Gringa

Everything is always so easy when you're younger. You know who you are and what you want to be. I'm always twisting myself into places now. Putting myself into boxes. I //like// boxes. But the older I get, the more I realize that those boxes are too small for me. The box breaks, and I spill out. Luis spins the spinner. I reach out. [[right foot, blue]] [[right hand, red]]

When surveys ask me my first language, I never know what to put. My parents taught me Spanish and English simultaneously. Nowadays they primarily use Spanish around me, but they knew that I needed English to prepare me for school. They weren't quite prepared for me to lose my Spanish. It wasn't that I //wanted// to. Everyone at school only used English. I figured, somewhere in my five-year-old brain, that Spanish wasn't important. I transitioned to only using English, even at home, until even the slight Spanish accent I had burned away into nothing. Once I realized my mistake, I had already begun to feel embarrassed about how badly I spoke what was once my native tongue--my //parents'// first language. My parents started calling me 'gringa.' I bristled. But I couldn't help feeling that they were right. Without my Spanish, what made me different from any typical American? My eyes lock on the spinner as it stops. [[left foot, yellow]] [[left hand, blue]]

I never fit in anywhere growing up. I was the in-between. I wasn't girly enough for the girly girls. I didn't like dresses, or pink, or lots of glitter. I wasn't always chasing after boys. If asked, I would say I was a tomboy. But that wasn't quite true either. I had assumed that because I wasn't girly, that made me boyish. I just wanted to wear my T-shirts with jeans, and just read. I guess this must have been my first clue that labels, while helpful, didn't always work. But I continued to force myself to fit in. Sometimes that's all you can do. [[left hand, blue]] [[right hand, red]] [[left foot, green]]

I was still drinking milk when I got baptized. Literally, I mean. I was barely over a month old. Mami pushed the teat of the bottle into my mouth, and I chugged away as the priest poured holy water over my forehead. Adam and Eve's original sin washed away from me as I drank milk. This would be a pattern. I accepted the Catholicism in my life: the blood, the love, the history. I just had my own way of doing it. Just like everyone finds their own way of reaching the spots on a Twister mat. The spinner spins again. God, what now? [[left hand, green]] [[right hand, yellow]] [[left hand, blue]]

Luis called me a lesbian when I was twelve. I didn't yet know what it meant. "A lesbian means you like girls," Luis told me with a smirk. "I'm not a lesbian!" I said defensively. I got crushes on //boys//. Like that guy in my social studies class! He was kind of cute. Not only was I sheltered, I was also oblivious. And then my best friend came out to me on the way home from school. I was in shock. Gay people //did// exist! And one of them was //right here//! Little did I know that I was also one of them. Carla had beautiful golden-brown curls. Her nose scrunched when she laughed. She was always willing to give a hug. She was sunshine embodied; I lived for every one of her smiles. I was seventeen and could understand my feelings a bit more. For the first time, I began to question. I knew what it meant when I felt like my entire world revolved around a single person. Why did their gender matter when they could make me feel like I was made of butterflies? I dived under the bisexual label and reveled in the shelter it gave me. Luis had been wrong to call me a lesbian. As I reach out for the next color, I realize he probably didn't even remember that conversation. [[left hand, red]] [[right foot, blue]] [[left foot, yellow]]

At nineteen, I stopped giving a shit about Church. Or at least, I pretended to. The Catholic Church taught things that I didn't care for, anyway: divorce was sinful and so was being gay. Abortion? Bad! As a bisexual daughter of a divorced mother, this didn't sit well with me. I started identifying more as 'spiritual but not religious.' It felt hollow. It didn't challenge me. And for me, there was no point in spirituality that didn't challenge you. My truest self included Catholicism //and// bisexuality. This was the hardest part to reconcile. I could pretend to push away my feelings for other girls and be the good, unquestioning Christian. I could turn my back on Catholicism and fill the hole with something, anything else. I yelled at God. A lot. Gave him a real piece of my mind. Why both? Why do I need to be //both//? Why can't the Almighty just spin the spinner and let my hand fit on one color? I get up from the mat. "You lose," Luis says, holding out the spinner to me. "Your turn to spin." I rip the arrow from the spinner and place it on the white edge. "[[All appendages, white]]."

