Shaken

When the earth began to shake, suddenly nothing was important: not the outfit I planned to wear on my birthday in a week, not the question of how to live through the awkward stages of growing out my hair, not the man who had just made me cry approximately 24 hours before.

When the earth began to shake, every dog in the neighborhood barked. I didn’t hear one human voice. Did you sleep through it? Did you not wake up in time to worry for your life? I sat up, naked in my bed, my heart pounding. Am I the only one that felt this? Did I just dream that shit? Maybe all across Río Piedras, everyone sat up in their beds at 1:34 am and watched their flower vases shake, their mouths stuck in silent “o”s, filled with unasked “what ifs.”

If this were the one, would I have time to get clothes on before I ran out of my house? Perhaps I should start sleeping with pajamas on, just in case shit goes down during the night, I can at least run out of my house without worry that I’ll get stared at. Or maybe I shouldn’t live in fear. I sleep naked. Come what may.

The night before, I thought about dying. I thought about whether or not I fit into this place (or any place, for that matter). I sobbed, sitting on the floor, head in my hands. All this over a simple stupid question: where the fuck do I go?

It all began in the Puerto Rico trench. A crack in the ocean floor where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea. How apt. This is where the problem started: where the United States meets Almost the United States. How easy it is to cross that ocean of ambiguity. A simple plane ride: three hours, a little turbulence, a prayer or two, free pretzels and tomato juice and there you are. Luís Muñoz Marín International Airport, sweating your balls off and hoping your luggage is not abandoned in someplace random like Milwaukee, or Charlotte, or Fresno.

The trench is more than 8000 miles deep. It is the boundary between the North American Plate and the Caribbean Plate. The latter wants to move to the west while the former moves to the east. And so they clash. And volcanoes erupt under the sea. And earthquakes shake Puerto Ricans awake at 1:30 in the morning. I think of it like an allegory for colonialism. It works quietly, underneath our feet, without us knowing, all the time, shaping our world and we don’t even feel it until, perhaps, it pushes too hard and it stirs us out of our (american) dreams.

When I was younger, one of my favorite hiding spots was the crack between my bed and the wall. Sometimes when playing with my little sister, who was still a baby at that time, I would pretend there was a monster in the crack and it was pulling me down with it. I would scream for her to help me and she would just sit there and cry. Then I would pop up again and hug her and say, “everything’s okay. I’m here.” And she would hug me and then we would play something else.

There is no monster in the Puerto Rico trench. No. The monsters are in plain site.

If I fell in the space where the US officially stops but doesn’t, I would take everything with me. Grab everything and put it in my pockets as I am sucked down to the bottom of the ocean, things I surely won’t need but want anyway: helicopters, bats (grab em in mid-flight), skyscrapers, highways, great big trees covered in birds nests, colored pencils, fire, homeless dogs, a pair of sequined sneakers, bicycles, a boyfriend, a shoebox, matches, magazines, horses, octopuses, whales, and squids. Falling into a space so dark and undefined, my pockets heavy with all the shit I have stolen but am entitled to, I reach the bottom of the trench, the epicenter, right square in between acá y allá. I unpack my pockets and make my home.

It is when we are shaken that we realize we are no different than them. A few points higher on the Richter scale and we would be dead bodies trapped under cement, dead bodies cut in half by fallen steel twisted into knots by an angry earth, dead bodies forgotten by the very government that is supposed to protect us. Isn’t the United States super heroic afterall? Haven’t they figured out how to stop plate tectonics and keep us safe from the evils of the earth? A few points higher on the Richter scale and in thirty seconds or less we would have finally understood that there is no God. A few points higher on the Richter scale and maybe we would stop using the word “haitiano” as an insult because in the aerial shots of the rubble that used to be our homes, one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between what happened here on May 16, 2010 and what happened there on January 12, 2010.

We all believe in God and the United States until the Earth teaches us not to.

A Growing List of Reasons To Say, “KEEP YOUR FUCKING DICK IN YOUR PANTS”

REASON ONE: Today as I was waiting for the bus to take me to the health food store so I could buy my weekly supply of tofu, almond milk, and organic nuts and berries soldbytheBULK, a man showed me his penis. No...no. That was an understatement.

Picture this:

You are waiting for the bus by yourself. You are a woman. In a city you are not from but feel increasingly comfortable in (which doesn’t mean yo stupid ass won’t get robbed, but I’m just sayin). You are sitting on a bench that is just high enough to give you space to swing your legs. So you swing your legs because when was the last time you did that?

Across the street is a man. You know he is watching you. How? Because you feel like a fucking reality tv amoeba porn star being observed under a fucking microscope by a sick ass molecular biologist who has an unhealthy obsession to watching amoebas just trying to do their amoeba thing.

