Category: Reflections

Reflections from the still places of life, where recovery and resilience meet the quiet astonishment of being here at all.

Reflections

The Return

MyFathersMirror

During one of Julia’s visits to her eldest in Baltimore, we got an eviction notice. Father thought it best to leave discreetly in the middle of the night.

From the marble phone stand to the broken chair to wool blankets used as luggage, things got progressively worse.

We moved into a smaller but modern house in an upscale neighborhood near the beach. Without a penny to our name. 

Then a cheap two-bedroom in a “commercial” area. It was in that building that Mila came home from school to find everything out in the hallway, the refrigerator, the only table, all of it on display for strangers to gawk at.

Julia returned, business as usual. 

Not long after that, they moved into a large condominium in an elegant building: two units to a floor, servant’s entrance and exit, window walls.

“Just say we’re very selective about window treatments. It takes time when they’re coming from Europe…”

A glass house. You adapt.

One bright afternoon, Julia asked Mila, dryly: “And you, do you want to go to the United States?” 

Dad, sitting nearby, said nothing. 

“Yes, it’d be fine…” Mila answered nonchalantly, hiding her shock

It was, of course, her father who got the airplane tickets. Mila stayed with the older sister in Baltimore for just under two years. Julia visited at least once. On his dime. 

Some documentation error, presumably, was the reason the girl was put on the next flight back south. 

When Mila landed, no one was there waiting for her. She found a bus to a relative’s house, and from there called an aunt, who drove her to the street where she’d been told her parents and brothers lived.

“Look, my dear, I’d have to make too many turns to get to the house, you can just walk a straight line from here,” she said, pointing to a narrow, residential street. 

“They live at the end of it, on this side.”

And off the girl went, in the new orange turtleneck she’d managed to buy with babysitting money, not expecting a thing. Soon she spotted two vaguely familiar figures walking toward her along the same side of the street.

“Mila? Oh wow, it is you!” Julia offered a shallow hug, as usual, then mumbled something about a miscommunication over the flight delay.

“You’ve turned into a young woman,” said Apophis, leering at the girl’s emerging breasts. He had not changed. Julia said nothing. 

The orange mock turtleneck lingers somewhere in her mind to this day. 

There was no one to tell her the sweater had nothing to do with it. 

In the short time Mila had been away, they’d gone from the posh glass house into a series of progressively worse rented rooms. Mila found them in a corner house that had seen far better days.

It was a far cry from the days of drawn curtains.

Reflections

Dressed as Glamour

MyFathersMirror

The clacking sound of high heels striking the floor still stirs something tangled in me, even if only for a second or two. I feared her. Still, I remember feeling a small, shameful pride when she dressed up, hair set just so, red lipstick, all of it in place.

She had the kind of arrogance a child could mistake for glamour.
And there was something almost amusing about it.

Clickety-clack clack…

On a good day, it preceded ice-cold silent stares.

Julia was one of Rosa’s first four children. Rosa, a young mestiza woman with little to her name, still managed to provide a home. Two more children came after that, and Julia, already ashamed of who and where she came from, hurried toward work and toward men she thought might offer a way up.

Two men seemed to offer escape. One belonged to a wealthy family. The other, Fernando, was a handsome thirty-year-old from a family whose money had faded, though its name still carried itself like royalty.

Three years later, in some remote town up north, Julia gave birth to a girl.

Gustavo came to see her soon after, carrying what her sister would remember decades later as “the largest, most beautiful roses I’d ever seen.” It made such an impression that she remembered it all those years later. Julia never mentioned it at all.

She went on to have three more babies within five years. Five years after that, another pregnancy. By then, Fernando had succumbed to her insistence and married her, much to the dismay of his parents.

For reasons never spoken aloud, Julia made sure the girl knew she had never been wanted.

Mila was Julia’s last child. When she was born, Julia had pneumonia, so Rosa took the baby home. Five years later, unexpectedly, Julia pulled the girl out of Rosa’s house and into the old one where they all lived on the bare minimum.

Other than sliced bread, margarine and canned milk, there was no food. I recall them referring to days without food as detoxification, half jokingly. 

It went on until our father either borrowed money from a friend or got food on credit. He would come in late at night, intoxicated, carrying bags of takeout.

“Wake up, Mila, come to eat…” one of the older siblings would say.

Both Julia and Dad enjoyed pretense. They sent their children to private schools even when they could not pay for things like First Communion gowns, field trips, or tuition. Three of the children eventually dropped out.

Mila was shuffled from one pretentious school to another.

