, Yamileth, said, “You don’t look Dominican.” The conversation stopped abruptly. My other cousin, Dia, turned to her and exclaimed that her statement was foolish.
“How could they not be Dominican?” She inquired, “They were born here, lived here, and speak the language.”
She’s right, I thought. How could I not be Dominican, if that is all I’ve ever been? I didn’t have any need to defend my identity; my cousin’s words made enough sense to end the statement there. Except little kids have no filter and their need to point things out is a necessity at best.
“She doesn’t dress like us, speak like us, or behave like us,” Yamileth’s words were concise, and her voice was fervent with what she considered to be the ultimate truth.
“She’s a gringa now; she acts like them.”
It was then when things started to make sense to me. The reason why people stared at me while walking down to the corner store with my cousin, why a man randomly asked my cousin “Is she American?” as we passed by. I didn’t know what to say back then, so I nervously laughed and shrugged it off as if his words were just specs of nothingness lost in the wind. I knew better than to entertain strange men on the street, especially if they saw me as the wrong thing. I felt like I was seen as a walking green card, a flight ticket to the promised land. In their eyes, I was an opportunity to get out: no longer Dominican but rather someone, or something different. Something that doesn’t belong.
Earlier that year I was sitting in history class with a couple of friends. The environment was as rowdy as a high school classroom can get; WWI posters were spread across the wall along with other posters that discussed cultural identities. The overhead lights were too bright for a room already painted bone white, which made the brightness too jarring. People were divided into tiny groups in seats that were scattered around the classroom and the teacher, Mr. T, sat behind his desk just like every other day. There were five people of color in a class of twenty; my friends and I made up three of those. Keep that in mind.
As per usual, my friends and I were speaking in Spanish, our mother tongue. We felt more comfortable that way, freer to express ourselves without the judgment that came after a mispronunciation. We didn’t have to think twice about the conjugation of verbs, or the order of words. We connected through the language that taught us our ABCs like it was second nature and never questioned our ability to formulate adequate sentences. This often makes me think of that one phrase from “Modern Family” that the character Gloria said in a moment of frustration: “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”
In the middle of the class period a guy named Jared asked us, “Were you guys born speaking Spanish?” It was a silly question. So silly in fact, that we didn’t even know how to answer it correctly. We collectively let out an, “Uh… no,” and continued with what we were doing. Another guy, named Owen answered, “How could they be born speaking Spanish, idiot. Were you born speaking English?” People laughed at his response, and that ended there, or at least it should’ve. One thing I had to learn the hard way is that smaller issues tend to get substituted by bigger ones when left unattended.
After that day, the class began to feel heavier. What started with silly questions became: “Are you talking about us in Spanish? You’re in America, speak English” followed by the casual n-word dropped in regular conversations. History class was becoming the ugly parts of the history we were learning about, yet not everyone was experiencing them. Not everyone had to sit there and endure the side comments, the snarky remarks, and the feelings of inadequacy.
The following day, Jared started wearing what later on became his favorite hoodie. It read: “This is America. We own guns, we speak English, we love freedom. If you don’t like it, leave. I’ll help you pack.” My friends and I were in utter shock and indignation. No one else seemed to realize how messed up that was, only us. It was hard enough going to a Predominantly White Institution where students felt comfortable being so openly bigoted while the faculty stood there and did nothing. It made us feel powerless. It made me feel like being who I was wasn’t right. It even caused me to feel embarrassed of speaking Spanish in public for years after the incident, because I was too afraid of making room for a voice like mine in places where people like me get chewed up and spat out by the next bell ring.
I grew resentful of my accent, of my Spanish, and of the guilt I felt for even feeling this way. My feelings of inadequacy when visiting my homeland and being seen as a tourist in my own country only grew as the years went by. I was looking for anyone to blame so I could give my rage a place to mourn, a place for it to grieve in peace. Soon enough, that rage turned into unmeasured sadness— the kind of sadness that invades one’s spirit when thinking about a million questions with no answers. The kind of sadness that grows from realizing that the world as you knew it was but only a spec of its true reality. I carried that resentment within me for years after these incidents, and when I finally let go of the string that tied us together, I could still see hints of it in the cracks of my syllables. Some things do change after all, even if only for a little while.