You do not meet his gaze. Even when he goes: ssss…ssss…ssss.

You try to read the book in your purse. It is The Power of Now. Fuck. It should help you focus but you can’t find your Being because your Being is being too horribly violated to be found. She is hiding.

It’s like when your mother told you not to touch things as you walked into semi-fancy department stores.

Or when your teachers used to tell you never to look directly at the sun during a solar eclipse.

You just had to do it.
You just had to look.

And so you see him jerk off.

Not quite: swinging his stupid dick around in stupid circles.

You know what you are going to be faced with. But you look anyway. And when you do, you close your eyes, open them again, see the same shit, close your eyes, open your eyes, shake your head, and walk to the next bus stop. Don’t you dare look back, you...

When you turn the corner, you see a police car driving up the block. You feel relieved, saved almost. Then you remember the following: walking down the street in Brooklyn and a police officer leering at you, grabbing his dick with one hand and holding his gun with the other, that since the beginning of the year just about 130 people have been murdered in this island, that it is February 21st, that so many people wouldn’t have to die if somebody didn’t turn a blind eye or open an expectant and complacent palm.

You walk past the police car. You look back and the fucked up molecular biologist is walking behind you but turns the corner. You meet his repulsive gaze. He looks at the police car. Then at you. You turn your head and walk faster to the next bus stop.

You don’t want to miss your bus. The drivers are assholes. They won’t pick you up if you’re not at the stop. They’ll leave you running, sweaty, dusty, and embarrassed.

The Three Kings Delivered Me My Heart on a Platter

I swear to God, this is the start of my first book. A graphic novel. Almost like a kids book, but for adults. This is all the text. I'm gonna start on the visuals right now.

***

Me: Really? Really? It has been decided that this is the shit that I need right now?
God: Yes.
Me: You’re the wackest God ever, God. Not only do you bring me some pretty tragic shit to deal with when I’m trying to relax in a tropical fucking paradise but then there’s like children starving all over the world, mass genocides, and war. You fucked up and you know it.
God: Oh my dear child, you just don’t understand.
Me: Damn right I don’t understand and it’s not cuz I’m stupid either. Hell, I almost got a Masters degree! And I’m not your goddamn child. Ooh sorry…to uh take your name in vain and shit.
God: ...
Me: Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!!

So started my camping trip in Culebra, Puerto Rico over the Three Kings holiday. Culebra is home to one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. That’s what all the websites say anyway. And all the fuckers who have enough money to see all the beautiful beaches in the world and are arrogant enough to say that they have enough knowledge to rank all of them. Straight up paradise: white sand, clear turquoise water, lots of cool shit to look at when you go snorkeling, forests to fuck around in, coconuts, a sky full of stars, blah blah blah.

I was setting up my tent. Eager to place my lips around the bottle of Balvenie 12 Year Doublewood that I brought with me to help me forget.

Forget what, you ask? There are many terms for it. How should I start? Hmm…A douchebag, un cabron, un hijo de la gran puta, asshole, jerk, trafala. The man that broke my heart. I thought I had been lucky enough to go through life without ever really being heart-broken. Sure dudes have made me cry before. Sure I’ve had really nasty break ups. But heartbreak? I had no idea what the shit was until about a week ago.

Heartbreak is the shit that La Lupe songs are made of. La Lupe. La Yiyiyi. The Queen of Latin Soul. You can’t understand La Lupe’s songs until you have been made to suffer by someone who you reallytruly thought loved you but then you find out in a really wack way that you were making the shit up the whole time. She sings this one song called “Amor Gitano” and the chorus goes like this:

Toma este puñal,

ábreme la venas,

quiero desangrarme 
hasta me muera.

No quiero la vida
si es de verte ajeno,

pues sin tu cariño,

no vale la pena.

That’s some deep ass hurt. And I got hurt La Lupe style on the beach in Culebra, Puerto Rico. Even though the hurt started about a week before that. This tropical beach hurt just kind of served to underline it, bold it, place exclamation points at the end of it. Almost like a citation, it made it official.

So I’m setting up my tent. A bottle of fine single malt whiskey in my backpack waiting to be consumed by me. So happy to be out of the city. Then. I see. Him. With a girl. A girl with long hair, bigger breasts than me, a bigger ass than me. Fuck. They are walking down the main path on the camping grounds. You know this man, dear reader. I guess he really didn’t want anything serious with me.

It can’t be him. Why would that be him with another girl? It can’t be him because I don’t need this right now. It can’t be him because it would just be too perfectly tragic if it were. It can’t…holy shit, that’s him and look at how he’s looking at her.

They were giggling. Giggling for God’s sake!

They did not see me.

