I deleted all my social media. I wanted to focus on studying and get my state license out of the way so I can potentially transfer out of the agency where I work at now. The pay raise alone was not incentive enough for me to care, but I realized I didn’t truly like where I was working. It’s not the job, but the environment, isolated from my coworkers because I don’t want to get to know them and I don’t want them to know I’m queer. That’s what I told some coworkers who do somewhat know me, who I am out to because they themselves are family or allies. As I complained about at work, if there’s about 250 engineers at work and let’s say 6 or 7% of us combined are some form of LGBT per the latest company survey, that’s only about 15 total? One of my friends admitted she had preferred not to say, so we rounded up to 16 total engineers throughout the agency who were some flavor of not-straight.

I complained, it’s not about the numbers, but that conformity, that adherence to socially conservative values was felt. Our upper managers with their stay-at-home wives, the way everyone was always talking about marriage and then kids. I didn’t admit it at our dinner, but it’s been harder to go through this family stuff and have to say very little about it at work.

See, I couldn’t mindlessly scroll on my phone at work this week since I had deleted everything to focus on studying. It was good for my work flow too, I might as well focus on work to prevent any boredom. Ok, finally outputting what I used to in my old section, when I could work so much that I didn’t have to think about my personal life. Well, this job is more steady than that, lots of work but all a constant steady stream rather than a constant chaotic stream. So I needed a lunch break, I took my lunch break and went out to get coffee at the local shop up the street, perhaps it counts as the heart of Compton. Inside the shop, plenty of students working a local zine, a new addition to the shop. Writers and poets of South LA, the eleventh edition. I grabbed it and my coffee, took it back to my car. I had been planning on reading anyway, although a different novel, more academic, less artistic.

I read about family, about growing up in South LA, Covid, the things people had lost, the ways their families had been mistreated. Then I read about a guy who, this poet who used English in one half of the sentence and Spanish in the next, Spanglish here and there. He really mixed it up, the magic lost on me. He said something about English, this tongue we’re all forced to learn here, our second language. Then Spanish, the language of our homes but itself a colonial legacy. Then he mentioned Nahuatl and I rolled my eyes. Yes it was the most common language in pre-colonial Mexico, but first, we can’t all be descended from them and second, they themselves were conquerors. They didn’t stamp out the other languages, Mexico recognizes something upwards of 60 different Indigenous languages and many, many more dialects, so perhaps they were kinder in their conquest than the Spaniards.

But that’s not why I started crying. This poet traced a connection to Nahuatl through his antecedents, through his parents (not Nahuatl speakers themselves, as if it mattered). I started crying because of how disconnected I felt from my own parents, how abandoned from them I felt, again. And again. I had recently seen my biological father, but that gulf would always be there. My mother was still blocked from contacting me directly, but our connection was never good. I couldn’t call and ask for motherly advice, seek her out just to hear her laugh. She only called to yell at me, only texted to be upset, or to her credit, sometimes just to make plans to see her on the weekend, but the last time she yelled at me it was because I wasn’t available. She had told me she wasn’t to blame for anything that happened in my childhood. She confirmed what I had always felt, that it was just me taking care of myself.

And maybe it was that I had been drinking and smoking all weekend, but also it was that I didn’t have social media to numb that pain, but I felt so tired to acknowledge that again, that it was just me taking care of my mental and emotional health. No one was around to lend a hand, no one to reassure me.

I remembered sobbing at the end of Gentified, the grandparent was finally able to return to Michoacan to see a grave of maybe his own father? I saw the name again just now, I wanted to verify they had gone to Michoacan, all the reviewers just said Mexico as if that was specific enough. But the tears have already started and I couldn’t make out the name. My grandmother couldn’t go see her mother before she died because she was scared of crossing back across the border without papers and she didn’t want to risk it. We tried to convince her, my mom and I, telling her we were old enough, her son was only a year younger than me he was old enough too. She didn’t go in the end, didn’t get to say goodbye. I’m thinking it through now and actually, she was probably in Mexico City getting help from one of my great-uncles, being cared for by his wife. But we are from Michoacan so that and the song plating near the end, one by La Santa Cecilia. The familiarity made the scene far more painful than it was intended. I just rewatched it, there’s not a single tear in the scene and they joke about tacos. I was sobbing the first time I watched that scene, wailing into my pillow so as not to scare my neighbors.