We were told never to open the living room windows, lest someone notice how bare the room was: an ornate mahogany chair with half its back torn off. The front door had to be opened just so, too. The foyer held nothing but a telephone on a marble table.

“Your daughter has a beautiful voice,” one of the nuns had said of the eldest. Julia pressured her husband to come up with at least the tickets to send her to a well-known music school.

He got them airplane tickets. On credit.

They had heard it was freezing up here, so they arrived with two large bundles made of wool blankets. That was the luggage.

Julia went back and forth many times after that. On his dime. Each return announced itself the same way: heels on the floor, lipstick in place, damage entering dressed as glamour.

And to Mila, her arrivals brought both awe and dread.

Reflections

Apophis

MyFathersMirror

You’ve met men like him. Maybe only once. Maybe just long enough to feel the air change.

They enter rooms already convinced of their own importance, head high, chest lifted, reading every face as if the world were a mirror. Apophis was that kind of boy. He grew into the kind of man people excuse too easily and remember too late.

From early on, he worshipped one thing: himself. He mistook being male for being superior. He handed down little pronouncements as if they were law: “men wear T-shirts like this!” to girls half his size. To him, women existed mainly as proof that he was not one.

There was always something foul beneath the swagger.

Indulged for no better reason than having been born male, Apophis learned early that he could move through a room and leave no trace but the damage. He slipped through back doors, grinned through lies, stole from the very people who fed him, and treated shame as something for other people to carry.

Some of his “games” were not games at all.

He used to grab me and place me on top of his narrow frame, bouncing me up and down while he lay flat beneath me. I was too young to understand what I was feeling, only that it was wrong. Uncomfortable. Strange. I would stare at the ceiling, as if there might be something written there I was supposed to understand.

There was nothing written there.

One afternoon we heard my mother’s heels striking the parquet floor. Apophis froze, then flung me onto the other bed so fast I barely had time to register it. I landed quietly. He straightened himself. By the time she entered, nothing had happened. At least nothing that could be named.

That was his gift.

To do what he did and leave silence holding the bag.

Later he stole from his father, passed out in a room that always seemed stained by drink and neglect. He stole his mother’s cheap jewelry to impress whichever girl he was after. He took money from the same woman who defended him, spinning talk of “investment,” then shrugged when it vanished.

Years passed. Apophis married. Cheated. Married again. A daughter was born along the way, though he always seemed more interested in sons he could imagine as extensions of himself.

Now he is older, stiffer, better dressed. He stops by the rest home where his mother sits and spends more time on his phone than in her presence. He leaves before her tea cools.

Age has changed the angles of his face, but not the nature underneath.

Apophis is still Apophis.

Reflections

It Wasn’t a Start

MyFathersMirror

I had not been in a classroom in years. It was the fall of 1996, and there I was, bright and early for some free short term course that was supposed to lead to a job.

The crowd was exactly what I’d expected: older, unemployed Latina women. One requirement for admission was fluency in Spanish. I sat in the front beside an older woman named Miledys.

We exchanged the usual pleasantries: had either of us worked as aides before, where were we from, that sort of thing.

Then came the standard speeches about caring for people with disabilities and all the rest.

A couple of weeks later, I overheard one of the women say:

“She’s gotta speak Spanish. It’s required to get into the course.”

Miledys and I mostly kept to ourselves, swapping stories in Spanglish. Then one day at lunch, a woman called out:

“You do speak Spanish, right?”

She was talking to me.

She was heavyset, with a forceful way about her. I was drawn in by her obvious interest, her kind hazel eyes and yes, by her nice ass too. What can I tell you?

“We were just talkin’ about you in the back,” she said. “I was tellin’ them you gotta speak Spanish to be here, right?” Then she added, by way of introduction, “Regina.”

Not long after that, I got thrown out.

In a drunken stupor, I made some dramatic confession when my live-in girlfriend asked about Regina. From there, my life tipped fully into chaos.

Regina told her father about me, and he graciously agreed to let me stay with them for a while. That didn’t last.

By then I had started seeing my ex-girlfriend again, if only to spend hours snorting cocaine together. Regina saw things differently. Still angry, still hurt, she nevertheless found us a room and even bought decorations for it.

I can still see her pretty face, beaming as she said,
“It’s a start. Our first little place together.”

I am ashamed to admit I lied to her too.

A few months later, she dumped me.

One of the best things that happened to me.

After that came a couple of rooms, a couple of evictions, and then the truth stood there plain: it was down to a park bench or rehab.

I’ll never know exactly where the idea of rehab came from.

