SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT YOU
TEMOCX
Sometimes I think about you.
Sometimes I think about you and the thing and the thing you’ve denied. I think about the isolation that surrounds you. The silence about you. I think about your screams…and how no one around seems to hear. Sometimes I think no one wants to hear. And in your silence you scream for help…but your voice is drowned…muffled…out…into space. And in your silence you suffer.
Sometimes I think about you. And I look at my hands and I know that I can’t help. I watch you dissolve… disintegrated…disappear. I participate in your destruction and your suffering I try to ignore because…sometimes I think that I am a part of it. I’m helping in your destruction.
Sometimes I think about you. I think about your dreams and how they’ve vanished…right before your eyes…right before our own eyes right…right our lives began to lose their meaning. I think about the answers that you desperately search for. The answers that I fear you will not find and yet to try to find with dignity. I think about you and your dignity when faced with your misery…and your silence.
Some times I think about you. When I used to see you get your letters of rejection…many positions that’s were filled…many positions for which you simply weren’t qualified…they will always say. But that’s when you still would send out your resumes…before you gave up…but who can blame you. I think about being born in the wrong place and you’re going to the wrong schools and I think about you speaking the wrong language. I think about you having the wrong accent…and how the few interviews that you ever had never turned into anything…and the price you’ve paid for being a spic (*).
Sometimes I think about you…and I wonder if you think about me…and if you know that I care…that I am scared…and I look up to you. The kid that grew up looking down on people looking at you…you will find it odd, I think. I know. But it’s true.
Sometimes I think about you. I think about you teaching at UBC and how you would ride the bus after doing your shift as a janitor. I think about how you used to worry that one of your students would see you mopping a bank…I think about you at UBC…the token spic dad teaching the odd night course. I think about you, those white kids complaining to the dean because you have an accent…those classes every kid was white…those were the wrong, I think. But that was before. I think about this society and where or how we’re supposed to fit in…this whiteness that surrounds us denies we exist and slowly erasing us into…nothing and I fear that we don’t really fit anywhere and I think about our future and the answers we can’t…won’t…will find…our accents and the doors that never opened for you and how I want them open for me…for us to pull with us…and the need to change things if only for us…for only one moment we would scape our daily reality…
Sometimes I think about you.
…and can I only cry…alone…like you.
N.R. Este articulo, escrito por Federico Barahona Araya se publico al final de los 80’s o principio de los 90’s en un periodico de Langara College en Vancouver Cabada.
(*) Spic. (OFFENSIVE•US) a contemptuous term for a Spanish-speaking person from Central or South America or the Caribbean