keeping on keeping on

03. ANGELICA

"They practiced the 
policing of reserve on the surface of my brown skin. They practiced homing in on enemy. The clouds above, the sky above, witnessed."

- Sonnet L'Abbe, CXIV

The lock clicks as I turn the knob. My cat greets me back with a purr, and then she's off.

I never really liked this place, never wanted to call it home. It was impressively large, but it was too clinical. The walls were bare and the tabletops were pristinely empty. A box of colorful belongings sat in a corner, where it's been withering away for the past eight months or so.

A certain photo caught my eye, and I remember Yunior once again. Our apartment in Harlem was small, but it was ours. It was home. Now, I don't think I'll ever see it as one, the memory of numerous girls he had an affair with was seared in my mind.

I feel the weight of my engagement ring on my finger.

I didn't think this job as a counselor in high school would last, but apparently it did. At first I was just looking to go somewhere as far as I could get away from the memories. But if I'm completely honest, I've grown to love the kids, no matter how stubborn they are sometimes.

The sound of my ringtone pierces through the silence and I immediately fish it out of my messy handbag. I check the ID and find myself surprised to see that it was Mrs. Wilson. Why would the secretary of the principal call me at 9:15 pm?

"Hello Mrs. Wilson," I greeted apprehensively, "what can I do for you?"

Mrs. Wilson's soft voice was tinged with sadness as she said, "Hi dearie, I'm afraid there's some bad news."

I remember picking the phone up from the floor and getting my bag.

I remember getting into the bus.

I remember the red and blue lights swirling around me as I reach Evanston High School.

I remember staying up as I tried to contact Mr. and Mrs. Owens. Tom and Justin never wrote their home address. Mrs. Wilson told me it was because there was an incident last year where a bunch of teens threw rocks through their windows screaming at them to go back where niggers come from. The scene, as painful as it is, provided a distraction from thinking about what to say to Tom's parents. We decided to call the parents ourselves rather than the police, to prevent further issues that arose from such a sensitive topic.

How do I tell them their boy's gone? That their boy was shot because someone suspected he had drugs on him? That someone thought it was justified to shoot an innocent kid just because he was black?

At 4:38 am I finally get ahold of Mrs. Owens. From her voice I could tell that she just woke up. I took a deep breath and tried to stop my voice from quivering. "Mrs. Wilson," my voice cracked.

"Yes? Who is this?" She sounded more alert now, more careful. Call it a mother's intuition, but she knew something was wrong. "Hello?"

I realized I was holding my breath and let go. I took another deep breath and carefully said, "This is Ms. Angelica Rodriguez, the guidance counselor in Evanston High. I'm afraid something happened to Tom."

***

I hear Justin head to the door and I knew Will was on the other side. My eyes drifted back to the colorful flowers, full of life, surrounding the casket. Suddenly my hands were enveloped in warm, bigger ones. I looked up and saw Tiny hovering. "Hi Ms. Rodriguez" he says.

"Hi Tiny, how are you holding up?" I ask.

"Better than you are, it seems" I can feel my eyes getting sore from crying and without having to look at myself, I knew I look like shit. Sensing my uncomfortableness, Tiny hands me a folded piece of paper. Questioningly, I look down at the paper.

I have accepted this home as mine, I hope you find yours, Ms. Rodriguez! :) - Tom

"You were like a sister he never had," Tiny whispers, "you gave him support and courage despite what he was going through. Mrs. Owens found this in his bedroom. He was meaning to give it you the next time he saw you."

With shaking hands, I unfolded the paper. Tom's handwriting stared at me in the form of a poem he had written down. Wiping stray tears, I slowly read,

CXIV by Sonnet L'Abbe

             I'm not sure whether it happened in Manitoba or Alberta: go home, they complained, go back, wherever pakis or niggers come from. Was 
I seven years old? Was I five? The day was cloudy; there was wind, and a sidewalk underfoot — a path of cement on which we kids marched. In whose place was I a guest, if home wasn't this flat territory we were on? The hard sidewalk under my shoes, their sense of here. 
I walked home alone — I say "home" — I went where my parents paid rent, right? Our house wasn't ours? Overhead, the sky spread out; the sky's country was itself. We had moved from Ontario, but my gut got that they didn't mean there. Immigrants, all of us, we'd chorused in assembly — the more immigrants, the kindlier the country, the folksier the mosaic. First the English and the French, then Western Europeans and the Ukrainians, I guessed, then Chinese and Indians, then the Guyanese and other such Commonwealth stragglers? Eventually we'd bring into "us," Canadians, a panoply of the human race — so my sweet young self, in Trudeau's aftermania, believed. Those children's hate had a kind of guilelessness, however, that conveyed my abjection straight from their Canadian parents' hearts. I was foreign to clear distinctions between master and savage — to fantasies of homesteaders who, by subjecting trees to their saws, had "mixed their labor" with "unowned" lands. Homesteaders, they called themselves, by principle: "home" was theirs, because they were first to fence it. As if we still were at war with whatever made entreaty against their fencing, my existence existing too near threatened. My very being entreated something before I ever opened my mouth. Get lost! Here kingly kids drink from institution's cup. Something older than English yea well knows what with his guts he must disagree. Something français dit bon, histoire-là, je parle 
au-dessus du poète: domination, Dominion, domicile, home. I protested: one of my parents is here's occupying family! Don't blacken 
me! Please see my colonists' blood, inside! They practiced the 
policing of reserve on the surface of my brown skin. They practiced homing in on enemy. The clouds above, the sky above, witnessed. The land underfoot said, here was here first. We thought about 
beginnings.

I burst into tears. I've never felt this kind of pain. Losing someone wasn't new to me, I've grown desensitized at these situations, simply because I don't let anyone get too close to me ever since Yunior.

I always told myself that these kids would grow up and move out, forget about me, and I accepted that. But for one of them to leave unwillingly, because the thought of home was not his, it was theirs, made me furious.

Here was here first. Tom's home wasn't someone's fenced in territory. It wasn't fenced in by colony, or by race, or by nationality. Tom's home was his, because he made it his. And because of this, he accepted who he was.

As I refolded the letter neatly, I removed my engagement ring. I will make this place my home, these kids, this town, would be my home.

I thought about beginnings.