But I chose recovery.

Reflections

In Each Other’s Way

MyFathersMirror

I had been living with Manzoor for a handful of years.

Not the kind of living people imagine when they hear that. He had a place, and he had found a couple of roommates to help pay the bills. A generous if frugal man, Manzoor had never asked me to contribute a dime. He saved every penny, cooked for both of us on weekends. Meanwhile, my days were spent drinking alcohol, smoking and watching reruns on the portable black-and-white screen. Kindly put, mine was a numb existence. 

“You know the electronics store on 96th and Broadway? I got a job there,” I told him.

He was getting ready to leave for a month-long trip back to his country of birth. I was annoyed by it, though I couldn’t say exactly why. I had always known he was married. That he had children there. None of it had mattered to me.

If anything, it felt oddly flattering when he told me he wanted to take me as his second wife.

At the interview, I sat across from two managers and told them, without hesitation, I was there for the assistant manager position.

Looking back, one of them must have mistaken my naivete for chutzpah. They gave me a job behind the Walkman counter.

It definitely wasn’t chutzpah.

Soon after Manzoor left, I met Joe. And Rita.

That’s when things began to tilt.

A couple of months in, Joe called me one night to declare his undying devotion, insisting he was done with Claire. As in completely done.

Claire, however, had not received that update and firmly believed she was about to become his wife. She didn’t take kindly to me moving into his apartment, just a few blocks from where I still technically lived with Manzoor.

It was wrong, but I did not even pause to question it.

Around that same time, Rita started working the register.

I remember the first time she looked at me, it was not in passing, not the way coworkers do, but with a kind of quiet insistence, like she had already decided something. 

She didn’t rush it. I pretended not to notice her subtle approaches, building a kind of anticipation I hadn’t felt in years.I was flattered. 

And little by little, she made her way into my days, and then into my thoughts, until there was barely a moment she didn’t occupy. 

The day came when I saw Manzoor off at the airport and, as we embraced goodbye, I cried uncontrollably. I remember his face, the way he looked at me. I think he believed it meant I loved him.

As I write this now, I hope he didn’t.

Because what followed doesn’t match that kind of love.

By the time he called me, as he promised he would, I felt… nothing I could name. I spoke to him easily, kindly, but without longing. Like speaking to someone just a few doors down. 

I cried when he left. I didn’t miss him when he was gone.

What unsettles me now is not that I left. It’s that I had already left before he ever boarded the plane.

So while Manzoor was away, impulsively, I packed my few belongings, met Joe downstairs and off we went to look at hues of sunset off the brick wall out his kitchen window. 

Joe, to his credit, not even once tried to force things between us; we just settled in like two old beer guzzling buddies while I fantasized of Rita’s fragrance and how it would all be like. 

We found a rhythm. It didn’t last.

Rita got fired for theft and I made an ass of myself by staging a ridiculous, pompous exit, right there in front of everyone. And within minutes, there was Joe running down Broadway: 

“Hey, hey, wait for mee!” as though unhinged.

What can I say, three clueless people just going about aimlessly. 

Not long after, we were behind.

Claire was ecstatic.

Rita soon asked me to move into her small apartment, much to the displeasure of her teenage son whose opinion was never even asked. 

We lasted ten years. 

Reflections

It Wasn’t Free

MyFathersMirror

“I’ve got work with Mathew tomorrow, but we’ll get busy right after,” Rita said, smiling in anticipation.

I knew what “busy” meant.

Her gig was as an interpreter for a small legal firm, specifically for Mathew.
Mathew liked early mornings and clients before sunrise in Lower Manhattan.
The kind of cases that didn’t need to be mentioned at home.

Mathew had an overt interest in Rita, who was decades younger.
She was, at best, a tentative, often unintelligible, interpreter.

Deep in the throes of addiction, I pretended to believe the story. I regret that now.

“So… are we busy today?”

That was the code for I’m buying coke.

Ours was a daily kind of “busy,” to the exclusion of almost everything else, even whatever we once called a relationship.

Every now and then, we’d talk about looking for work, and she insisted Mathew would always be there, which made sense since he owned the building.

I convinced myself she lived there rent-free, a single mom and all…

It wasn’t free.

She paid for it in trade.

I’m not certain knowing would’ve made a difference.

Ten years went like that.
Blurred.
Wasted.
Hard to believe now.

It was a time when internet cafés and Video Professor were still a thing. Rita enrolled in free computer classes. At my suggestion, she recorded the lectures for me to transcribe.

