Some days are uneventful (Commentary)

Some days are just blah, blah, blah... This is one of them. I must finish a paper for school, plus I have to study for a test. It's not so much that the day is uneventful, maybe the problem is that the events which have filled the day are not meaningful to make it an 'eventful' day. Then, I ask myself: from where am I going to get the will to do this, to study for these tests and write a 12 page paper? Where can I find motivation? In days like this, one can't help but to look at old pictures. Pictures of places that one has been to and happy in. Places in which one felt free, happy, relaxed and faraway from here. Places in which one did as one pleased and the words 'have to' or 'must do' were of no importance. In days like this one, one can't help but wish one were somewhere else, living some other day. Then, again, one wakes up and realizes one only has the here and nowhere else.

An Unamed Poem

(Based on the true story of my uncle, whose father was a Cuban political prisoner, came to Miami and recently, passed away)

We meet out of season, out of time.
You couldn’t wait for me, or
I didn’t make it on time.
For those 20 years in prison,
I evoked you each day.
Did nothing but to tell,
about your ideals and dreams,
while you lacked up in a cell,
wrote and remembered me.
I grew up visiting you on Sundays.
I grew up without a dad.
Once released, I lost you again.
And this time was to the exile.
I grew up some more.
I became a father,
but remained your son.
And before I could see you,
before your time and mine,
you had to leave me again.
I didn’t have my chance,
to make it up to you,
to see you one last time.

I scream.
I grieve.
I hurt.
I can’t explain why I cry.
One,
Two,
Three,
Four days pass by
and I get it.
I might finally understand.
What hurts me the most is the unspoken.
What pains me is the unlived.

On the bus (a poem)

I see you missing the bus
while I’m waiting inside it,
eager to feel you by my side,
smell the sea of your skin
and smile with your smile.

I liked you.
I answered your “do you want to be my girlfriend question?”
And you missed the truth under my lying answer.

What follows?
An unbearable absence of laughter.
An emptiness during the bus ride.
Then, the sea slips through the window,
and I feel you beside me.

An Idea of Love

If I must give you an idea of love, I have no other place to look for it but within my life. Today is Monday. Going through the day was like riding a roller coaster. It was full of ups and downs, illusions and disillusions, just like life. After that, I still believe in my aptitude for spotting love within this bad day of mine. Right now, night has fallen. I’ve lit three candles and placed them on top of the desk in which I write from. The candlelight create dancing shadows on the walls and keyboard. The air conditioning is not buzzing, ‘cause my mother is sleeping without snoring. So, there’s no noise, just pure, deep, utter silence. I believe I can spot love at this dark hour. The inspiration must hit me any time now. Ideas are not tangible like buckets of water; therefore, to find an idea of love I must look inside my heart, eliminating all the abstractions and going for an specific which can be easily felt. So I sit and think of an idea of love.
I am wishing very intently to do something. I wish for it so hard that I feel I am being punched in my chest. While I think of an idea of love, I am wishing I could place my head in my grandmother’s lap. I wish her fingers could stroke my long, brown hair very gently. Those fingers of hers with short nails would then play with my wild curls and pick out the lighter streaks of hair, burned by the sun. It’s been thirteen years, since the last time I saw my grandmother. Yet, I get a warm feeling all over me every time we meet in this manner. It feels as if a wave of sun was bathing my insides and my chest could open and give birth to a rose. It sounds crazy. It almost seems like a surrealistic painting. This is love to me. It is an overflowing feeling that brings me not joy, nor grief. It calms me down. The mere thought of her is so powerful that it leaves no room for regrets, tears or sadness. She is not here anymore, but my love doesn’t leave room for tears. There's only space for this feeling and that’s what I consider love.
I have wished many times for many things that would bring her closer to me. I have wished to hear advice, to be with her for one more day, among other wishes. But tonight, I just wish we could sit in complete silence, in a silence as the deep as the one in my room right now, while I put my head in her lap and close my eyes. I get a feeling of well being and bliss. I feel the relief of my total bareness, because I am not wearing self-preservations veils. This has to be love, because I can just feel her and I do not need to touch her, or put my head in her lap. This energy must be love.
Yesterday would have been my grandmother’s birthday. My mother puts white and pink roses in a vase. We always dedicate flowers to her on her birthday. I have no idea where that tradition comes from. Maybe it’s Afro-Cuban; maybe it's my mother's. But I look at them now and I think of love. I hear the word love and I associate it with my grandmother. And then it occurs to me, I always remember grandma on nights like this one, maybe because the sky looks the way my soul feels, dark. Maybe because on nights like this even if the sky is light my soul feels dark.
My grandmother’s love seems then to come to me and save me from sadness. Her presence comes to me at unexpected times. I even have come to think she is under my skin, already a part of me, and her energy is all around me, in and outside. I can just be quiet and talk to her, or write her letters, or stand by her grave telling her about the family, school, boyfriend love and all kinds of things, but I can’t forget I haven’t put my head on my grandma’s lap in thirteen years and I’ve needed that plenty times.
Then, I guess that when you love someone you find a way of loving him or her and nothing can get in your way, not even death. This is my way of loving her after death. 'Cause I realized that love doesn’t go away. You cannot choose when to start loving someone and when to stop. I can't help but to love her every single day, every single night.