At that point, I stopped setting up the tent. Because physically I could not. Because I could feel my stupid little heart detaching itself from the veins, arteries, and valves that used to keep it securely in my ribcage. Pop! Pop pop! It slipped past my lungs, started to slide down my esophagus, make its sad little way past my kidneys. I doubled over in pain, held my stomach with my right hand to keep my heart from falling out of my vagina, reached into my bag for the whiskey with my left hand, opened the bottle and took a long sip. Head thrown back, looking at the sky, this is the moment I was reminded that Orion is made up of more than the five stars that squeeze through the light pollution and contamination of your normal city nights. I drop the bottle, take off my clothes, and stumble to the beach in my bathing suit.

Every. Step. Is harder. Than the last.

I could feel my heart slipping past my stomach. I saw shooting stars. I could feel my heart winding down my intestines. The half moon was rising. And just as I got to the shore to throw myself into the lap of Yemaya, I couldn’t hold onto it anymore and my heart fell out of my vagina and landed in the pristine, white sand.

I didn’t hear it fall because the ocean was too loud.

I left it in the sand and swam and swam and swam. It’s really weird to swim and cry at the same time. You feel really stupid doing it. Like running and crying. Who does that? So I stopped swimming and just let myself cry for a little while. Then I felt stupid crying in the ocean. I started to hear the bad music that came on during the “intense” scenes of Beverly Hills 90210. I looked around for the video cameras because it was just like a bad movie. Who gets their heart trampled on when they’re on a tropical fucking beach? WTF? Really? That happens? It’s not just the fruit of the total lack of imagination of numerous Hollywood screenwriters? ¿En serio? So I stopped crying and swam back to shore. I picked up my heart from the sand, dusted it off, and swatted away the mosquitoes that thought they found heaven. The flies had already given birth to their precious little babies in my rancid heart, just as you can learn here. I shoved it up my vagina again and made sure it was put back in its cozy little home in my ribcage.

I finished the whiskey with my friends, smoked a blunt, and for a while forgot about the wackness that was my life. I went to sleep in my tent.

When I woke up, I took a walk along the beach, knowing I was going to run into them, wanting him to see me, wanting to torture myself.

I ran into him. It looked a little like this:

Him: (Gasps.) ¡Raquel!
Me: Hola.
(No kisses on the cheek. The girl stands there and looks at me. I look at him, no smile on my face. I cannot pretend.)
Him: Uh…Esta es La Fea [duh, not her real name]. La Fea, Raquel. Raquel, La Fea.
(I scratch her eyeballs out with my fingernails and fashion them into earrings using the seaweed discarded in the sand. The inferior of the species collapses to the ground and bleeds to death in absolute agony. I have proven myself to be the superior and dominant female and so the man goes with me...in my head.)
Me: Hola.
Her: Mucho gusto.
Everyone: …
Him: ¡Llegaste a la playa! ¿Cuándo llegaste?
Me: Anoche. ¿Y tú?
Him: Llegamos ayer.
Me: …
(I pummel him to the ground and shove sand into his screaming mouth. He begs for mercy, I think, because I don’t understand his stupid sandy words. I shout, “How does that taste motherfucker?! Love is bitter, isn’t it!?!? Isn’t iiiiiiiit!?!?!” In my head.)
Him: Pueh, no vemos ahorita.
Me: Ciao.
(They walk away and my heart falls from my vagina and plops into the sand. A crab grabs it and scuttles away. It takes me a moment to gather myself and chase the crab. I pry my heart from its claws of and shove it back up my vagina. I run into the water and cry corny 90210 style again. Once I start feeling stupid, I stop.)

My time in Culebra was a series of moments like this. I see them kiss: my heart falls from my vagina, gets sandy, I sigh because I’m frustrated and sad, I pick up my heart, wash it in the ocean and shove it back where it belongs. I come up from snorkeling, I see them playing in the water: my heart falls from my vagina, and sinks to the bottom of the coral reef; I dive to retrieve it, wrenching it from the arms of a starfish and shove it back where it belongs. I see her touch the small of his back as they walk along the beach: plop and it starts all over again.

Really? This shit happens? I mean, really?

When I got home on Thursday night, I noticed that he had defriended me from Facebook, which felt awful. What right does he have to defriend me? He broke my heart! Goddamn it! Beach rejection and digital rejection. The shit just keeps getting worse and worse.

When I got home on Thursday night, I stepped into the shower and took off my bathing suit, sprinkling sand on the tiles, standing naked in the shower for a long time before I turned on the water. I like the feeling of the beach on my skin. The smell of it on my flesh. I reached into myself and took out my heart and placed it in the medicine cabinet. Even though I know I should, I will not use it everyday. Too much work, just like the dental floss next to it.

Clear Blue Easy Redux

It's a good thing the guy I'm seeing (don't worry; it's not serious, we promise) has vowed (well not really) to never read my blog because if he read this he would feel REALLY awkward. Phew!