One day she came in, animated, telling me about a job training program working with people with disabilities.

We’d been living together for almost ten years and, by then, I needed something to change.

Within days, I was sitting in a classroom.

That’s when Regina walked in.

Reflections

Tap-Tap on the DL

MyFathersMirror

Three taps meant: I’m here. I’m thinking of you.

It was the middle of August in New York City, I’d never been to the Bronx, let alone that far uptown on the 2 line.

Buzzer.

“Hi, I have an appointment to see Brenda,” I said in my best voice to the few women in the management office. 

“That’s me, come sit down,” a pleasant, older woman gestured to her work area. 

And within the hour, I had been accepted into their program for women with addiction problems. 

I went into what someone later termed transition shock at the noise level, in between people chatting, music blasting from the dining room while someone played a different playlist in the backyard. But right after rushing up three flights of stairs to put away the plastic bag with the stuff, there I was, in that very room from where the deafening sounds came. 

I detest plastic bags to this day, the cheap, flimsy NYC bodega kind. That one. Everything I owned fit inside it.

Deafening to me. 

In time it almost grew on me, especially a handful of the women who, for different reasons now contribute to this story. 

“Hey, you want one?” offering an open pack of Newports, from the door to the backyard. 

That was Myrna, the young woman with whom I shared the room. Her story was of abandonment, neglect even of self as addiction had swallowed whatever plans she once had.

And Esther who, as someone “confidentially” shared, relapsed and either left or was removed from the program. She and I would’ve made great friends. 

There was Ramos who, true to the old lesbian stereotype, comported herself with a theatrical  level of masculinity. She once gifted me a pair of black Jordache sneakers. 

Full stop. 

Then there was Diana. She took an interest in me and, I, in turn, let myself be flattered by her admiration of me. We soon became “an item,” as she enjoyed saying, much to the chagrin of an admirer I had inadvertently encouraged. I had become reclusive, venturing downstairs only for a quick cigarette and a meal, I felt utterly uncomfortable, and spent most days in the room. 

Diana’s interest, her gentle coaxing, got me out of that room, and out of my head.

It felt good to be asked: “Hey, where were you all day?” No one had asked me that in years. We got to the point of late night conversations, her feet discreetly on my lap, going over old VHS tapes. A Field of Dreams was the very first of many movies she shared with me. 

In the evenings, we felt a certain intimacy to my tapping on the ceiling to let her know I was back, much to the amusement of Myrna. Three taps, code for “im here, im thinking of you.” 

And Darlene, the go- between, carrying love notes back and forth in her ever present wicker purse. And also the CD player left on my bed. “Play track 14” discreetly tucked in. 

The one day when things got intense between Diana and me while my roommate was out. A nice, slow burn, fewer and fewer pauses. 

The door burst open. I felt my stomach drop. 

My admirer screeched in horror and ran to the management office. 

I was given a week to move out, a magnanimous act from a director who prided herself in having removed a pregnant girl from the program despite the girl’s kneeled supplication. 

In my optimism, I took the embarrassment as a clue to pursue a deeper involvement with Diana. 

It did lead further into my renewed life in sobriety although not in ways I had expected. And for the first time in over two decades I was not disappearing into a bottle of whisky.

Reflections

Anyone from New York?

MyFathersMirror

It had been a couple of years since I’d seen Carlos, an old acquaintance from my days of daze.

“Here, use my screen name, someone will reply!” Carlos insisted, confident that his idea was the solution to my solitude. I had told him that yes, I’d been looking to meet someone, although not necessarily for romance—more along the lines of companionship.

Not a single reply.

We soon parted after the minor disappointment, Carlos assuring me no one replied because I was online under his screen name. “Next time you come over, we’ll set you up with your own,” he said warmly. I never saw him again.

This was in the early 2000s, when AOL chat rooms were still a thing.

Life went on with its frequent struggles and detours until I had the funds to buy myself a desktop. A used one, refurbished by Per Scholas. After a lifetime in the stupor of addiction, this was among the first significant choices I made for myself.

The desktop turned out fine for my purposes, which were essentially to stare at it after work and figure out how to do things. One evening I remembered Carlos and his much-touted AOL chat rooms, though not his screen name.

I eventually got bold enough to go from lurker to occasional chatter, and while there were a few fun conversations, most people seemed interested in casual encounters.

Many chats later, I’d grown tired of them, mostly for that reason. Things were gradually improving for me. I’d started looking for an apartment, still worked for a well-known nonprofit, and had begun college as an adult student.

