The Past Has Passed

“Ya lo pasado pasado, no me interesa (el ayer)”
–Lo Pasado, Pasado, José José

I have played this song over and over and over again. He sings, the past has passed,
of forgetting…

Obsessed with some of my memories, reliving them as if I were there.

But I speak of a memory, not the past, because to do so, to dwell on such a force… the past… is to make myself sick…¹

 

Hearty Microphone, Swallower of Sorrow.
And Glory Glory Glory to the King…

This entry is not to make fiction
out of whatever future will come,
but to poetic on what has happened.

Many visits to memory to make sense of the current.

I’m tired… I’m tired… I’m tired…
To learn is to be in constant movement.
To SEE is to understand where to go.

 

The last few months have been an excruciating process
of sitting with what happened,
how it happened,
and trying to understand time and space…

I was overtaken by that,
though there was so much to say,
I could not find the words.

The spirit, the writer in me, the current self–
all at war…
a younger self surfaced
holding twenty-nine’s shaking hands.

 

I’m in a mental space of accepting what has happened,
making sense of my position in all the spaces I exist in,
trying to translate my experience…

This will be all that is left of me.
Negro has taught me how to leave a legacy behind.
Someday, someone’s going to read about how I experienced things.
I’ve been poetic’n on that.

Still…

Lately I’ve been angry at myself for writing less.
The other part of me has compassion
for allowing myself to exist without any title
to anything, simply tending to my responsibilities
while accepting the sharp and tragic shifts that have occurred in the last few months.

 

There’s a pain in my side,
and stretching…
yeah, that’s the only way to tend to that pain.

 

Of all the blows that have punched my gut,
grief has been the illest
Ouch!

It hurts and confuses me.

And still… every time I’ve thought I was okay
it slips the rug from under my feet like damn…
there goes another headache.

Didn’t I beg the universe for a higher consciousness?
Was this the fucking price?

Am I insane for hearing his laugh carried by the wind?
That he too lives in the tree?
And the birds stop by when I can’t bear the reality…

That I feel as if we will meet again.
His last voice note plays in my head…
Was there joy circulating in his blood after he played my voice note?

I wish to be in the waters of Najayo again.
We were little kids there–
the sun, the waves, and a never-ending dialogue.

I will never forget those eyes… how deep they go…
I see the night stare back at me, and I feel him…

Negro.

 

It always smells good in my house,
but even the meals couldn’t keep me from turning to bones.

Where do I belong?

That is the question that lingers in the shadows,
haunting me at the wake of day.

Every time I think I’ve arrived in the arms of my destiny,
I’m pulled by the ends of my hair.

Will it be like this until I am no more in this realm?

 

I would not trade my experience for anything in the world.
All I want to do is write poems and cry them and sing them
and birth them until the end of my time.

 

I’m starting to SEE
that this ain’t pretty after all!
That it is deeper than I will ever get to understand,
but I still must find my way back to myself.

Every. Single. Time.

 

There’s a letter I had written to Jovanny,
that he never got to read.

I didn’t believe at the time that I had the ability
to translate the profoundness and intention
behind every word from English to Spanish.

I told myself I would wait,
certain about the eternity between us.

Now I’m here, and you’re there…
it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

 

Treasures left at the head of my bed by my dead loves.
The act of dreaming, while one sleeps, is to experience other lifetimes.

What should I take from the waking day?
When sleeping through the night is where I want to stay…

My first instinct is to rewrite an alternative ending.
I spent weeks on the scripts:

You made it out of every one of them.
You come back home to your daughter, to your mother, to your brothers.
To me.

 

The Dead and the Living All In One Place:
January 15, 2025.

I took an Uber to work in the morning.
The driver asks what I do for a living.
I tell him, “I write.”

He went quiet for a moment,
then said he’s been wanting to write a book about his son,
who was murdered in 2011.

He asked me about how he should begin.
I told him,
“Just start writing. The story will put itself together.”
Then I told him someone I love was murdered too.

I said,
“The dead have a voice. We’re going to write their stories.”

 

Seeing you still and cold in that box
made my guts almost spew out of my mouth.
I was frightened! frightened! frightened!
I called upon God,
upon all the magic I’ve ever believed in.

Somebody hurt you.
Somebody betrayed you.
Somebody took you away from your baby girl.

I will never forget what they did to you.
I will never UNSEE the blood from your nose.

But…

How you had this softness to those closed eyelids
and black lashes…
You looked like you were dreaming.

 

Oh, Negro… Oh, darling…
I shake my head and rub my temples,
reminding myself yet again:
the soul, not the body.

 

In my poems:
Characters don’t cease to exist.
Death is only a phase.
The Soul simply cannot perish.

 

Music drives that frequency,
so will your inner voice,
and the company you keep.

 

Friends and loves,
anomalies and teachers,
manipulators and mirrors.

But in the end,
all that remains is:
the self, the spirit, the consciousness.

Can you sit with that?

 

One day you’ll be sitting in front of that holy tree,
sighing a sigh of relief,
exhaling the strain that held your worry–

Only then will you truly understand
what Gavin De Becker meant
when he talked about following your intuition.

One day, when you’re sitting on your porch
and the golden light of the setting sun kisses your face,
it will finally resonate.

The red cardinals will land between you and that tree.

You’ll smile at the sky.
And it will smile back.

And you will understand…

This is why I’m still here.

 

3 things I’m sure of:

One cannot unsee.
One cannot undo.
One cannot forget.

 

The people you love will die–
by nature, or violence

and still…

You will have to rise for work,
care for many things,
and pay rent on the first of the month.

That is the harsh truth.

 

29. I survived a tragedy.
I experienced betrayal.
I fell into confusion.
I was consumed by grief.

 

There will be few, not many.
Write this down…
When it is real, you will feel it.
You will know it.

 

The map lies inside.
One would say: in the shadows.

 

Choco confirmed this with me when he bumped into me,
Mami and Beba on a warm night on Broadway as we walked home.
He had that look, like he’d been through mad shit in life.
He looked at me with those deep eyes,
he kept pointing to his heart and told me to follow that.

 

I remind myself:

This is not the end.
This is not the end.
This is not the end.

In loving memory of Jovanny, “Negro.”

 

Notes
1. Nigma Talib, Younger Skin Starts in the Gut. Talib discusses research connecting dwelling on past experiences, stress, and increased inflammatory responses.