The border to me
XUAN CARLOS ESPINOZA-CUELLAR·WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2015
  
The border to me is a constant anguish,
A big pause button,
Often in dreams I dream of Mexico as my lover
And he waits for me,
And waits.
The border to me is my grandma’s rosary,
She said she’d hold on until I could go back,
Until she couldn’t.
I recently found out that for years she’d scold my cousins for using my table games “he’s coming back, and he’ll ask for them…”
And she’d save t hem in her old, rusty closet.
The border to me is a big pause button,
I often dream of going back,
Who will I be then, when I hit play?
Who will I speak with to recover my grandmother’s prayers,
To collect 12 years of unclaimed hugs,
All the wrinkles and gray hairs I missed on her hair,
And every step I couldn’t walk by her.
But one day I will cross back,
In the middle of songs and candles I will conjure her spirit,
And I will look in the back of that old closet
Where she saved my table games
And there I will find her love
And her songs, her advice, her songs,
And the little pieces she left for me, hidden for me,
When she envisioned the day
That this pause would be over.

She hated her mother's voice, her strong accent thick like champurrado.    Her defiance, her identity.    

  She didn't fit in, and her mother's voice was a reminder why.
A constant reminder.   She hated the moment she crossed that border, maybe “I would have been the popular girl at school with a mother in the United States”. But here she was just an illegal.  

  So many postcards, pretty pictures of tall buildings:   “Las Vegas, city of lights”. She dreamed of one day being a tourist,   like them gueras on TV,   with their flashy credit cards, ordering coca light and rare steak. But here, she was just an illegal.

  Her resentment grew like a cactus: green, slimy, tall and filled with thorns. Each microagression a thorn,   each mispronounced word a bullet.

  She remembers that one day   when her English teacher made her read. She caught her as she was about to leave the classroom,   “Miss Cuellar, it's your turn!”   “Dang this pinche vieja is slick!” she thought...   For cacti can't speak, much less read. But they remember. They remember each day they went without water, so their roots grew deep and profound in hostile ground, and they kept themselves strong, they hid themselves,   they stood tall and vulnerable in the middle of nowhere.

  “I am a cactus” she wrote as the first sentence of her English paper about identity, she then deleted those words, what the **** was her teacher going to think? Now this crazy *** illegal thinks she's a plant   so she wrote her name instead. But deep inside she knew she was a cactus in the middle of hostile lands, far away from that precious lake of healing waters where the wind sings and hills are green; far away from that country of dreams, colors and stories. Stories where her existence made sense, stories where she belonged. But here, she was just an illegal.

  So many things would trigger her, the sunset, the heat, people starting conversations,   “don't talk to me, cacti don't talk”   they grow thorns, they grow green, they like to be left alone. But she knew that that was not her natural state, she wanted to be free. Her spirit wanted to run out of that cactus. Why couldn't she be a bird? Un tzentzontle or a humming bird, even if they didn't live as long, they at least get to fly.

But instead there she remained, rooted, guarded and defenseless, no matter how profound her roots were, she was still an illegal: wrong countried, wrong bodied,   multispirited.   One day her skin began to cry,  a deep beautiful wound  from which a flower sprouted.  She had found poetry and realized that while cacti didn't speak they still flourished.
  To be continued..

When I looked at you
in that blue light shining on your eyelids
Almost making you look transparent
I swear I heard a voice telling me
what God wanted me to be.
That you somehow had gotten it through my thick skull.
Because I can't see or touch God,
but looking at you,
reminded me I wasn't alone.
And I kneeled near my bed every night
Praying something would exist
Not to save me or fix me
Because I don't need any of that
I just wanted something to make me feel less alone
When I laid my body down onto the earth
I swear the soil took it over
and led me to
Where everything ends and begins
My hand trembles less
And I'm not afraid to speak in front of you
I remember how I felt something when I looked into the Oregon Sky and how the mountains seemed to never end, and they filled up the sky and it made me feel full.
but when I look into indianas Sky, it's empty and so am i.
My creative writing teacher told me, I was very observant, and seemed to care about others a whole lot. She always writes  on the  top of my poems,  "very creative" I don't feel like I'm anything. Especially creative. Because if poems hadn't been trendy in middle school, I wouldn't be a poet now. And that scares me. I don't know which parts of me are real. I started photography because it was the cool thing to do, I become interested in art because I guess I wanted to feel what others felt when they looked at the individual paint strokes, and I went on dates at the art museum and stared at the paintings more than my actual date, which isn't poetic at all. Now I go alone and sit in the whisper room for hours because everyone I take it there thinks it's too creepy, I write down what I hear and sometimes put it in poems. I think I hear what I'm actually thinking. Because my brain usually shuts that out and I hear what I want to hear. They say write what you feel, what you've experienced, what you love. I feel sick and sad when I remember the past, and I don't know what I love. And then they tell me to write happier but I don't feel that way.
I wish the ground could swallow me up. I want to be able to touch the world but I feel like I can't breathe. How will I ever change the world, if I can't change myself? Because I look in the mirror at 12 am and I wish I could crawl out of my skin.  I wish I could write love poems and draw smiley faces all around my paper. But the happy parts in my poems are usually made up. I add them in, to make it seem like I'm a lovable important person. I think everyone sees right through me. Flowers grow under my body and push through the soil. If they can grow, so can I. I am far from happy and I write it all down because I will not lie to myself. I'm alone.