Remember a little while ago when I posted something about taking a pregnancy test? Well, after I finished it, I became kind of obsessed with the idea and I wrote more. And here is the finished product.

How My Baby Would Kill the Devil and God With A Bat of Her Non-Existent Eyelashes

Clear: the result
Blue: a little
Easy: not as much as you would think

Clear: I’m in the…
Blue: En este momento, in my bathroom with the blue tiles, my mosquito-bitten ass sitting on the blue bathtub, yo quiero estar en el mar. In the blue water, deadmanfloating looking up at the sky so bright blue it hurts.
Easy: Is that why they call me…

Clear: Pa’ que estemos claro. I don’t want a child but sometimes I see little hands wrapped around bigger ones en dondequiera: the market, the shoe store, the bus stop, the pharmacy and well, I can romanticize, right? I can be a woman in my latefuckingtwenties, right?
Blue: My vein bulging out of my forehead, when I’m worried. When I’m thinking too hard, assuming too much, when I cum and I fall.
Easy: Does it…But do it.

I am not pregnant.
Which is an extremely good thing for the following reasons:

1. I am unemployed
2. I like being unemployed and dread the day my rumbling belly will tell me to update my resume, get my ass on a bus, and work BITCH
3. I am slightly crazy

Yet, as of late, I have begun to feel the evil presence of all these hormones that I can’t pronounce but sure as hell can curse out because they’re making me feel things that I don’t want to. So, for five days I wondered, what if. What if for nine months the clothes that fit me a few days ago now rubbed into the swelling mound that housed half of me? What if my jeans could no longer hold in the life that grew so intensely inside of me that it stretched my skin, stretched my imagination far beyond the boundaries of my own selfishness? What if I started to cry at all the things that were supposed to make me sad before but didn’t? What if changes in hormones are just this littlealmostperson inside of me teaching me what it really means to be human? To be good. Finally. What if I could create something that wasn’t about receiving accolades, hugs, positive feedback from people I respect, props, a beer from a boy who wants to hit it or a smile from girl who thinks I’m cool? What if I were a mother like in the magazines at the supermarket checkout line? What if I talked to my baby about everything instead of saying “because I said so”? And she understood? What if I no longer hesitated to hug someone when she cried or walked away when she needed me?

***

It has been forty days. Forty days since I last looked down at my underwear and saw a stain like rust telling me it’s time. Time to plug myself up, to shed the lining of my uterus because I DON’T NEED IT THIS TIME AROUND. A stain like rust: as if I am not using my parts, as if I have forgotten about them! But I haven’t; and this is why I’m in trouble in the first place.

Forty days is a biblical amount of time. Jesus fasted and wandered through the desert for forty days and the Devil tried to tempt him three times. Each time, Jesus cited scripture and the Devil ran away. I think if I retreated to the desert for forty days, I would see the Devil too but surely I would not chase him away. I would need someone to talk to, someone to help me pitch my tent. Surely I would accidentally trade my soul for some directions. The Devil is a tricky, smooth-talking motherfucker, I hear.

According to the Christians handing out yellow pamphlets and telling me that “Dios me ama,” I don’t even have to wander into the desert to see the Devil. Apparently the Devil is the reason why I think I’m pregnant. If I have seen the Devil in the past forty days it has been:
1.
When I walked down the Paseo de Diego to buy some avocados and saw a young man, surely not older than me—pero ave Maria, how heroin ages you, he looked so tired.
He sat on the sidewalk, nodding out, almost hitting his head on the ground.
(But you know he never will right? The Devil has slipped an invisible noose around this man’s neck and he will never let him rest. Just when he slips into unconsciousness and his forehead is about to meet the grey reality of the cobblestones and he will finally be at peace, the Devil, sometimes quickly sometimes gently but always violently, tugs that invisible rope and wakes him up.)
The young man’s left arm is almost completely gone. A gash, the only abyss I’ve ever seen in my life, takes up the entire inside of his forearm.
So deep you see bone.
So deep you gasp.
So deep you don’t look but then you do again, avert your eyes, but then you look again.
So deep you wonder how he is still alive enough to ask you for a quarter.
But then you realize that it’s only the Devil that could be keeping him alive when clearly it would be better to be dead.
He is so far gone, his skin so slimy I thought my fingers would slide right into it as I pressed the shiny coin into his palm. Like Silly Putty, I swear to God.
(to who?)
The Devil made me want to wash my hands afterward.

