The tingling sensation that always has your body tense is normal for the majority of human beings, but why is that? Your heart always pounds very hard, the nerves in your system run around like mice do in a dirty house, your head spins as if it’s on a carousel that won’t stop, and your body can’t keep still and soon starts to shiver. Well, my friends, it’s the feeling of nervousness. This feeling is caused by fears that we all possess in our minds such as not getting hired for a job because you couldn’t get past the interview, or you weren’t successful when it came to passing a test, which is what I fear the most. 

The day of my road test was here, and I can assure you that I’m not ready for whatever comes my way as I’m nervous about the fact that I will fail again. I took it the first time, but that one didn’t go too well as I thought it would. 

It was a cold morning, with everyone still asleep except for me. The skies were mildly bright with no sunlight until later on in the morning. My driving instructor pulled up in his car once I let him know I’m ready to take the road test.  

On the way to the road test, I was already feeling tense as I thought to myself that if I don’t perform greatly on the road, I’ll never be able to get my license, and buy myself a car. We were soon approaching, but we had to make a line for the road test. There were many driving examiners ready to get on the vehicle, and they were sharp as blades. My turn finally came, and the examiner asked me questions based on COVID-19. I responded “no” to every question as it can affect the delay of my exam. I took in deep breaths from my lungs which used up their energy to release it once I was ready. 

I started the car, then proceeded to wherever my examiner wanted me to go. He told me to make a right. I did, but it was a short turn, which was really going to cost me, but all hope isn’t lost. I then made another right in a two way lane. Then, the examiner ordered me to do a 3-point U-turn. Luckily, I was saved by the fact that there were no cars behind me because I would’ve definitely crashed into one. The next part was the hardest one for me, which was parking. I remembered the steps while I was doing it. It looked like I was about to hit the curb, but it was a close one with just only 1 cm away from the curb. The car was parked, and now I had to exit, and head back to where we started. Then it was a pull-over to end the exam, and the results showed that I passed. All the nerves in my body went to sleep, and my brain finally got out of the carousel once I got my road test over with. 

You have a terrible memory, and trying to recall things is like digging around for keys that have long fallen out through a holey pocket. Most things you know about yourself are stories other people have told you. But you have a few memories that are yours alone, and they come to you in finely-detailed flashes when you draw upon them. They go like this:

You sit in an ESL classroom, and your teacher painstakingly corrects your clumsy English consonants as you read aloud to her from Amelia Bedelia. On a crowded train, the three-seater you’re on is empty. A man materializes in your DMs when you are fourteen, and asks you if you know how to belly dance and if you’d keep your hijab on while doing it. Your mother fixes the folds of your first hijab and says you should carry yourself with pride. You see your grandmother again after four years. Her hair is silver, her fingertips are stained with henna, her face is lined with age, and envy burns hot in your chest as you think, if there ever was pride to wrestle away from the world, she took it all. You sit through a sociology class where your white teacher asks you to make him a film about how the world views you, about all the complexities of the identities you didn’t know you had until someone made them dirty. You make him a film, and watching it feels like a bad impersonation of the girl you’ve taken to wearing in the confines of a predominantly white institution. You go home and delete it off your computer. You’ve always loved a metaphor so, at some point, you remember a game you used to play with your cousins as a kid. You’d all give a raw egg to one person, and chase them up the stairs, through chicken coops. They won if they made it to the end of the round with a whole, unbroken egg. You think then that if the American immigrant dream was a round of the egg game, then your egg has long been broken, though you don’t realize it at first. All along, you’ve been trying so hard, so desperately, so blindly, your hands full of eggshells and yolk.

As I wake up in the morning, a day after graduation, I was excited to see that I ended middle school. I exit my room, I see my mom crying and bursting into tears and then I see my dad beside her. Both just sitting there, as the room is in silence and sobbing. They see me but I did receive no explanation, as I walk to the bathroom and come back out and sit. That’s when she said it “Your grandma has passed away.” As I look and try to speak my voice goes into silence as my breathing gets harder and harder, I start crying. I feel pain in the chest as if my heart will stop any second and then that’s when it hit me tears running down my cheeks. As the river of tears when down dropping to the floor.

I did not have a chance to say goodbye or even get to see her one last time. I was counting down the days to go visit her but I was too late, she went ahead and left us with memories.

As my day arrived to go to Mexico, I was excited to travel but also with a broken heart I won’t be able to see my one and only person. As the plane took off, all the memories just came to me, when she took care of me, when she kissed me on the forehead, when she defended me from any danger, when she hugged me tightly and said “Te Quiero, mija.” Those words were always with me.

I arrived in Mexico City, now I had to take an 8-hour drive to a city just close by Acapulco, just a 4-hour drive closer. As I spent my whole day in a car making stops every once in a while, I think more and more about the changes that I’ll expect now that my grandmother is not there any more. As the hours continue to decrease more and more and go down to 6 hours then to 4 and just then 2 more hours to go my heart starts to get more nervous. I take a nap and then realize it’s just 20 more minutes left.

I have arrived to my destination, there I see them my gradfather and my uncle waiting for me, but just that one person is missing. I feel just tears running to my eyeballs just for them to go down my cheeks, they get closer and closer and I hug them tightly. As they help me with my suitcases and put them on to another car to get another 30 minute drive deeper inside the city. I get in the car, and sit next to the window and remember some places as if it was recent hat she held my hand and took me for a walk around these places.

