My Life Re-written

Welcome back.

In my last post i left you with a quick recap of my childhood. In this entry i would like to expand on that time of my life. Because maybe writing all of this will help me access my  memories, the ones that are locked away in a corner of my mind. A corner that we all have (trauma or no trauma), that hosts our darkest parts, but i also think holds wonderful memories that we have forgotten with time.

Because life happens, and as we age the joys and sorrows of that life, of everything we live and experience, will make room in our minds, by pushing some memories away with the help of age, worries, family and work.

Those wonderful childhood memories get tucked away and sometimes even replaced. And i just know that everything that gets pushed away, good or bad, are all in the same place, that dark unnaccesible corner of our minds.

So here ill pour every memory i have of that time, trying to be as concise as possible.

Living in my neighborhood was amazing, i still live there today, when i had my chance a couple of years ago, in the pandemic, i packed up and moved my family to a house near the one i grew up, where my grandma still lives. I wanted my kids and my husband to experience the neighborly atmosphere where everyone knows everyone. It’s like the suburbs, and i finally have a garden and garden beds. The smells are still the same, the park where we played basketball, and rode our bikes is still the same, with certain upgrades, but still the same. The streets and the houses , some are totally different, but they still evoke precious memories in me.

My best friend at the time, i will call her Ivette here, lived two houses from mine. I talked about her in my last post:

“I remember my best friend at the time, we were inseparable. We used to play making a little kitchen, we made salads by picking flowers and leaves all around the block.“

It’s amazing that my mind is so damaged from my party years that this is the most i remember about her. In the family house my mom and i lived on the second floor. That stair behind the kitchen on the 1st floor lead-up to the door that was my mom’s bedroom, we slept together in this massive king size bed that had a wooden frame and a sunken mattress, i loved that bed. She also had a walking closet that opened up to the bathroom. A door with a step up, on the other side of the bedroom took me to my game room. This i remember clearly.

This whole room was filled to the brim with barbies. I had so many, i remember a pink 3 story house with an elevator, a red sports car, a carriage with a horse, several princess barbies. I think that my favorite was the one that had a big red dress, 1990’s holiday barbie, my mom used it once as a cake topper for one of my birthdays. What i didn’t have was a lot of kens so the boys in my made up world of barbies were mostly my teddy bears.

Ivette used to spend hours in this room with me and i would spend hours at her house, our playdates were spent walking up and down the sidewalk. We would make up this fantastical worlds, and the barbies would act out our stories that were mostly telenovela like, dramas about one barbie cheating with the neighbors teddy bear. My grandma watched a lot of mexican telenovelas so i’m guessing that’s were it came from

We would go on these walks around the block, picking flowers, twigs and leaves and make a little garden salad with our toy plates and silverware. There was this boy, i don’t know why this one is a core memory but i’ve never forgotten about him, he used to pass really fast next to us and knock out whatever we were making, so we would chase him and start arguing, bothering us was a pleasure to him, what i don’t remember is his name.

Sometimes we would even argue about our barbies being mixed up. And there was this boy, our childhood crush, still today everytime i think of him my mind goes to that little girl. He had blonde hair falling down his face, blue eyes, in my tales i’ll call him Zach because he reminded us of Zach Morris or Macaulay Culkin, but he wouldn’t give us the time of day.

My earliest memories is also one of my fondest and most precious of my childhood, it was the yearly trip to see my dad. So i guess here you can really start to unravel my mind and understand why and how i turned up the way i did, all of my issues can be trace to those early years.

That yearly christmas trip to italy to visit my grandma and my dad was the happiest i remember. I loved the plane, even thou it was an 8 hour flight i don’t remember sleeping on the plane, i loved looking outside the window, walking up and down the hallway and talking to new people.

The food on the plane was a source of discomfort for us, at the same time they were serving the food i was retching my guts out in the little barf bag, it was the smell. One time they even let me get in the cockpit with the pilots, because i was so sick, and they showed me all the controls and buttons, it was amazing.

