Returning to my childhood. When I slept at my grandmother’s house, she would wake me up, give me breakfast, and take me to school. And if I spent the night in the apartment in the projects, she called my mother’s cell phone at seven in the morning to wake me up. I think about my aunt’s intentions. She wanted to help me, show me another reality, get me out of the projects, get me to college. To her, that meant being a better person. But I refused that future of well-being, and, as she put it back then, I wasted my potential. I didn’t study anything in college and I ended up as not much more than what my parents were. I didn’t want to disappoint her, not her or my grandmother or myself, but accepting the hand they were holding out to me meant stripping myself of many things. It meant sloughing off who I was then. And who was I? I was a boy who loved his mother above all things, and I was going to stay with her, I wasn’t going to betray her again. I guess I knew that maybe my mother wasn’t the prettiest, and it wasn’t likely she’d ever take me on vacation or make me the food I liked, but she was my mother, and if I wasn’t by her side, no one else was going to love her.

For a time I’d thought that if I separated from my mother I would get caught up in one lie after another and live another person’s story, one that didn’t correspond to me. Wasting my potential, resigning myself to my life, was the only way I saw to be honest. But the truth is—and maybe this is why I can’t forget those days in La Serena—that once I was back with my mother and my brother, I wasn’t the same as before. A part of me was lost forever and I was caught between two selves, the one I was and the one I could have been. Although I try, I can barely reconstruct the voice of that ten-year-old boy, before that vacation—the last vacation he’d ever have.