2.
When I see the man with metal sticking out of his leg, walking around, with a Burger King bag full of somebody else’s left over french fries. I don’t really (want to) understand but will try to explain it:
Certainly he has broken his leg in many places
and someone was concerned enough to take him to the hospital.
The doctors performed a complicated surgery in order to put him back together,
a surgery that included sticking four shiny metal vises (is that what they are called?) into his calf bone.
Maybe those vises are supposed to be tightened on a precise schedule (you see, young man, you turn the little, butterfly-shaped metal thing approximately 14° to the right every two days. Remember: righty tighty, young man, righty tighty!)
Maybe he escaped from the hospital
or the hospital kicked him out
because he couldn’t pay.
or because he wanted more and more morphine and the nurses wouldn’t administer it to him
(maybe it’s the Devil that makes me think that).

A Portrait of the Devil on La Calle Humacao:

The Devil is not unprotected sex.
The Devil is heroin and he is destroying my island.

***

Forty days is the amount of time you fast before Easter. Forty days is the amount of time God made it rain. Forty days is how long it took Him to kill Everything. How long did it take Him to decide we were not worth living? To realize that He Fucked Up and needed to start all over again? A split second of a second thought perhaps. One hundred and eleven years is how long it has taken the United States to:

bomb the shit out of our island and say i'm sorry but not before babies were sorry they ever breathed in so deeply they inhaled fumes so toxic their lungs buckled under the weight of an asthma so powerful
sterilize the women on our island under the guise of testing birth control (“it’s better for you,” they say in english as they scrape our wombs clean of possibilities)
commit massacres in Ponce, in Utuado, Río Piedras, Jayuya, and San Juan
kill our leaders
imprison our leaders
replace our farmland with cement (“it’s progress,” they say in english as they pour highways over our houses)

It took the United States one hundred and eleven years to make sure we forgot what freedom was.

I know the United States is not God even though they both work in mysterious ways, here they are both unseen and all powerful, many Puerto Ricans look to them both for salvation and prosperity and will drop to our knees if either one of them tell us to, even though everyone here has a few family members they have lost to both of them.

QUE DIOS NOS BENDIGA (Cross yourself.)
QUE LA ESTADIDAD NOS BENDIGA (Wave your flag.)

For forty days I have been wandering in the desert that US imperialism has made. And if I have run into, crashed into, collapsed into the warm and inviting arms of sin, I don’t mind. God is a gringo in a suit that can’t get me off anyway.

***

I waited five days before I consulted the white plastic fortuneteller. For five days I thought about having to make one of the hardest decisions in my life. It wouldn’t be a baby anyway, right? It’s hard to reconcile pro-choice politics with the feelings that come from terminating something that all those pink and blue books say will give you unprecedented amounts joy. A mere collection of cells. A creature that will smile and grow and give your life meaning. Which one is it? Then there are those women who have babies for all the wrong reasons: to have someone to love you unconditionally, to have someone to love unconditionally, hoping it will make a man love you unconditionally, to put your womb to use before it lays to waste. I don’t want to be one of those women. For five days, however, I loved the potential group of cells in my may-or-may-not-be-empty womb.

I am scared of what these feelings mean. I am scared that my friends will think I have turned into some kind of pro-lifer evangelist, giving a spirit to a blob of blood and proteins. Yet for as much as I denounce religion, I can’t reject the pulsing spirits I feel inside of things (everythings): Have you ever sat on a rock in the middle of a river after it has rained long and hard, ants stinging your thighs, the chirping of frogs filling your ears? The leaves of the trees that hold you in that moment shield the sun from your eyes. Then they open to let the sun warm your shoulders, still cold from the swim you took to get to the most perfect spot in the world. Has that ever happened to you? Yes? Remember that spirit you felt as you hugged your knees close to your chest and closed your eyes? Then you must believe there is a spirit in the pin head-sized gathering of cells that began to take shape inside of you when you squeezed a man closer to you, squeezed your vaginal muscles tighter and tighter (no te vayas) as that man came inside of you. How can you not want to protect that bead of potential life in the same way you wanted to protect that man from everything bad this world will hurl at him, as his head rested on your collar bone and you noticed with every swelling of his chest as he inhaled, your chest caved as you exhaled? There are many things in this world I want to cradle in the clammy crook where my bicep meets my forearm: the baby brown bird with a broken wing I found on the street the other day, fresh baked bread that has risen perfectly, a branch separated from its tree during a storm, a book that makes me miss my stop on the subway, a beautiful man after he has fallen from orgasm, the idea of being a mother even better than my own.

***

Triplets

One evening when I was a senior in high school, I gave birth to a little pink ball of flesh. To this day I have no idea what it was. I remember sitting in the common room of my dorm and doing my homework when I felt something uncomfortable in my underwear, like when you haven’t put a tampon in correctly and you can feel it slipping out. It did not hurt and I do not remember if this birth was preceded or followed by cramps or blood. I remember I was not menstruating at the time. When I went to the bathroom, I pulled something out of my vagina that was about the size of a golf ball. It was the color of my insides: a pink you would never wear, blue bulging lines the color of your eyelids when you’re sick. I placed it on a wad of toilet paper. I sat on the floor of the bathroom for quite some time observing it. It was a hard, little thing. I flushed it down the toilet and told no one about it. Sometimes I wonder if that was the only chance I would be given to… A chance…in and of itself. I mourn it but there is nothing I can do.

