juliana's story

a very out there introductory

juliana. i hated that name damn it. where did it even come from? there's no meaning, it's ugly; what were these fucker's thinking? oh yeah, they weren't.
when i was little, my family was the most coolest thing. the parties were always so exciting. i remember driving out to new york so frequently, even as a child i could recall the sights on the way. garbage on the streets, graffiti on the walls, homeless people waving cups begging for me to shed a dime or two. i remember 'fun fridays' at my grandmother's house. ordering dominos and doing arts and crafts. sitting on the dining room table in the cigarette stained apartment. making cookies and my grandmother and me saying "staaaand back," to avoid my young self from getting burnt in the white oven. i remember crying and never feeling good about myself. being told that i needed to play sports because i was too fat, at the whopping age of three years old. wanting to kill myself before i even reached high school. lacking self love. i tend to remember a lot. i also tend to regret. but most importantly, i tend to make my way through things.
growing up, i was under the assumption that having a mom and dad who were twenty when i was born was normal. i also thought having parents who were never wed was usual, too. now don't get me wrong, i personally don't give two shits how young you are or if you happen to be married when you have a child; but in your typical white majority public elementary school in central new jersey, you might get a raised eyebrow when sharing this information.
living in south brunswick, you are pressed with the oh-so-racist and arrogant community. saying this, one's mind would usually go straight to the thought of white to black racism, but i will assure you that is not the problem in this township. no, there is a chain of racism. kind of like a food pyramid. the white population are obviously the top of the food chain and they attack the indians who then attack the asians (which makes no fucking sense considering they are asian!!!) who then attack the spanish. black people are usually left out of this, probably because how low the amount of black people is and also because although they were all raised in clean cut, suburban, south brunswick, everybody tries to act hood. everyone thinks that the black kids are automatically ghetto because they are african american. gotta love it! don't get me started on the white kids who try to speak with street slang and act badass because they are really my true favorites. wait, i'm lying. my true favorites are the white racist teachers who are speechless at the thought of a class filled with minorities.
here you are probably wondering: where do i fall on the spectrum? well, i will let you know that i am the product of a colombian immigrant and a european mutt. unsurprisingly, i fall at the bottom of the ladder and to make things even worse, my family was the real ghetto. not like the try hard, put on a show ghetto, we were the real deal. not that i'm stating we were trashy and ghetto but let's just say while all the other kids were listening to hannah montana in the car, i was listening to kanye west.
gladly, i didn't fluently speak spanish and i looked whiter than bread. sadly, when i would eat vienna sausages no one would sit with me at lunch. also, i fell into the hispanic stereotype when my dad left my mom and moved to sayreville.
i was daddy's little girl from the time i was born. [now i'm a different daddy's little girl ;-)] after i was born my mom, dad and i lived with my grandma and grandpa in a two bedroom apartment. i clung to my father a lot more than my mother and he really loved his baby girl. when i was born he took a video of me and in the background he was speaking in spanish, speaking about how his baby was perfect. he sent the tape back home to his family in colombia. sometimes i get emotional thinking about how close me and my dad were when i was little. when we started drifting it took a toll on me big time.
when i was two my parents moved into their own condo. the day my dad went to go sign the paper to buy the place, my maternal grandfather, whose apartment we had been living in, told my dad he didn't have to do this. he nor my grandmother minded us living there and they surely didn't want my parents rushing into anything they couldn't handle. my father answered saying he had to this. it was a pride thing. which in my opinion was the cause of my parents split. when i was four they started fighting more and more often. in fact, the last really happy memory i have of the both of them was my fourth birthday. it was my first big party. to be honest, it was lit. the party had been ariel the little mermaid themed and i woke up that morning sick as a dog. i had a fever but still ran around like any imbecilic child. that day we were taking pictures and i hit my head on a jagged brick and started bleeding. that was okay though, because from day one i've been a true g. i didn't shed one tear. just bled and ate some cake. shit, now i do that once a month.
my dad left my mother for another woman months later. let me correct myself: my dad left my mother for a high school student months later. my 25 year old father started dating an 18 year old and i hated it. i was four and depressed. that's got to be a new record or something. i thought this new woman was a home wrecking devil. my parents not being together made me sickly upset. being told mommy and daddy will finally be happy again if they split. they can be happy, with a sad kid living in a broken home.
i have always been an old soul and able to comprehend what was going on. at times i wish i wasn't, could've made my life a lot easier and less painful.