Anyway, I wasn’t sobbing like that in my car at lunch, but I was crying. And I thought, this old pain again? It wasn’t as bad as watching the show finale, but it felt disproportionate to what I had just read. So I figured I’ve just been holding on to all of this for a while. I didn’t have social media to help me numb the pain anymore and so it was allowed to surface. Indeed, the rest of the week has been a mix of the best days and the worst. I cut out the pre-workout too, the blood it was drawing elsewhere was making certain things difficult, combined with all this anxiety from scrolling through the apps. I still set a new PR for deadlifting. But there have been nights where the sorrow takes the spotlight and I feel the loneliness, aching as I am for physical connection and warmth. I wonder, what would I feel like today had my parents been that for me, cared for me and nurtured me in that way. Would I be a colder man, less aware of the myriad ways to feel at odds with the hegemony?

I was sitting in the barber chair, telling myself I deserved the extra cost and pampering of asking for a shave along the fresh cut. The thought occurred to me that I should forward you some money so you could do the same on your fiftieth birthday next week. Well, whatever the equivalent would be for you, to have your hair and makeup done up perhaps. My barber had been telling me of her travels, a concert she’d been to and I was jealous, glad she was out travelling but wishing I had seen that artist in his home country. “Bueno, esta vida solo hay una.”

So I sent you the money and cried, because it wasn’t enough to take away all the pain that you had gone through but also, because of all the pain you had put me through. I know better now, what I didn’t know then when you raised your hands in anger to strike me. That was all you knew. Faced with the uncertainty of the world and the difficulties of a country that did not welcome you even as it sought to exploit your labor, you took all that confusion out on your eldest children. The younger sisters you told us were too young to understand. I suppose you really believed that, that we were old enough to understand, and needed that to be the case, so you could hit us when it was all too overwhelming and we spoke out of turn.

I wish I knew then how to stay quiet. I wish back then I had the resources to help, instead of being another mouth to feed. I didn’t have much of a childhood anyway, you swept me up into your problems.

But I know now and see that your mother did the same, as was done to her as well. She was the eldest and orphaned. Did I see the connection growing up, between what had happened to my grandmother and what the state here threatened to do to us. Only once have my sisters seen the contortion in my face, when you accused me of saying I didn’t know what you had been through. I answered back, trying not to cry, squeezing my face muscles to prevent any tears, “You never hid anything from me and I was always your smartest kid, apologies to my sisters. I grew up in fear that one day I would come home and la migra would have gotten the three of you. I knew I would drop out of school to take care of my sisters. I hope they never knew that fear.”

But you didn’t put me through that, not directly and not without trying to improve the situation. Still, you didn’t really have the means and you didn’t have the people to lean on around you. Neither did I. There were no uncles and aunts around us, they were all back home in Mexico. We were alone, the three of us, then the four of us, then the five of us, our family grew and relatives migrated here. In time we had connections, but the burden often falls on the first, the oldest or the ones who moved away, and the three of us in a straight line were the eldest: your mother, of her five siblings; yourself, first of all the cousins and then many years later, the much older sister of my uncle; myself, only four of us total and the only boy.

Part of the love I have for my siblings has been in seeing the pain you had dealing with this all alone. My sister and I have never been alone dealing with you. We’ve backed each other up, called you out on each other’s behalf, reminded each other that yes that really happened after confronting you and you saying no it didn’t. Your mother does the same to you and I see it in your face that you doubt your memories, the childhood traumas that on the eve of your fiftieth birthday still give you nightmares, can still break you down into a sobbing mess. I have seen it, but I cannot heal you any more than someone could heal me. I could empathize, but it’s hard to do so when I know you’ll turn around and blame me, somehow. So when my sisters ask for something that is within my means to give, I do. And I always try to be there for them, as, they were for me without knowing it.

I wouldn’t have made it this far without something else to live and work for. I was ready to throw my own life away, to chase the dragon and leave this unloved flesh behind. Back then especially, before I had even begun to process what had been done to my body, I couldn’t stand to be in it, to feel that same flesh that responded in pleasure to unwanted stimulus. But I held back from destroying myself after you kicked me out of your house because of them, my sisters. I knew you’d fall apart and blame them, hurt them as you had hurt me. I have seen the people who taught you that behavior and they are not happy in their old years, though they may still outlive me.

So I don’t blame you for taking it out on me. They took it out on you first. You were and are responsible for your actions, but you also truly didn’t know better. And you pressed on anyway, as I did, so you should still have that money. Treat yourself… I believe you did your best for what it’s worth…