standuphigher

Dedicated to the memory of Patrick Berthiaume and family.

If you have heard the song by Ricardo Arjona about the couple from Havana and New York — the girl who dances at the Tropicana, and the boy who likes rock — it’s a bit like telling my story, but with the plot twist of a Latin American/Anglo-Saxon «Euphoria»-style series. My version would rather say: «She is from Caracas and he’s from New York, she dances salsa and he listens to hip hop.»

Because that was basically the synopsis of my life for a few years: two cities that don’t fit together at all, two ways of dancing, two ways of understanding silence, wrapped up in the same love story. If this were really a series, the first episode would end right there, with that song playing in the background and me thinking, «this is going to go badly, but it sounds so good while it lasts.»

I heard in May that he had died in January.

Four months. Four months walking around the world, handling things of spectacular banality — the grocery store, work, arguing with my son to eat his vegetables — while that news already existed somewhere, quietly waiting, as if the universe were conspiring to deliver it to me only once I could handle it without falling apart completely. I don’t know what happened, but whatever effort anyone made to reach me somehow, mysteriously, never worked. The truth is, I found out the way everyone finds out everything now: by chance, late, with my phone in my hand like a fool.

It was hard for me to understand that he died, and on top of that, the entire universe decided, without consulting me, that I was no longer on the guest list for that news. But it was exactly how it needed to be; something bigger than me wanted me to be strong for those four months so I could keep up with my life while planing to emigrate for the 3rd time. If I had found out on time, I would’ve probably go back in a spiral of self sabotage and depression.

How we got here (or: welcome to the most ridiculous family tree in the Caribbean and Brooklyn)

I met him in New York, and the way I got to him was already a clue that this story was tangled from the start. Before she became my co-sister-in-law, she had already been my sister-in-law once — meaning: I dated her brother first, and later ended up with my son’s father, who was her husband’s brother. Read that again. I’ve had to draw the family tree with arrows more than once just to understand what mess I’d gotten myself into, and I’m still not entirely sure I do. If this were a screenplay, some producer would reject it as «unbelievable» and «too many coincidences.» Well, too bad, Mr. Producer: real life doesn’t have an editor, and families tangle themselves up this badly without asking anyone’s permission.

He was a New Yorker. I’m from Caracas. We basically mixed Latin drama with New York sarcasm and, without meaning to, we put together the most unnecessarily complicated soap opera on the continent.

The Breakup

When we broke up, I was pregnant with our son. And we ended badly — the kind of breakup where someone has to be officially crowned the villain so the rest of the cast can sleep at night. That honor fell on me. I spoke badly about his family, and not exactly with elegance, so today, with the distance time gives you (and several rounds of therapy I owe myself), I can admit it without the roof caving in on me: I was wrong. I wasn’t right.

He was hurt. And that kind of pain can push someone toward demons that only the people who’ve faced them really understand. He went through a hard time. I did too, carrying the guilt of knowing my words had added their own grain of sand to that collapse. We hurt each other, each of us with whatever broken tools we had on hand — and mine, to be honest, didn’t come with an instruction manual either.

Forgiving myself cost me so much. No epiphany with golden light and background music. It was more like slow, ugly work — like scrubbing rust off something — until I could accept that I had caused harm without that making me the permanent villain of the story.

Silence with hope inside

We went two years without speaking. Two years of silence that, for me, were never a final closure, but more like an uncomfortable pause — a «not now, but at some point.» I always held onto a hope — small, tucked away in a corner, but alive — that someday we could treat each other like two civilized adults instead of two characters in a reality show. Not out of nostalgia, not out of soap-opera love. For our son. Because a child deserves to see his parents share the same space without the air turning thick like cold soup.

That hope was my quiet way of believing the clock was still running in my favor.

It wasn’t.

What I really lost

That’s why the title of this post isn’t a pretty phrase pulled off a desk calendar. It’s literal. What I lost in January — and didn’t find out until May — wasn’t just him. I lost the chance to make things right. I lost the chance for my son to one day see his parents speaking to each other with respect, even from a distance. I lost the «someday» I’d been keeping like a quiet promise to myself, so I could sleep at night.

No one warns you that the deadline for reconciling has an expiration date, and that you’ll only find out once it’s already passed.

The moral (yeah, there’s one, brace yourselves)

Okay, here comes the lesson part, even though on this blog we usually avoid it like an unbearable neighbor:

If you have unfinished business with someone — a «we’ll talk someday,» a «we’ll sort it out when we’re ready» — don’t wait for the calendar to decide for you. It doesn’t need to be a perfect reconciliation or a movie scene; an awkward message, a clumsy call, a «hey, this is still unresolved and I don’t want it to stay like this forever» is enough. Because «someday» belongs to no one, and the universe doesn’t send a reminder before it shuts the door.

And that’s it, I’ll stop there — if I get any more motivational, they’re going to have to take away my membership card to this blog.

For you, and for yours

I’m writing this part without humor, because not everything needs a joke to be bearable.

To you: if there’s anything to forgive on my part, I ask for your forgiveness. Not to look good or to close this on a nice note, but because I truly mean it, and because there’s no time left to tell you any other way than by writing it here, wherever you are.

To your family: I want to honor you, not confront you. I know this story has its ugly parts, and I added some of my own. But I also know you were part of his life, that you loved him very deeply, and you deserve for this space to speak of him with respect and affection — not only with the pain of what was never resolved.

And I want you to know this, because I imagine it will bring you some peace: my son is the only child he had. In him, there’s something of his father still walking through this world — his gestures, his blood, who knows what else as time goes on. You will always have an open door from me to reach out to him, to get to know him, for him to get to know you. That has nothing to do with what happened between his father and me. It belongs to him.

Closure

I’m still standing. With old guilt turned into something else — I still don’t quite know what — with a moral I didn’t ask for but had to learn the hard way, and with a son I’ll one day have to tell this tangled, painful story to, with dark humor and all, exactly as it was.