Al Escribir, Vivo
My fingers coil with ink pens and lead pencils. The pages in which I bleed have started to grow gloomy and rainy, like water fountains in the land of Quisqueya; worn down fountains that run with old water and are covered in green algae, yet the water is clear enough to see my reflection in them. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to clean that fountain, to brush out the algae with diligence, decorate it with soft words and written prose, and love it with a heart so fierce it makes the entirety of Quisqueya catch on fire. Instead, I treat the fountain as my personal wishing well and flip a bronze coin. I watch as it falls in with a ploop sound, while my eyes close and my lips start to murmur hints of an undying wish.
Tener por siempre un alma joven que escriba hasta conocer el descanso eterno.
People think the fountain of youth is a myth, while others claim that it’s real—but it has yet to be found. I wanna stay young forever and never be met with the discrepancy of worms knowing my insides the way only I know them. Mushy, brown, nutritious, dirty soil engulfs my lifeless body once the ink pen drops from my fingers. I die as do these pages the moment I stop writing, and the lead pencil is long forgotten somewhere on the floor along with failed attempts of tragic stories within ball-crumbled papers. We use things, then we discard them just as easily. The moon goes back to being a rock in space when I’m done confessing my laments, and I go back to carrying my feelings within this humanly designed vessel until the sun hides once again. We use, reuse, then throw away. That’s the cycle of life, the cycle of a writer that has met their end with crystal eyes and ears on fire.
The death of a writer begins when they stop writing. To delve into the obnoxious art of forgetting, of laziness, of procrastination— that kills a writer. It consumes so much of their creative spirit that in the end there is nothing left to grieve but wasted potential. Every other day, a part of me dies when I don’t write what’s on my mind, when I don’t let my mind wander free within pages of soul-pouring certitude before it is killed once again. I strive to compel this sentiment much longer; past the me that knows the now, and the me that knew the yesterday. To welcome sentiments that are often misguided into feelings of wrongness and allow them to exist within blurbs of ink.
I want to be young forever, to write forever, and experience forever. To exist in every life that could exist, to consume living air, and become one with the moon. I want to inspire, to aspire, to transpire. To be so infinite that no star in the universe doubts my very existence. To touch the tip of the universe and tilt it sideways, it’s Saturn.
I am alive when my mind is set ablaze— a las brasas. Este calor en mi sistema, esta hambre de crear y resplandecer me nace de lo más profundo de mi ser. Llego hasta ti en la forma de un escritor abatido por las ocurrencias de la vida, y escribo hacia el universo desde el fondo de mi alma. Voy más allá de lo vivido, de lo creído y de lo hablado. Yo soy aquello que no puedes tentar, aunque pienses en mil maneras para acabar con mi ser de forma redundante. No podré ser destruido, porque la materia solo cambia. I am not the enemy you’d like me to be, I am just a writer. I am a writer that cannot be killed—beyond my words I am a wanderer of this deserted life. A searcher for truth, for love, for things that go beyond you and I. A writer cannot be killed until they decide it is time to do so. Icarus wished to see the sun from up close and I wish to be young forever. Both of our wishes are impossible in the minds of those who never transcended the normal—impossible to those who cannot grasp reality by its fingers and tug. Hard.
Tucked in pen, lead pencil on my side, you will never witness my death—the death of a writer. For I am as infinite as the stars and as overwhelming as stardust. We are all made up of stardust. So, I’ll be floating here and there; I’ll be around after all of this is over and there is nothing else for humanity to fall upon. I’ll welcome Icarus to my home and we’ll drink ginger tea with lemon spurts on nicely crafted china. We’ll laugh around light poles and make rocks dance over water lakes until our laughter is louder than our doubts. A farewell to my beloved Quisqueya, to burning suns, to countless scribbled pages, and an ode to that which cannot be killed.
You will never witness my death— the death of a writer.
alex vidal pérez
Alex Vidal Pérez is a senior Creative Writing major with minors in Publishing & Editing and Spanish Studies. On campus, he serves as the Social Media chair for SU Slam Poetry Club, and the Treasurer for ALAS, among other things. They enjoy magical realism and anything by Gabriel García Márquez.