12:30 AM
There’s something about the beginning that’s the trouble because once you start, you may never stop. At least that’s the problem with vinegar chips and orgasms. Why stop when there’s something still to be had? And then there are the other cases: why stop when there’s something good to be had? The more mysterious the good, the better!
And that’s the lesson I’ve really learned, or not: the morality of living. No matter your upbringing, you cannot escape the spiritual matrix in which you find yourself. It’s permeating, gaudy in its undeniability. Who am I, who are we, really?
Writing is the real challenge: you cannot address a pain until you investigate its depth. You cannot put together a puzzle without feeling its pieces. And writing is an escapade into knowing. How can a better morality exist without exploring the edges of this one?
And then there’s the “for whom” and “for what”—the questions that every human motivation boils down to. Most people make it easy: children. Sacrifice everything in the name of your children—it’s the obvious choice when you aren’t offered other choices. What becomes more moral than children? We label it selfishness.
For me, my moral focus became justice. The least obvious to me and the most painful. In the tangle of intersectional justice, I managed to waltz around my brown-woman-ness until it filled the room; it’s as if all my queerness primed me for the discomfort of disruption on a grand scale that I never wanted to imagine. It is so bleak, exhausting, futile, and simply dangerous that reproductive justice, other justices fall away. Environmental justice, the pinnacle of justices, would need to be tabled.
Airing dirty laundry is a betrayal to not just your family, but to the ancestors who sacrificed to bring you the privilege that affords you the luxury of introspection, the fruits of an education.
It is because of my Latinidad that I find myself here, reporting my small history of colonization from the bleeding edge of present. The big picture got way too big; this may be my destiny or tragic flaw, or both. That’s what I feel: vocational (and thankfully, not without allies).
Who knew?
The topic of Catholicism came up at a dinner party my parents threw this past holiday season. One practicing Catholic left the room. Almost 50% had been raised Catholic, but only three remained practicing. It was said (by me?): “You can leave the Church, but it will never leave you.”
My dad hummed a hymnal at the dinner table. “Do you know that one?” “Of course,” I said. “I can still remember the lyrics.” “No way,” he said. I recited them.
Abuela left communist Cuba to provide a good life for her daughter in capitalist America, where people can vote and access quality education and build wealth—the American Dream. This is why I do not identify as a socialist.
Socialists are one human rights violation away from being communists.