Mom told me once that you had two abortions when you were a teenager. Those were hard times, huh sis? Dad, a full-blown tecato fuck up. Mom, depressed and barely holding it together. I was still in boarding school and I rarely came home cuz I hated it. When I did, we pulled each other’s hair and clawed at each other’s faces. I’m sorryI’m sorryI’m sorry Those two procedures were secrets, never daring to cross the tightrope of your lips. I want to ask you about them, to get the advice older sisters are supposed to impart on little ones. What was it like, both times? Was the second one harder or easier than the first? Did you take a pill, sis? Did you have a surgery, sis? So many things are not talked about between us. People say we look like twins. But I don’t see it. If you looked like me, surely we would have more in common, more stories to share, more mindtomind connections that would take the place of conversations. You have two dogs you refer to as the girls, just like mom and dad refer to us. It’s so good to have all my girls here for Christmas, dad, now clean and happy, says.

I had a dream that I carried a baby in a dark Washington DC. I held her in my arms in a blanket. She was me as a baby. I held myself and I wasn’t crying. We were lost and there were police officers who helped us find the metro station. When I got to the escalators, all the gears and chains and mysterious machinery that makes things move were exposed and each step was like a grate but there was a wide space in between each bar and there was a wide space in between in step. I didn’t want to get on. I didn’t want to get swallowed. The baby was not scared. I remember the dream in shades of blue and grey. We were by the baseball stadium, even though I had never been there in real life, but it was under construction. The only sounds were the loud churning and clunking of the escalator, the drills drilling, hammers pounding, men throwing planks of wood into piles.

***

For five days I thought about this moment right now, in the bathroom, sweating, shaking, not wanting to look at myself in the mirror, not knowing which result would be the right one. Then I peed into a white plastic fortuneteller and waited for two minutes for either one or two lines. One line=I’m good. Two lines=I’m fucked. (???)

Why was I doing this all alone? Certainly I wasn’t the only one who got myself into this mess! These are the names I called the man who made me think I was preggers:

1. sperm donor
2. asshole
3. mi amor
4. douchebag
5. papi
6. lindo
7. jerk
8. dick
9. wonderful

These names floating in and out of my head as I carefully read the instructions to my pregnancy test.

***

(Setting: Raquel’s pink and blue bathroom in Río Piedras. It is early afternoon. The mirror is broken, the toilet is running, the garbage can is full to the brim with toilet paper. There are two cats fighting loudly outside and the neighbor is blasting “Loba” by Shakira. It is hot. There are two identical Raquels. They are both sweating. They are both naked except for a turquoise towel wrapped around their chests. They are sitting on the edge of the blue bathtub. Raquel is reading the instructions to the pregnancy test. Other Raquel is looking at them over her shoulder.)

Raquel: (Visibly angry.) What a douchebag, he couldn’t even return my phone call.
Other Raquel: (Smiling. Not really listening to what Raquel is saying.) He’s probably just busy. He’s beautiful! Think about what his baby would look like!
Raquel: No. I don’t want to think about his stupid baby. I swear to God, it better not be inside of me. Fucking jerk, he knew I was going to do the test today.
Other Raquel: Well maybe he didn’t get the message because he had no service, you know that can happen where he lives. (Gets up and dances around the bathroom.) ¡Ay pero qué lindo, qué precioso, qué HOMBRE!
Raquel: Well that dick should have been paying attention to his phone. God, I hope I’m not pregnant! If I am, I swear , I’ll rip my uterus out and beat the shit out of him with it!
Other Raquel: It’ll be okay. Just because he’s not here, doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. After all, he’s wonderful! And maybe we can have wonderful babies together!
Raquel: (Now infuriated.) You know what, fuck you! You just don’t get it!
Other Raquel: (Insulted.) Hey! No, fuck you!
Raquel: No, fuck YOU! (She picks up other Raquel by the hair and flushes her down the toilet. We hear the gurgled screams of Other Raquel. Raquel sighs heavily as she sits back down on the rim of the bathtub.)

***

***

For five days I entertained the romanticized idea of what it would be like to have a child:

I would do yoga everyday so that my baby would come into this bleak world flexible, ready to bend and not be broken by the difficult situations this world would throw at her. I would eat only the purest foods—clean the soil from them with my fingernails—so that my baby would be healthy, not addicted to the chemicals, preservatives, and artificial colors that only serve to make us weak to the interests of companies who only think they are larger and more powerful than the love I would have for that imaginary child inside my may-or-may-not-be-empty womb.