It wasn’t long until I arrived to home, the place that I ran around with my cousins. I drop off my lugage and my grandfather takes to a place close by we stop to buy some flowers and a candle. As we walk we enter a place where all you see is names and dates, we walk down more and more and more and more names appear. When we come along her name, “Angelina,” her new home were she is resting in peace and is an angel taking care of us from up in heaven.

Sitting on a futon in the basement, I lay feeling fuzz. It feels like I’m riding a wave of static. See this,

The feeling of a leg that’s long since fallen asleep without you knowing.

It’s that, but you feel it coursing through you.

Not limited to your veins.

Not limited to your body.

It’s your life, rather.

It’s in everything you feel, an aftertaste that makes your teeth melt.

So I lay there with one ear down in a soft blanket and one listening to the cartoons playing upstairs above the floorboards. My eyes are open but I don’t want much, my sideways view of the T.V. starts looking like cooks in a kitchen on the other side of a doorway covered by clouded strips of plastic.

I hear footsteps going towards the basement door upstairs. I sit up as the door opens, the fuzz is gone by the time the footsteps come down the stairs. I bring my hands to my face to feel tears rolling down my cheek and dripping from my nose. I turn my head to hide my face, my heart beat pounds in my ears.

She had red hair, textbook red head. She made me want to burn at the stake. She didn’t say anything as she walked up behind me, my back still turned and my hands scrambling to hide the mess of my face. A pale and pasty hand eased its way onto my shoulder. I felt the futon sink a little deeper to my right.

I didn’t want to turn my head, not at all, but I did it anyways. I wanted to show her, like someone shows a dog the puddle of piss on the floor that it was responsible for. I started crying again without a sound. I told her I was done with her, she was always one to speak physically.

I didn’t try and hide the tears or the blood on my face when I walked up from that futon. I wanted her father to know who he kept in that basement. I sat on a rock in the front yard and called my mother to have her pick me up. I picked up a half smoked cigarette and looked behind me with it hanging out of my mouth. In the front window of the house, a man with a great big red beard scratched his head and walked to the door next to him. He came outside in a robe and slippers and sat next to me.
He took the cigarette from my lips and said, “I started smoking when I was thirteen too,” now fumbling through his pockets, “better quit now.”

He pulled out a half full pack of cigarettes and slowly placed one in his mouth, then holding the pack out to me. I fingered one out and put it in my mouth, holding it like a drumstick.
He handed me his lighter, and while I was taking my first drag off of my tenth cigarette, he said, “Stat out of trouble, I like you.”

—

The air in my car was stale, the heat blowing in my face made my throat sore. This girl next to me was crying behind a curtain of blonde hair. I looked forward, off at her house, an off-white tower sticking out of a dirt yard. She kept giving me reasons why I was different, reasons I already knew. I let the fuse burn.

Wes.

Please.

I’m sorry.

I said I’m sorry.

Didn’t you hear.

You make me feel.

There’s no one like you.

I started to cry and pounded my leg with a closed fist. Everything was trying to squeeze out me not like toothpaste, but a ballon being blown up by a young kid, too young to know when to stop.

I dug my nails into my leg and said, “get the fuck out of my car.”

Three weeks before this day, after I had to explain my humanity, I was told by her that she was sociopathic. A week after that, we split. Three days after that, she forced herself onto me while I was driving her home from work. So now we’re here. In the previous months, I had been torn away from friends, my family, my job. Again, I was stripped of skin and left bare on the rocks.

I drove away after she got out of the car thinking I would chase after her. I left a perfect semi circle in the mud and sped off on the road. It was then that I started crying. Slamming the steering wheel over and over, I kept yelling that I did it, that I was free.

I know what I know. I know the shit I dealt with. That’s all that matters to me. The shit. I can smell it and I’m sorry if you can too.

What a world we live in, that anything could happen with a simple tap on our little screens. I’m definitely not mad about it. It’s how I learned some of my biggest lessons. It all started off with a direct message. I texted her. You know sometimes I wonder how life would’ve been if I didn’t. I was perfectly fine up until that point. Up until I got my emotions running wild. It must’ve been a very boring day. The funny part about that is that I remember that day as if it was yesterday. I didn’t think too much about it. I can use a extra friend I probably thought. She texted me back. And from that point on, I had developed a deep emotional connection with her for the next six months. Simply through iMessage games and corny games of 21 questions. We eventually met up right before summer had started. Date after date, laugh after laugh, I didn’t think I was capable of being with someone at all. Something about my insecurites always told me that I was incapable of being loved, or liked at that. After all, this was my first relationship and never knew what this type of affection was like. I really thought our relationship was perfect. I thought that this was a forever thing. I started going out of my way to do things that she liked. Sacraficed a lot just to accompany her. I’m pretty sure every man knows how that feels like. I was changing. I would write her in the morning, think about her through my entire day and cap it off in the night time with long conversations about how much I cared for her. I’m not going to lie and act like she didn’t do the same, because she did. At first, I think. She was my favorite person, my bestfriend, my girlfriend all in one. And I loved that. I loved her. I still probably do. I’m just a tad bit salty. But it was until I mentioned that four letter word that things started to go wrong. Yeah, she did say it back but to be honest, towards the end I just never felt it. It hurt me everytime she said it because I felt as if she was lying. Her emotions started to fade and she pushed me away. Used the excuse that she wanted to work on herself to do that. It’s really selfish of me to say that because what if she actually is, but I am hurt. I put too much of my happiness into her and feel like all the time, effort and mental compacity I devoted to our relationship went to waste. I never got a chance to say that. And now, the person that knows me better than I know myself, is a stranger to me.