The Break-Up (A story)

“Coward!” I screamed mentally and for a second, considered letting him get away with it. Yet, the brain works in marvelous ways. I remembered instead the Dr. Seuss’ book, Oh, the places you will go, in which the main character arrives at the gates of a town and doesn’t know if he should make a right, or a left, turn around and leave, or dare to go in. I felt like Dr. Seuss’ character. I felt the same way. I felt horrible and in pain.
“Richard, wait. You are not going to talk to me?” I finally grabbed the courage to say and he turned around fast like a bullet.
“You want to know what really happened? I just realized you had more to lose than me. So why even try to make something work, if you think it’ll fail,” he answered.
“That’s what I told you from the beginning! But you kept on insisting,” I snapped.
“I know. This whole thing is my fault. I should have given up long time ago,” Richard said in a whisper and played music with his fingers. Now he can’t stop, but keeps on going:
“We are too different, way too different. I don’t see how we can be compatible. Plus, your mother gets in the way and I don’t want to be the one who separates you two.”
I couldn’t believe he was saying that, “I’ve brought you a letter” I felt childish as soon as the words slipped out of my mouth. Was I not listening to what he just said?
“Give it to me,” he demanded.
“It’ll serve no purpose, now,” I looked up.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” He looked down and I found time to say:
“Don’t be. Stop being sorry and blaming yourself for making me fall in love with you. I don’t even know why I like you. There are many, many things I don’t like about you. But I guess I fell in love with you. I’ll recover. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” I thought to myself that if I was not even crying I must had said at least half the truth.
“Remember this, you are not only too good for me. You are too good for anybody,” He said and smiled. That was a tender, almost a loving smile.
“How old are you, now? You are 20, right? Maybe five years from now, we can make it work but now I know we can’t. I’m already graduating; you just started university and like I said, I don’t want to be the one who separates you from your mother. ”
My hands felt cold, so I placed them around my body. Tons of things crowded my head. That is a phenomenon the female brain can do and men don’t consider when they throw material at it for the hypothermus to absorb and process. At that inappropriate moment, ‘cause that’s how life is and what we do, I thought of Paola and Malena, the only two girlfriends Richard told me he considered girlfriends, and how he broke up with them because they were more in love with him than he was with them. At least, that’s what he said. I remembered how he always made love sound like a weakness that no one should allowed her or himself to be dragged into. I remembered a day, in which unlike today, he seemed willing to love and be loved. Then, he had confessed that his father left his mother before he learned to call him papá. His mother had been forced to support his older brother from her first marriage and him. She had cleaned houses and asked the welfare for help, when they moved to the States but they had barely gotten by. I remembered snaps of information and pieces of conversations that don’t seem to match whatsoever.
“People speak of poverty in other countries and omit poverty here, in the U.S., poverty in the Roman empire of our days,” he had said that day.
But now he stood in front of me, a 6’2 man poorer in spirit than he had been while growing up. I had to stop thinking and do something, because he stood right there, in front of me. He was handsome. Even when I was mad at him, I had to admit it. He was the handsomest man I had ever met. “Wow,” I said to myself, “he knows he can’t never love me. He probably never wanted to in the first place. He’s so wrong to think he’s the winner for not taking that risk.” I felt heartbroken. He hugged. We kissed. My body felt dumb, until he patronized me for one last time: “Don’t be sad. And whatever you do remember what I’ve told you: Don’t stay with the safe guy.” We both got in our cars and drove away. I saw him lighting up a cigarette and I turned on the radio. The radio was playing the Sheryl Crowe’s song, The first cut is the deepest, and I changed the station. I couldn’t cry that night, which surprised me.
After this encounter, I didn’t see him in four months. Then, the years passed. He graduated and we didn’t see each other again. Sometimes, inevitably, I remember him. The memory is tender, despite everything else. I do my best to forget the break-up.

A journalist is someone who loves life...

During the little time that I've been practicing my career, my love at first sight and eventual passion, Journalism, I've learned that: a journalist is someone who loves life. By life I mean new people, cultures, different sensations, novel stories, places, all kinds of things. Today I did a story on Daniel Edwards, the artist who made the polemic sculpture of Castro. Today's work made me come to several conclusions. For instance, in my humble opinion as an art critic, I think Daniel Edwards' works are mediocre. He has made a controversial sculpture of Hillary Clinton, in which he shows her breasts, but that's all he does with his art: controversy. I seriously doubt the originality and talent one might find in his works. The Castro sculpture made him national news material. Lucky Daniel, he got the public attention he'd never gotten before. Analyzing him from a distance, I think he used the Cuban exiles' hatred towards Castro to gain fame and money. Now he created Spears giving birth in an unthinkable position, another way of his of striking the viewers with a controversy.
Yet, being a journalist is about loving life and seeing both sides of the stories and meeting the main characters of the stories in person, while everybody else is seeing them through a TV screen. And you have to love the people with their vanity and horrors; otherwise, you'll stop loving the career. Most of the time journalists cannot tell the viewers bluntly and straight to their faces the reality of what's being said. They must be objective.
We, journalists, must speak properly. But even when we can't or don't, we know truths, or parts of it that nobody else knows. We are different species. We are a different breed. I drive around overtown, on my way to the gallery with the camera man, and I'm not thinking that it's a bad neighborhood and I'm in danger, like my mother would think. I think instead of the people and their stories. I look closely at the American looking, blonde girl who holds hands with a skinny, white boy, while a black guy talks to them. I wonder if they're there to buy drugs. I wonder what all the people on the streets are planning and dreaming of. I question how has society and its systems fail them, when I see a group of strong, black boys riding bicycles, hanging around, talking, walking. All this at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday. Shouldn't they be working? I know I'm here. I know I'm going to shoot a story. I'm working. But what are they doing? Why aren't they doing something, going somewhere?
That's a little of how it is and feels to be a journalist. You question yourself, then you question others, sometimes you have the courage to ask, but all the time you wish to know.