One day you are laughing and enjoying your life . . . and the next . . . you are lost and scared.

I remember the goon chasing me . . . . He was probably five or six. I must have been two, because this was before I was kidnapped by my drunken father. 

Time isn't worth saving. 

I don't even have much to begin with, and I won't ever have enough to spend freely. 

​

If a liminal space is to be understood as a place between spaces, then I . . . have been living in liminal spaces since the day I was born.

You either know or you don't. You stay and settle, or you run like hell; praying it all works out. No other feeling exists but the feral tiger . . .

Mornings were usually accompanied, if not
beaten, by the high-pitched beeping from my father's Casio. . . .

we all called her ‘Sister.’ . . . every time we went to her house, she would give my big brother and me vanilla wafers, like clockwork.

I would stare at her face like I could magically understand . . . Then she’d repeat it in Spanish, and the knot in my stomach would loosen.

I grew up on the . . . coast, where the tickseed frames the houses and I couldn’t walk down the street without being recognized

. . . when the sun had yet to fully embrace its rays . . . my grandma’s fingers softly touched the top of my head . . . 

I almost suffocated in the amount of foliage that surrounded me. Everywhere I looked, Mother Nature’s flourishing wrath tried to haunt me.