La Vida es un Sueño
By: Sofia Fuentes
Duérmete mi niña, duérmete mi amor
duérmete pedazo de mi corazón.
Esta niña mía que nació de noche
quiere que la lleve a pasear en coche.
Duérmete mi niña, duérmete mi amor
duérmete pedazo de mi corazón.
I spent most of my days in the backyard, however, I never seem to visit it when I sleep. I tend to find myself lying on the upstairs floor. The green carpet rubbing against my skin. Stains from different foods, drinks, games, both mine, my family’s, and of those who occupied the house before us. Sometimes I am in the room at the end of the hall. The bookshelves surrounding me, comforting me. The big flat screen T.V always there, but never on. A reminder of the comfort we had, of the afternoons watching Caso Cerrado with my dad while digging our hands into a bag of Takis. Other nights I open the closet next to the stairs. The unbearable mess my siblings and I maintained throughout the years is gone. A well-organized space takes its place. Unrecognizable; still I know where I am.
I have lived in many homes. The one with three floors, eleven dogs, and an unlocked sliding door, the Greek one with the white fence and all the bikes that were stolen, the room with the bed the three of us had to share, the back of the Nicaraguans house where Luna popped our air mattress, our balcony over the lake which I underestimated, the ladder through my father’s room, the solution to a problem, a choice. It was never my choice, though I wouldn’t choose differently today.
The day eight of the eleven dogs were born, I was in the bathroom. I had borrowed my brother’s habit of listening to music while I showered. I placed my black radio on the toilet seat, set to Santiago’s most popular romance station. I thought about Gino, my boyfriend from school, about Chago, the boy I first kissed. I thought about how difficult and tragic it all was, how relatable Prince Royce’s lyrics were. About the barely visible breasts on my naked twelve-year-old body, about shaving my legs behind my mother’s back, about growing up. I imagined what my dog, La Negra, would do if I were to be showering at the moment she gave birth to her first puppy. I didn’t know how strong she was then, that she would give birth to eleven of them on her own for hours. That she would do this more than once. That she would be a better mother than my other dogs, as small, ugly, and stinky as she was.
It was in this house that the dreams of my home in North Carolina began. It was almost as if I never left. While asleep, I lived in one place and woke up in another. Many nights I spent awake, many nights I wasn’t sure whether I was asleep or not. Women from different eras crossed my room: dresses, corsets, feathers, hoop skirts. I seemed to go unnoticed. They entered my open door and left out the window. Outside my window a twenty-four-floor building. Late-night parties put me to sleep. Every day it was someone’s birthday. I listened each night to the name of the person they celebrated. Felicidades Anita. Felicidades Carmen. Felicidades Antonio. Awake, a celebration of life. Asleep, a boy stands on the roof of the twenty-fourth floor. Staring into the distance, he contemplates ending it. From my window, I look at him, naively, wondering where his bed is and why he is not in it. My gut builds up tension. Voiceless, I scream at him. The silence fills my room, his mind, and the air between us both. Like the women passing through my room, he is oblivious. Before I can move, his body drops twenty-four floors down, and I awaken, drowning in a pillow full of tears, and I recover my breath uneasily.
I was introduced to my first Tasbih shortly after. On my knees, I prayed to a God, La Ilaha Illallah (there is no God but God). I crawled inside my heart with the thought and sound of this phrase. Each bead I touched, unknowingly reaching out to someone, something, myself. Religion wasn’t something I was taught nor something I was guided by. It was something I found. Accompanying me through my growth, though I couldn’t recognize it. In time I’d come to believe that God was in me. At times, that there was no such thing. Others, that my mother was the closest thing to it. I’ve concluded it all to be true.
The first summer I chose to live without my mother, I spent with my sister. I passed the nights awake, fighting the mosquitoes who eagerly feasted on me. I couldn’t sleep well until I connected the extension coming down through the neighbor’s house, to my kitchen window into the room I stayed in. This gave power to a black fan that stood at the edge of my bed. Still running on East Coast time, my days began in the afternoon. From the bed, I took ten steps over to the torn up brown couch, which I quickly fell back asleep on. My sweat created an adhesive between my skin and the leather. A breeze entering through the balcony doors and the smell of Dani’s tobacco alleviated this, allowing me to start my day by the time Babi arrived from work. The shop down the street my father owned took over many of my afternoons. A stool next to the rolling chair my sister sat on was my assigned seat for many hours of the day. The old man, Vicente, passed by unexpectedly, giving an unbearably long lecture about his plans for the map of the city and the designs that Babi would be creating for him. His smell filled the room the second he walked through the door. It was a similar one to the lobby of my Abuela Pucha’s elderly low-income building. He’d assume I would give him my seat, forcing me to stand through the hours of unnecessary speeches he presented. I came to terms with this, feeling almost bad for the old man who carried his entire life in a black briefcase. He rummaged hopelessly through the disarray of papers within it, only to pull out his delicate round glasses, which would allow him to see the computer screen. Still, his face inches away from it. He put them back in the briefcase only minutes before closing time, giving us each a wet kiss on each side of our cheek before limping back out the shop and down the lit-up street of El Carmen.
The time after seems to be more of a blur than the time before. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; a moment in time erased from my memories and now impossible to visualize. Lives I’ve lived suddenly detached from my self. They belong to someone else. To her. The one who spit her life out at strangers and walked home barefoot at the end of the night. She heartlessly left it all behind. She started over again and again. A homogeneous mixture of stories which all seem to go the same way. A new beginning, desperate regret, love (or what I thought was love), flee, repeat.
I’ve grown tired of this repetitive pattern that seemed to be engraved in my way of being. Exhausted of swimming against the current, I only seem to be doing so once more by longing for calm at a time when others are beginning to live. I look at Runa, my mother’s fat black cat, and envy her passing of time curled up on the foot of the bed. I notice her taking my place in accompanying my mother and come to welcome and accept my new title. As I begin this life, I wonder what will remain with me from the one before. Whether I’ll remember writing this or the things I spoke of. If I’ll sit in an empty apartment and be able to say it was my choice. If I’ll someday stop visiting my old home in my dreams. If I’ll ever forget what the French doors with green paint looked like or the horseshoe above them as you stepped inside. If the closet will remain organized, if the television will turn on, if the carpet will someday be wood, if I ever revisit the backyard again when I sleep.