Guayaberas and Banana Leaves

I hid them in a garment bag.  I couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.

Much of how I maneuver within womanhood was determined by my current environment.  I’ve been watching women and building preferences for as long as I’ve been alive.  The core of my style was settled long ago, pretending then to be a statement of preference for the other women in my life, with a tactile longing I only recently came to understand.  But its current expression owes much to where I am now.  Nearly my entire wardrobe is from the heaps of donations I’ve received, filling my closet to bursting and slowly being evaluated for whether and how I’ll actually wear each item.  The friends who provided these items have fairly different styles of their own, and I accepted their largesse knowing that I’d be picking and sorting through it as my style evolves.

Most of those friends are Canadian.  None of them are Hispanic.  And it makes me wonder.

How different would I look if I had recognized myself in Miami, instead of in Ottawa?

Continue reading “Guayaberas and Banana Leaves”

Guayaberas and Banana Leaves
{advertisement}

Chickadee

I don’t belong here.

The paths are the same, the same Australian umbrella trees and thickets of palms and little yappy dogs, the same pervasive sun and smell of car exhaust, but they feel foreign now.  I walk the 33 blocks to the grocery store that sells all the Latin specialties I quickly learn to miss when I’m away, and it doesn’t feel like coming home to something.  It feels like traveling a long way away for my weird exotic tastes, bits of the old country I like to keep around, like the immigrants who define my past.

I lived here from 1999 to 2009, but I got used to counting it as eleven years in my mind.  And I’ve finished with this place.

Continue reading “Chickadee”

Chickadee