Disculpe

I don’t feel very verbally articulate today.

It’s like everything that happens here takes on a tapestry of meaning.

The last few days have been a little bit stressful with my housemate. He keeps saying he is moving out any day and I am waiting for it (without him here it is much easier to focus on Spanish) but it hasn’t happened yet. I am starting to play keyboard again, at least, and hopefully I will start to get my energy back. A couple days ago he lost his wallet out his window or something and then he climbed the gate between here and the funeral business to look for it. He had me come out in the pouring rain and ‘help’ him and then offered to let me go somewhere in his rented car without paying him but then tried to hold that over me like a power thing and I almost got out of the car and started walking. It is so annoying, he doesn’t seem to care to speak Spanish, only speaks it when he thinks people do not speak English, and at least IMO I think he’s rude about it. Speaking Spanish is a pleasure so I don’t know what his problem is. Suffice to say it was a pretty stressful night, and he’s been draining my energy.

I got something at Burger King and then we stopped at Walgreens. He waited in the car. The line was really long. I only remember a guy backing into me slightly in line. I immediately say ‘disculpe’. Suddenly it’s like this guy that was in front of me in line is no longer there. Then I pick up this fun little ball of chocolate. Now I notice three girls in front of me instead and one of them is picking up a ball of chocolate too. They are giggling a lot. I got to line and tried to pay with a card but it takes forever for the system to process and is declined twice. I was pretty sure it was a store issue since the lines were so long and there was a sign saying they only accept cards with Visa and Mastercard logos and such things. He says it’s okay, don’t worry about it. I asked if I could take money out of the ATM instead and he said, “It has no money in it.” So we went to another Walgreens and I took money out of their ATM first just in case.

This morning I went to the closest restaurant down the street. I walked across the street but realised I’d be walking right by the store where I haven’t been since someone called a room temperature bottle of Coca Cola in the fridge ‘caliente’. I smile like every time I walk past the open storefront without looking inside but I don’t know what it will take to get me back in there again. Someone told me about this place with home fries and let me try them and I thought he meant this tienda sold them and that’s why I got scared when the girl told me there were no papas the first time I asked her for breakfast. I thought she was singling me out. He actually got the potatoes from the restaurant right next door but after that I half thought she might had a grudge against me because she wouldn’t bring me papas. I was nervous and shy trying to talk to her until the day she said the drink was ‘caliente’ and ever since then I haven’t even been able to walk or look into the store.

So I crossed the street again to the side with the funeral home. When I get to the restaurant where the home fries actually are I order an omelet and home fries. It is my first time having home fries at this restaurant. I sat at an outside table with a great view of the new mural on the other side of the funeral home from the house. I don’t eat eggs very often except in restaurants when there’s not much else that I can eat. I can’t believe they don’t completely repel me like meat does. (Eventually I need someone to talk this through…)

My server starts gently calling a chicken out of the restaurant with little crumbs and I get really still so the chicken will not get scared. After a moment she says, as she passes me, “She’ll come eventually.” She gives me hot sauce “just in case” and I cover everything with it. The taste of the food was amazing. I have a whole bunch of ones and they start blowing away when I try to count them. I tell her I am going to try to pay with a card. I leave a 30% tip. She says, “It worked,” and I say, “Have a great day.” She may be insinuating that I am too chicken to walk back into that store again? Like everybody around suspects something is going on!

There was something about her though and I can’t explain but it’s almost like the people here in town, in some strange way that I can’t explain, are exactly what I imagined they’d be like years ago when I wanted to come here because I was doing a transcription project that interviewed girls studying in STEM fields at the University of Puerto Rico. I can’t remember any of the interviews clearly but I do remember the way Puerto Rico felt when I heard these girls talk about their lives and ever since I have wanted to come here.

All I can say is that she felt like that. In a way, so many people in town do, but this was maybe the first time it really dawned on me that, I don’t know, it is like there was a feeling of comfort and at homeness I was searching for or the sense I gleaned of the island when I typed up those interviews (or maybe one or two of them in particular) is here, if I’m open to it… all I can say is that Puerto Rico is like no other place in the world.

It is nothing like I expected but in a sort of subtle energy level way when I tune into some of the energies around me it’s everything I expected without knowing how (and yet also nothing at all like I expected and did I even have any expectations?). It’s like the familiarity of the island takes time to dawn on me and a veil slowly fades that reminds me I am home.

I am processing a lot of things. Her words about the chicken: I think they are the exact words that a nurse or some hospital worker said to me at Harrington Hospital last year right before I was transferred to this other place where I was then sexually and verbally assaulted right around the Fourth of July. If I didn’t mention it here, it was right after my mother screamed I hate you I hate you I hate you when I tried to say how much I was hurting and that awful violent house sent me to the hospital without my consent to hurt me more because they knew I was hurting, and it was where a girl named Mariah was sectioned by her police officer father and later restrained perhaps for desiring to talk to me. I spent a few days here before they transferred me and it was really weird having noooo idea what in the world to think about any of the employees. It took a lot to trust that they were not all going to be as evil to me as the people at the last places they sent me but I seem to recall that some of the staff there I rather liked.

I was asking about something like how long I have to wait for someone to give me an evaluation or something and she said, in a way that felt really inappropriate or something, or creepy and foreboding: “She’ll come eventually,” and it’s almost like she said it almost in a whisper so no one else would hear. I forgot all about her until today. I got a sense she had an ulterior motive. I did not think she was referring to what on the surface it seemed she was referring to (and later in the place they transferred me to they actually sexually assaulted me on the pretense of restraining me for stomping my feet on the floor). Now I am thinking about this person saying these words to me while I was lying in the gurney and I just can’t make up my mind about whether this girl was good or bad… and for some reason even though she didn’t have a big role in my ‘treatment’ figuring out what I actually feel about her intentions is starting to matter. It’s like she might have said these words just to rile me up.

That along with countless other things that happened at these violent places scared me. I forgot all about those words being said to me until today when they were brought up in the context of a cute chicken and now… well, it is weird, because I liked some of the people at those hospitals, many of them were downright evil but I liked some of them, and one of the ones I liked the most was a nurse named Olivia. (I don’t know if I’ve said that here before, so I just thought I’d say, because you never know, she might read this somehow.)