I would sing to her and dance with her to give her the lightness of spirit that will allow her to travel inside the spirits of others and heal them. You see, my baby would be a traveler. And I would pack her suitcase with epiphanies, lullabies, hands to hold, and bombas molotov.

My baby would see inside of you, see through the wool you try to pull over her eyes, see solutions in people blinded by ignorance. See possibilities, shiny and brilliant as shards of broken glass, in this society inured by colonialism. She would have x-ray vision, even though she would probably wear thick glasses, like her mother, the kind that magnify your eyes and make you look like a spider(woman).

I would exercise everyday so she could be strong enough to Fuck. Shit. Up. Tear down seemingly impenetrable walls of silence. Slice through handcuffs with the sharp blade of her tongue. Lift the weight of US occupation off of our chests with her bare, calloused hands. Carry the baggage our grandmothers have hauled for too long with their long, sinewy fingers spotted with age, broken by generations of hearing “no, eso no se hace.” She would be strong enough to love whomever she wanted, fearlessly, fiercely because I would have planted that love inside of her, fearlessly and fiercely.

I would give offerings to Yemayá and Ochún so my baby could be one with them. Offerings of the blood that escapes from my skin as I fearfully jump and crash into their laps. Offerings that would help those water goddesses drown out the Devil’s distractions so my baby could swim through this world with her eyesWIDEopen in water with waves so powerful they knock the weak off their feet and wash away the non-believers.

But I
am not
pregnant.

So I sit on the edge of the blue bathtub and stare at the white, plastic fortuneteller that comes in the aluminum wrapping that comes in the white and pink box, that is Walgreens brand because my first response to First Response was, “hell no, my unemployed ass will not spend eight more dollars for the same shit I can get for $11.99.” And I wait for the second blue line to not show up. And in the empty white space that confirms my empty uterus, after the two minutes of obligatory waiting time, I see nothing.

And now
I don’t have to say
Nothing
To him
I don’t have to plan
Nothing
With him.
I don’t have to worry about
Nothing.
And so,
I throw out the white plastic fortuneteller in the white plastic bag it came to me in, roll a cigarette, pour a glass of wine,
And feel.
Nothing.

¡El Paro Nacional y los QUEERS!

As I have grown older, I have become more comfortable with my identity (thank the spirits) even as that identity continues to complicate itself. I remember the good ole days (do you see the sarcasm dripping from my words?) at my bourgie boarding school Milton Academy, when I used to agonize over being one of a handful of scholarship kids and being one of an even smaller handful of people of color. I evaded questions about what my parents did for a living and didn’t talk about what I was doing over vacations—because, clearly, my ass wasn’t going skiing in the Alps or scuba diving in the Yucatan Peninsula. That, however, wasn’t really an identity struggle as much as it was an experience in displaced-working-classness (i.e. what the fuck do I do with these people who don’t know a damn thing about work?) Some of the people I went to school with had farms and they understood what physical labor meant. But they weren’t the farmers who grew food to live; they weren’t the farmers who worried about Walmart and Costco and not being able to compete with lettuce grown in a place they have never had any reason to look for on a map. My classmates had big farms but even bigger cushions to fall on if something went wrong. They had second houses in the city where they escaped to when it got too cold and complicated in the country.

What I really struggled with as a teenager was the combination of my sexual and my ethnic identity. When I came out as bi (back then, I didn’t have the consciousness or vocabulary to be able to come out as queer), I immediately felt the awkward stares from the vast majority of the students at Milton. Whatever. That didn’t matter. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I really enjoy making people feel uncomfortable. Yet I felt alienation from the other students of color and that mattered big time. Suddenly I was faced with a really fucked up question: How can I be happily Puerto Rican and happily enjoy women at the same time?

In college, this was not a problem. Hybridity was hot and I found myself at home in a community of queer folks of color. Yet in 2003, when I started to spend more time in Puerto Rico, I felt the absence of a proud queer identity, especially that of Puerto Rican women. Gay boys were everywhere to be found (well not everywhere but at least they were visible), yet the gay women remained under the radar. This I contributed to the presence of a fierce machismo that all but silenced the vocalization of an alternative female sexuality, one that had nothing to do with men. I mean, God forbid a woman gets off without the help of a dick!