My sobriety date came around—no one with whom to share the suffocating July heat. It was still just me in that basement room with the small rectangular window that looked out onto gravel and the feet going in and out of the driveway.

“Let’s take a look at the chat room,” I told myself, looking to lighten the day.

The chat was much as it had been in prior weeks: the regulars, their childish cliques, their conversations peppered with the same old obscenities. Shortly after, I turned the desktop off, in a weird mix of disgust and loneliness. In retrospect, the mix of emotions was more than I could explain even today: I found myself covering my face with both hands, sobbing, asking Spirit for someone for me. The intensity of that moment surprises me to this day.

In late July, I typed: “Anyone from New York?” in a cute blue font, no less. The old refurbished desktop wobbled on the box it had come in. Maybe good things do feel fuller when shared. 

“Hi.”
“I’m in New York.”

After a few pleasantries, I cut to the point.

“Do you have children?”

“Yes, they live with their father and they’re big… is this a problem, sweetie?”

“No. They’re not that small, and they don’t live with you.”

“I have a second question: do you cook?”

“What? I can make you a meat stew that’ll rattle your bones, the best pork chops you ever tasted,” her excitement practically jumped off the screen.

Wouldn’t you know it? We met just a couple of weeks later, and not long after that, she showed up with a tray of the most delicious baked ziti. She brought it to our spot in the nearby park.

That was part fun, part embarrassment, because I lived in a basement room, but it really turned out to be a lovely afternoon. She even let me keep the leftovers. In retrospect, that day, her gesture, us sharing a homemade meal for the first time, right there on a bench in Bronx River Park, was a gem of a moment.

We’ve been together for over twenty years, not only each other’s spouse but each other’s person.

in that basement room, I had asked Spirit for someone for me. I still wonder if that blue-font question into an AOL chat room was only me reaching out or if something had already started reaching back.

Reflections

Lumpy Beds and Other Luxuries

MyFathersMirror

Last night I must’ve been half asleep when I started muttering about our bed, how that old, lumpy mattress would soon just kill my back dead. How is it that I still have this thing here?

The truth? I could’ve replaced it long ago. I could’ve upgraded the furniture, bought the better things. But I’ve never cared much for that kind of new. I’ve always preferred what’s stayed with me, the things that have weathered time alongside me.

And yes, the bed could use replacing. But here’s what I remembered, somewhere between half-sleep and gratitude: it wasn’t all that long ago that I was dozing off in laundromats, trying to stay warm in the dead of winter, or in emergency rooms, pretending to be someone’s family.

A spot on a lumpy bed, a blanket like the one my wife gave me, would’ve been heaven.

I don’t ever want to forget the long road that led me here, to the comforts of home and, yes, our old bed and the tender lives that came to rest beside it.

Remember where you came from.
And be gentle with where you are.

Reflections

The Nitwitzes

MyFathersMirror

“I want a baby,” Meera announced.
Randolph blinked. “Now? Meera, we got bills. I’m still in school, remember?”

A month later, he strode into work, grinning like he’d won the Pick 5.
“Yo, imma be a dad!”

Silence. Stares.
Then, from the back of the office:
“Uh… congrats, man,” someone mumbled, the enthusiasm flatter than a DMV clerk’s stare.

At some point, Meera called her mother to inform she’d be moving upstate for the rest of the pregnancy for “support.” That lasted five weeks, which exceeded everyone’s expectations. By mid-trimester, she was back in the Bronx.

She and Randolph headed straight to his mother’s housing project apartment, where his older brother had been scrounging off their mother for years. The guy somehow got partial custody of his kids on weekends, so the place was already bursting. Randolph—the only wage earner in the whole setup—was crashing there too. Now Meera sat like a queen on the couch, either unwilling or unable to navigate social services for assistance.

Randolph’s grin was long gone. He seemed equally unwilling or unable to grasp what was really coming.

Much could be said about how society romanticizes childbirth and motherhood. And yes, indescribable admiration goes to women who choose to become mothers. But honestly, some of what goes into the process can be flat-out traumatic. Maybe both things are true. Maybe it can be both, traumatic and beautiful.

Still, here they are, the two nitwits in over their heads and at the center of it all, a baby.

Randolph’s latest mission? Buy a couple dozen cupcakes from the bakery down the street. The kind with blue and white filling revealed when bitten into, an ultra low-budget gender reveal.

Meanwhile, Meera, still in a kind of stupor, struggles to navigate even state medical coverage, let alone housing or other basic resources.

And yet, somehow, the baby’s coming anyway.

The baby is coming.