❝you're ripped at every edge,
but you're a masterpiece.
and now i'm tearing through the
pages and the ink.❞
❘❘
"IF YOU CROSS THIS BORDER UNLAWFULLY, then you will be prosecuted," Attorney General Jeff Sessions told the entire world last year. "It's that simple."
Because it's simple, so fucking simple, to prosecute asylum seekers, to tear apart families, to ruin lives.
"If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law," he said. "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border."
In May of 2018, the Trump Administration implemented a family separation policy—a zero tolerance approach along the US-Mexico border to deter illegal immigration.
From April to June, this policy separated thousands of families, victims fleeing trauma and violence and poverty in their native countries. If caught at the border by federal authorities, adults were prosecuted, as promised, and children were held by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
When revealed to the public that the policy never included any measures to reunite those families, and therefore enforced some fucked up permanent separation, a wave of national criticism over these cruel and inhumane methods forced Trump to sign an executive order on June 20, 2018, effectively ending family separation at the US-Mexico border.
Despite the official court ruling to end the policy and reunify families within 30 days, it has been reported that over a thousand families have been separated since, and thousands more have still not been reunited.
For those parents, for those children, those months feel like forever. Algunas cosas son para siempre. Cada día y cada pinche noche es para siempre.
It's December of 2019, and some of those families are still separated.
I drop my pen.
"It's that fucking simple," I hiss, raking a hand through my hair with a bitter scowl. "Nada es pinche simple."
It's December of 2019, and I haven't seen my mamá in three years. It's December of 2019, and I lost my papá nine years ago. It's December of 2019, and I came to this country eleven years ago.
It's December of 2019, and I'm four weeks pregnant.
El tiempo no para. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much you run from it, no matter how much you... you...
My throat tightens.
No matter how much you wish it was different.
Tears sting my eyes. Silently, I steer my gaze up from the inked notebook to the quiet room.
Todo es blanco.
It's a soft haze of white light, skimming white walls and white floors, but it doesn't stay white; it caresses different colors of clothes, different hues of hair, different shades of skin.
Everyone here has a different story.
Fuck. ¿Qué estoy haciendo aquí?
My hand is fucking shaking, and my head is fucking reeling, and there's something razor-sharp gnawing at my heart, biting, like faint sensations of ice, still desperately clawing into my bloodstream.
I draw a deep breath, but it comes out short and ragged, and I can't steady, I can't blink away those violent fucking tears, I can't focus on the bleeding ink and the white paper, I can't... I can't do this.
Estoy sola, sitting alone in a Planned Parenthood, surrounded by strangers, silent and still, clutching a tattered notebook in my lap and just waiting for it to stop.
"Okay, no, no, no," I mutter, reaching for the pen again. "Puedo hacer esto, puedo hacer esto."
I chose this. It was my decision, and I need to do it.
But the pen feels heavy, so fucking heavy, with a million lost confessions, with shame and guilt and grief, loss and loneliness, and... and... anger.
All those fucking feelings, repressed and revived, are suddenly at my fingertips, pulsing, throbbing, destructive in nature, but somehow... unapologetically mine. As the pen hovers over the illegible inked words, as it meets the blue-lined paper, as I write what I know, what I hate, what hurts, what is real.
These feelings are raw, and they're justified, and they're so fucking painful, but they're real. They will always be real.
"On May 23, 2008, I crossed the US-Mexico border. On August 11, 2010, my father, José Luis Reyes Álvarez, was deported."
"Neva Álvarez."
My breath hitches. Abandoning the scrawling words, the tangled sentences, the start of something that will never end, I glance up with a weak smile. "Sí. That's me."
❘❘
**ONE MORE. ONE FUCKING MORE. ❄️
YOU ARE READING
Snow
RomansaWhen Neva Álvarez moves to Queens, she's merely biding her time between bartending and dodging her brother's phone calls before her final year at NYU, and with the summer dwindling to an end, it's difficult not to find herself drawn to her new next...
