By Michael J Pagán

to break the ice, a school counselor once asked about my childhood.
“but begin with i feel,” she said. so i told her about how i used to keep
nunchucks inside my jansport backpack, right next to my ninja turtle
coloring books. she thought i was joking. i could instantly tell she wanted
to laugh, but only smiled to her credit. so i told her how i knew what it felt
like to hear gunshots in the distance while watching a friend fly a kite
at a nearby park. how my mother once owned a blue, ’87 corolla
i’d eventually get head in for the first time from a girl my age who was
guilted into doing so by my older stepbrothers even if i didn’t want to.
how she did it because she like them & not me & how my mother
didn’t know or care because according to her, “this city is too big
& decayed for lovers,” but she was talking about herself.

i told her about the first spanish class i’d ever taken: 5^th grade spanish one.
how la profesora asked us to pull out our cuadernos so the class
could review together la tarea that was assigned the day before.
how i had no clue (i’d started the school year late) & how i’d joked
that my mother & i would always call ourselves Miami gypsies because
i didn’t want to admit i had no idea what cuaderno meant but more importantly,
i didn’t want to admit what my mother once told me: “spanish is very important,
but your survival? in this country? that’s more important to me.”

she would eventually refer to me as a highly functional depressive:
“but you want to have & that’s what’s saving you,” she said.
she made it sound like being person was like being born in medias res:
right smack dab in the middle of an action sequence then left to wander
(& wonder) around in our pre-destined timeframes, hoping to put together
in our minds what the hell it was that we actually saw. what the hell
it was that happened in the first place? only for someone to then call
you crazy because someone always does eventually. instead of just listening.

“but what about my feelings?” i then asked her, but she wouldn’t say more.
even though, now, is wish more than anything she did. i wish she would’ve
reminded me: you want to be here, with all its noises reminding you
of what you want to be, instead of just lying there in the dark inside
wounded hallways trying to figure out how to belong to other people.
we’re all so close, but not because we’d like to be—the bodies have always
there. here. & the worst thing in life is witnessing every day & all its devastating
of the things we love & only in death make complete because catastrophes,
they say, oftentimes is where we rediscover our humanity, but is that true?
she never answered that question. is it true? to treat our lives like a bare mattress
we lay on where some else has already died?

Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagán spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before (hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. A graduate of Florida Atlantic University’s Creative Writing M.F.A. program, his work has appeared in Apogee Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, Juked, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Revolver, ANMLY, The Florida Review, Frontier Poetry, and Dialogist, among others.