Take Off and Fly

Take off and fly

Steel wings carrying you, taking you from the warm weather that made your skin glisten,
Away from the mangoes drenched in lemon and pepper that dripped down your chin.
The airplane took you from pain you didn’t know existed
You were too young to understand what the screaming and the bruises meant.
You could not see that this goodbye meant growth and not destruction,
It was the beginning of your reconstruction.

Winter bit into your skin and your mother’s kisses tried to heal you-
From the wind, from the heartache of missing home.
While you imitated the language that came from her mouth
Word by word you learned the language that your classmates spoke, repeated until the words Rolled off your tongue like clouds

It’s nearly ten years later, your feet have barely left the ground
you don’t want to remember how it feels to fly.
You decide to try.

Take off and fly
To a country that used to be yours but now is a skeleton of a home.
A language that was shed as you tried to forget and
Now you’re scraping at the dust trying to find where you flung it.
Sentences, palabras, and a nostalgic taste are all that’s left.
Everyone wants to know why you don’t speak the language,
The one you learned before the world was bigger than your grandmother’s arms.
You can’t explain the necessity you felt to assimilate,
To whitewash your own skin- paint it over and over until you could imagine yourself as one of them because you thought you blended in,
forgetting that the sun soaked into your skin causing brilliance,
forgetting your heritage was one of resistance.

You were never white enough for them but now
Here you “spoke too white” were “too American”
But your mouth remembers the taste of pupusas and the burning of the coffee still too hot to drink.
Piece by piece you start to remember.
As you soar the skies to go to New York,
To home,
you realize that the sky welcomes you,
It knows you’ve grown.
The clouds wrap around you like the arms of your grandmother
And whisper their see you soon

Take off and fly
A year later and you’re greeting the sky again,
The sun shines and reflects on the metal wings,
Winking and saying “I knew you would come back.”
Citizenship makes this trip a family one.
Your siblings hold the stars in their eyes as they realize
That through the years the love of the family was always being sent,
Fingers tracing your photographs. Praying. Waiting.

You’re scared to go back. How does your ever changing multi layered identity fit into the picture? Will the frame cut off part of who you are?
Afraid your worlds will not combine,
Like oil and water,
It would be one or the other.

But now you see stars in their eyes,
The weathered hands of your grandfather,
The crinkle around your mother’s eyes,
The laughter of your brother,
The taste of lemon and the burst of mango and you know,
One foot in both worlds is the way to go,
One here one there, your identity is a structure.
It is pieces building you up from the ground,
Each brick and stick and muddy palm, each hurt and word are irreplaceable.
Your identity is not an either or, but a constellation that cannot be separated to fit into one world.

 

Alexandra ’20  was raised in Guatemala until she was eight and then moved to upstate New York. There she attended a small school in a very small town. There she became involved in activism that has led her to pursue a degree in sociology.

 

 

 

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