My nana prayed the Rosary every day. At three in the afternoon, she would lock herself in her room and prayed for an entire hour. Luis, Tina, and I sometimes would wait by the door. If we pressed our ears against the wood, we could hear her softly repeat "//Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amén.//" She taught us prayers in Spanish. The //Ave María//, the //Padre Nuestro//, even the prayer to the guardian angel. Even as I left Spanish behind, I kept these prayers in my heart. There is something special about praying in a language that no longer comes to you naturally. [[left hand, green]] [[left foot, blue]]

"You cannot be a Catholic //and// be Pro-Choice," my CCD teacher, Mr. Johnson, said to my class when I was thirteen. "You have strong opinions about abortion," I said as I was leaving the classroom. "It is murder," he said levelly. "Why wouldn't I be passionate about human lives at stake?" I thought about it for a moment. I gave him a sort of half-shrug, half-nod. I wanted to be a good Catholic. At sixteen, my friends said to me, "You can't be a feminist //and// Pro-Life." Oh, fuck me. I wasn't even one of those weirdos standing outside of Planned Parenthood clinics with signs calling to end abortion or anything. Now I was being asked to choose whether I would be Catholic or a feminist? When I'd always considered myself //both//? God, I wish Twister mats had orange too. Wish they had all the colors of the rainbow. [[left hand, red]] [[left hand, green]] [[left hand, blue]]

I'd always loved other girls. I surrounded myself with girls in elementary school. Each of us were stunningly different: Cleo was bright-eyed and enthusiastic; Carrie was the tallest and shiest of us; and then there was Kelly. Sweet, fierce Kelly who chased a boy around the playground and kicked his shins for pulling a prank on me, Nydia, her best friend. I wanted to be around her all of the time. She wanted to be my sister. I felt the same. I don't know if I had a crush on her. It didn't feel like one. But these feelings were some of the most intense I'd ever felt. My days orbited around her. We spent each moment of recess together. She would sit at my table at lunch, even though she wasn't supposed to. We joined the school orchestra together. She took care of me. I wanted to do the same for her. Was it sisterhood? My first crush? Maybe it was something indefinable. Maybe it was something outside a Twister board. [[left hand, red]] [[left foot, blue]]

I didn't see Tití Imelda much. My mom's younger sister bounced from place to place-- Puerto Rico, New York, Philedelphia, back to Puerto Rico. I didn't know where she was now. At family gatherings, there were always whispers about my tití. That her lifestyle was all wrong, that she needed to settle down already. The hairs on my arms bristled. But I couldn't open my mouth to defend her. I was thirteen, my Spanish was poor, and my family had deemed any defensive conversation around adults to be 'disrespectful.' Even Mami just pressed her lips together around her tías and nodded. I was a born-and-bred Puerto Rican gringa, though. Fuck respectablity. I couldn't understand why my mom just let her family say those things about her younger sister. "Why didn't you say anything when they were talking about Tití Imelda?" I asked on the car ride back to Mami's house. The one she'd grown up in. "She's not living the life they want her to live," Mami replied, her grip tightening on the steering wheel. "They think I can probably talk sense into her." "Why?" I snapped. "Why do they care so much? Why can't they just leave her alone?" "They //do// leave her alone," said Mami mildly. "They just worry about her. We all do." A couple of years later, I learned they were worried about her because she was a lesbian. I scowled. Guess they'd worry about me, too. [[right hand, yellow]] [[left hand, red]]

I'm a bisexual, Catholic, Puerto Rican gringa. It makes sense to me. It doesn't need to make sense to anyone else.