My grandma lived in this huge apartment complex. Arriving there you were first met with these huge black metal doors, a little entryway that opened up to a circular garden.

All around the garden the apartment buildings, inside they were tiny. As soon as you enter to the left a little one person bathroom, next a little kitchen (if there were 2 people inside it was very crammed), then the living room/dinning, and a little balcony, and the bedroom with a massive closet that took all the wall, it was so big she needed a pole to reach the stuff in the upper racks. In the window sill of the bedroom she used to put rice for the pigeons so i could watch them.

We went daily with her to the market and to the senior center, she was really fun. In the apartment next to her lived her older sister, this woman was amazing. She drank 2 and 3 bottles of red wine daily (my grandma used to call her out on this), widowed 3 times, broke her hip dancing in the senior center, had to stay in bed for 4 months, got her hips replaced and went dancing again, i remember the ladies at the senior center clinged to their husbands everytime she walked in. She also had all her original teeth and died at 96 from a fall. I loved her dearly.

We stayed at my grandma’s apartment and slept all 3 in the same bed and some days we got in a car and rode very far to visit my dad. We always went to his job, he used to work in a chocolate factory, i don’t remember much about the building but i do remember where we met him every time we went. We would meet in a space that reminds me very much of a highschool cafeteria because it had picnic tables, and a little green area with toys.

My dad would always greet me with 5 or 6 new barbies, and a ton of chocolate, you know the huge bars you can buy at the airport, that helped the fantasy that he worked in a chocolate factory, and apparently lived in it to. I don’t know why i never questioned this fantasy but i was ok with it, even in school when people asked me about him this is what i said, looking back i can see i was very naive.

When he left us to go look for better opportunities in italy, he didn’t find them. Instead he made some really bad decisions about his life that eventually affected us. That opportunity he told my mom about, it was drug trafficking, he was getting paid to move it, and of course the punchline here is that he got caugth.

That amazing, wonderful chocolate factory that made me think my dad was like willy wonka, and made me gloat to all my friends, yeah, that was a prison. He was in jail in italy, that is why we had to make that trip every year. I think here i unpacked my unhealthy addiction to chocolate.

I do have to say i give props to my mom to try and conserve my innocence for so long. The horrible truth is that as hard as she tried, she couldn’t do it, i was forced to grow up in other ways, terrible ways.

So all my childhood memories of my dad, the one that with my mom gave me life, are of him in jail, i wish there was a way i could forget what i know and only leave the good memories. My grandpa on my mom’s side was more my dad that he could ever be. And don’t get me wrong i don’t hate him, but i don’t think i love him either, it’s more of a neutral feeling.

Ivette moved from her house in 1990, we were 7, harsh for a little girls to say goodbye to her best friend, i remember the heartbreak, my second one because my dad leaving was the first. So i was forced to expand my friend group.

I made friends with 2 girls, Ada and Laura, we spent our time biking all over the streets and always had to be home when the street lights came on, we played Hopscotch, Red Rover, Marbles, Statues, Duck duck goose, with all the kids from around the neighborhood.

One time, a couple of days before my 13 birthday, i got amazing news. I don’t remember who did it, but someone came to my house and told me Zach wanted me to be his girlfriend (I think this was standard behavior at the time, like the little gossips in school, some kid tells another that someone else likes them, yeah we all had this at one time.) i was so happy with this proclamation, even if it didn’t come from him directly, i remembered i spend a couple of days in heaven. But it didn’t last long.

After that i didn’t even saw him for a couple of days but i still was going all over telling everyone the news. And the day of my birthday the same person came back and told me he was going around telling everyone i was a whore (i can’t remember the exact word they used but i was hurt), my world shattered, i was heartbroken again but this time i was also angry, so i told my friends i was going to slap him.

That was like throwing fuel into a fire, everyone heard about that. So the next day, in a street close to mine, the whole neighborhood was there, even kids i didn’t know. Zach was on one side of the street in the house of a girl i’ve never been friends with