Which is why it is dope to come back to Puerto Rico and see a full-fledged queer movement fucking shit up. This Thursday, Puerto Ricans from all over the island took part in the Paro Nacional. Organized by students, labor unions, and civic groups, including the umbrella organization, Todo Puerto Rico Por Puerto Rico, the national strike was a success because of the approximately 200,000 people that took to the streets. Generally speaking, the demonstration was designed to bring the economy to a standstill, as a way of protesting the recently passed Ley 7. In March, Governor Luís Fortuño announced his Fiscal and Economic Recovery Plan, also known as La Ley 7, as a means of reducing the island’s massive debt. The law led to the layoffs of about 8,000 government workers in May and 16,470 in September. Those layoffs will leave us with an unemployment rate of about 20% yet somehow Governor Fortuño thinks this piece of legislation will help stimulate the economy.

Perhaps the most problematic facet of the legislation is the fact that it gives the government the power to suspend any agreements established through the collective bargaining process, thereby taking power away from workers and placing it solely in the hands of those of the privileged ruling class. It also paves the way for the further privatization of government services since those jobs that are being eliminated in the public sector are now being redeveloped by private industries. For sure Puerto Rico has not seen the end of the destruction of La Ley 7. Hundreds of millions of dollars still have to be saved and that will probably mean that the Fortuño administration will attempt to layoff more workers.

What does this have to do with the burgeoning queer movement here in Puerto Rico? Everything! At the national strike on Thursday, I was pleasantly surprised by the presence of radical queers spray painting phrases like “Cambio de Sexo Legal y Gratuito,” “Dile No al Discrimen por Orientación Sexual,” and “Los Gays También Somos Obreros.” Thursday’s strike, and all the organizing that led up to it and will follow it, was not just a manifestation of class struggle. It was also an expression of the desire on the part of many different kinds of Puerto Ricans to take back Puerto Rico and redefine it in radical terms. And the government knows that. That’s why Marcos Rodríguez Ema, the Secretary of State, called those who participate in the protests “terrorists.” He said of workers’ threats to close Puerto Rico’s ports: “Ya esto se está tirando hacia una anarquía, hacia los sabotajes del pasado.” Rodríguez Ema is equating grassroots organizing with terrorism because he knows the power that that label holds. He is criminalizing the ordinary Puerto Rican, pissed off with the way shit is going down, calling us anti-Puerto Rican when really we are defending the Puerto Rico we want for the future: A Puerto Rico that doesn't give in to corporate interests; a Puerto Rico that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and pro-woman; a Puerto Rico where everyone has a job and can support themselves and their families. Terrorists? Really?

The police know it, too. The superintendent of police, José Figueroa Sancha, attempted to dismiss the actions of students who blocked one of San Juan’s major highways, el expreso las Américas, by saying, “[el grupo de estudiantes universitarios] no representa al estudiantado porque son unos pocos.” Additionally, he tried to paint those students not just as enemies of the police or the government but enemies of the entire country: “Estaban preparados para hacer daño a la Policía de Puerto Rico y a personas que estuviesen ajenas allí. Incluyendo la Prensa.” Of course activists are going to disagree on how to bring about change. Maybe not every student or every union leader would have laid down in the middle of a highway to protest a law that attacks people in a time of fiscal crisis instead of helps them. The bottom line is, however, that the students of the University of Puerto Rico have been organizing for quite some time against the privatization of the university and have placed their fight clearly within the working class struggle. To say that the students were “unos pocos” is to ignore the purposeful association between student activist groups, unions, and civic organizations.

But back to the queers…

It is significant to me that the queer community had such an active and militant presence at the march on Thursday because it made the struggle for queer rights part of the national struggle. Suddenly, just like every Puerto Rican has the right to a free and public education or the right to join a union, every queer Puerto Rican should have the right to adopt a child, marry whomever they wish, or identify with whatever gender they wish. On Thursday October 15, 2009, queer politics were put on the national agenda in a loud and visible manner and it was dope. On that day, activists proclaimed that being queer was just another way of being Puerto Rican.

My good friend and roommate, Leona, used the occasion of the national strike to make a statement about President of the Senate Thomas Rivera Schatz, gender, police brutality, la Ley 7, and the current state of Puerto Rican politics in general. Leona decided to protest while all dolled up in a military-green dress, a Hitler mustache, and a red armband with a swastika. Yes, it was shocking. No, I wasn’t completely comfortable with the image but yes, I totally supported the act of parody. She walked around proclaiming that she was wearing “one of Rivera Schatz’s uniforms!” For Leona, the act of vistiendose, of dressing up in drag, is intrinsically a form of protest. And a drag queen Hitler/Rivera Schatz, representing both the turn of the Puerto Rican government to the extreme right and the increase in violent acts committed by the Puerto Rican police...well that just brings that protest to another level, huh? Leona was just one representation of the growing visibility of Puerto Rican queerness at the general strike. I have a feeling that one day soon (very soon, keep your eyes peeled), Leona will be back and a hope that this is only the beginning of the inclusion of queer politics on the Puerto Rican activist scene.