Reflections

Anyone from New York?

J. Angell

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.

Leaking Coconuts

Way Off

J. Angell

Mila was late to school again. It mortified her, having to knock on the front entrance of the director’s office. Tuition was probably late again, and old Ms. Blanco liked to send teachers into the classroom to remind her, right in front of all the other girls. Mila had learned to spot them ahead of time so she could run and hide in the bathroom.

“I’ll just say my dad dropped me off at the wrong spot. Or that the bus broke down… even better: it’s part of my new exercise regimen, and I intended to miss my stop or…”

She missed her stop by a couple blocks. Again.

She wasn’t late often, just enough to feel it. Especially after switching to the public bus at eight, no more pre-class fun with friends who rode to school on the yellow bus. 

There was that one time, though. Mila missed her stop, got off at the next one, and sat on a bench to, what else, come up with something clever to say.

That’s when a teacher from the school spotted her, scooped her up, and drove her straight to the dreaded director’s office.

“I found this girl by the shopping center, way past the park, ” Ms. Duran reported. “Imagine, had it not been for me, no telling where she’d have ended up!”

Mila had been sitting on a bench at a bus stop four blocks away. She didn’t even know where the mall was.

No one asked her a single question. Just condescending looks. She was never late after that, afraid Ms. Duran might find her again and make up something worse.

“It’d sure be easier if I could still ride the yellow bus,” Mila thought. Her parents couldn’t afford the service past first grade, so by eight or nine, the girl had no choice but to take the public bus to school. 

“Dad says we’re saving to donate more to the poor…”

Leaking Coconuts

The Portrait

J. Angell

“I know what it needs,” Julia said excitedly, then hurried to the bedroom and came right back out, clutching a pearl necklace.

She stood before the large mirror, adding final touches to her hair as she hummed a bolero.

Mila crouched on the floor, unseen, peeling a tangerine as she watched in awe. To her, Mom looked like a movie star.

A nationally known painter had been hired to do a portrait of her. She had never been wealthy but, after a couple of her husband’s commercial deals came through, she suddenly saw herself as Madame Bovary.

“She doesn’t even know I’m here,” Mila whispered. “She forgot all about me.”

She ran to the kitchen for another tangerine, then headed upstairs to sit cross-legged on the floor and watch The Flintstones.

The painting, in an ornate golden frame, hung proudly in the living room, until they could no longer keep the house.

Not long after, Mila saw it again, propped against a wall in some nondescript back room, surrounded by everything else they owned.

They’d been thrown out, bougie frame and all.

Reflections

Lumpy Beds and Other Luxuries

J. Angell

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

J. Angell

“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.

Leaking Coconuts

Taste Test

J. Angell

The old house had an open-air courtyard and, as usual, Mila was milling about with the same empty cardboard box which she liked to put over her head. It was her space, her way of dealing with people she did not know and did not want to be with. Lost in another daydream, she heard her father’s voice: 

“Mila, come taste this new, improved way of making us mashed potatoes!” 

His tweak to improve a humble bowl of mashed potatoes? Mash them in a blender. 

It had turned into a gummy paste, quite unappetizing. 

“Oh, it’s good, Dad, I like it!” She could not bear to tell him. She quickly retreats back into the cardboard box, embarrassed for both. 

As he walked back into the kitchen, the child heard him say, almost imperceptively: 

“This tastes like shit…she didn’t want to hurt my feelings.” 

She lifted the box slightly above her eyes and kept watching until the hallway swallowed him, then pulled the box back down over her eyes. 

Reflections

She Said, Calmly

J. Angell

It was a bright afternoon, still early, the kind of winter morning when holiday shopping hits a fever pitch. The neighborhood buzzed, overflowing with offers of cheap “designer” perfumes and last minute deals.

I was standing outside the post office when I heard them. Not saw — heard.

“Mom, mom!” one of the girls shouted, breathless with joy.
“We can get it, can we? Yes, right? Pleeease?”

She couldn’t have been more than ten, nearly bursting with excitement.
Her younger sibling stood beside her, parroting her every move, not that she fully understood.

Then I noticed their mother.

She seemed to be in her 30s, frayed, like she was holding everything together with a whisper. But when she turned to them, her voice came out calm. Surprisingly calm.

“That’s enough,” she said.
“Whatchoo girls think? You be asking for all sorts of shit like it’s free, but listen,
Christmas ain’t free.
Christmas ain’t free.
Don’t say nobody told y’all.”

And just like that, the girls fell silent. So did the entire block, it seemed.

To this day, silence surrounds that memory of me, standing on that corner by the post office, the bright winter morning, and the somber expressions on the girls’ faces.
I have never forgotten it.

Leaking Coconuts

Ropero

J. Angell

On Sundays, they gathered. The place was cramped, never fancy, except for her old “real wood” furniture and that ropero, her secret altar. Inside, neatly folded linens she barely used, reserved for special occasions. Bottles of perfume, half evaporated, some in their original boxes. Jewelry that, surprisingly, was not fake but rather old, striking jewelry pieces she had gracefully accepted from the many suitors of yesteryear.

I’d sneak a peek now and then, but she never let me hold any of her things.

One day, I took something, out of sheer curiosity and to take to school the next day. Not out of need, not even desire, I just wanted to hold something of hers and, yes, show it at school. It was a thin, gold chain. I just grabbed it, unaware of its significance.

Some relatives were visiting and they all tended to linger in the bedroom where I was, transfixed. The chain had crumpled into a knot and, panicked, I imperceptibly dropped it into a glass jar nearby, coughing nervously to cover what I was sure would cause an earsplitting noise.

“No one noticed. I’m good,” I reassured myself, a bit shaken.

Half hour passed.
“Mila, come to the kitchen at once!”

She was standing near that huge, cheap wall calendar.
April: Grand Canyon National Park.

There’s a place grandmother could not even fathom.

The glass jar sat on the kitchen table.

Reflections

The Voice on the Pier

J. Angell

I inadvertently noticed there were people standing on the pier for some kind of event. It was already evening, and the lights were warming up to that golden hue that flatters everyone. 

I wasn’t there, but I saw it online.

And somewhere between that gentle light, the music, a voice, not quite spoken, crept in:

–“Don’t you feel bad that you can’t do things like that anymore?”

A pointed remark, for sure but yet not cruel, a bit smug.

“Wouldn’t you love to be out there, swaying to the rhythm, that cool breeze on your face?”

And, for longer than I’d like to admit, I agreed.

For a second, I didn’t want to be where I was. I didn’t want to be the person I’ve become, the one who now needs help getting up, whose tendency now is to say “not today” more often than “maybe later.”

But the voice didn’t linger.

Because a deeper one rose, quietly.

 “Even if I could go, who would I be standing there for? There was a time I faked it, and after a couple shots of whisky I could wear the usual veneer of charm. If I stayed out long enough I could pretend I was part of something.”

But now?

Now I stay home.
Now I notice when my cats blink slowly at me.
Now I write things down even if no one reads them.
Now I tell the truth.

Even when it makes me ache.

Leaking Coconuts

The window and the necklace

J. Angell

The window fell shut and the necklace went with it.

How, you ask? Well, it was old and had to be propped with a stick to stay even half open. The rotted stick gave way and, in my haste, I either tried to hold it or it was too heavy; the necklace, a cheap little thing I’d bought myself from the corner store, somehow got caught in the mess.

Its charms scattered across the kitchen floor like crumbs from a careless hand.

In the process, I scraped bits of skin from my hand and wrist, but stood there nonchalant as I started to peel the loose edges away.

Just act as if nothing happened.
Hum to old boleros no one knows you love.
Just act as if…