c.s.kiner

light my path up the stairs when I come home late

tired and teary and torn

have nothing on this reminder

of your love

I think there is guilt in my mourning. I became aware of my color and lost my Lola at the same time.

and first and foremost, I miss her. I miss her funny quirks and her demanding our time and her love for sweets and American mayo.

but I also missed opportunities to learn brown experience from her. to carry her pride and her culture with me the way my skin does without knowing.

to ask why she didn’t teach her children Tagalog. to hear how nursing school was never enough, she had to study every night afterward.

to listen to her voice tell me how a brown woman lived when she was young.

I missed it. and her stories and recipes will have to sustain me while I walk my own brown path.

csk

there are a few memories of Lola that I cannot conjure without crying. pictures of her that have become so vivid and fought to survive when we lost her, that I hadn’t prepared for preservation but that I needed to remember when she passed. and I think I have a picture of mourning that tells me “it will get better with time,” like it’s just another moment that I’ll forget. but the fighting pictures overwhelm me, and the thought that I will never again see her so vividly always breaks me down. May is the worst—her anniversary and her birthday. the month belonged to her, and it still does, for my mother and me. now November belongs to her, too—the month in the hospital. and it’s been a few years but the tears come with just as much force—the rain doesn’t let up just because it’s been a long time.

csk

sometimes I have trouble believing that you are more than just a warm, breathing body in my bed—morning sunlight on your face and the sincerity in those blue eyes remind me that we have a history and a future of love, but you are such a dream that I must blink a few times to convince myself. it’s not so much about how lovely you are to look at. it’s more that we somehow manage to tread the most difficult terrain without faltering. that a problem is vast and hopeless until you are by my side, and then it vanishes into thin air without artifact. it seems unfair that I must only face the troubles of the material human world when you are not holding my hand, but how can I complain when all I must do is intertwine our fingers to carry on? a friend told me that love seemed so unattainable, so convoluted to her until she found herself in the middle of it, saying “oh. this is easy.” and I know love will not always be this way—we will face much steeper mountains the longer we walk. but at least we can climb them in good company.

csk

I didn’t know until I found it missing that love requires an immense amount of listening. love needs a willing ear and a ready heart— artificial love is loud and cannot hear pain but true love hears without speaking and gives the right cure.

csk

csk

being the only brown body at your family’s dinner table is unsteady footing, knotted shoulders, sweaty palms, silent prayers.

you’re well worth the discomfort or I would have slipped away long ago. and your warm grip on my hand under the table keeps me rooted, allied.

but negotiations pour down my neck and into my synapses, lighting sparks until my confidence turns to liquid— sweat—

these people are good people because they love you. you, the only thing I know to be worth loving. and they endure me because you love me.

I just cannot help but wonder: if we passed on the street a year ago, would they have seen me?

and all the practice I did in school to be a worthy opponent of conversation a strong articulate woman turns to mush and I am reduced; a girl who wants her boyfriend’s parents to approve. I wear dresses I have not worn since before puberty struck. I lose control of my mouth and it crumbles into “likes” and “ums” and I am doing nothing to help myself nor my stereotype.

I tell myself that I am white-passing. half-white is some white. they may not even see my color but I survey the room once and I know I’m not fooling anyone.

then I beat myself up for wanting to hide my gold/my golden.

rinse, repeat.

I stay for dessert and for stories of “sketchy neighborhoods” and pray the conversation turns not to politics. Like every member of every family does. And I see my family’s dysfunction in their eyes but it is colored with love.

I endure these good people because they love you and you love them. I want them to be my family, too but even a stranger’s eye could tell you we share no blood.

csk

the first time I heard “I love you” in tagalog— mahal kita— was from a boy. I was sixteen, and I had to ask the internet to be sure what it meant.

and I think it’s strange that I never heard it from my lola or my lolo or my tita or my tito they always told me in english. “I love you."

they told me in tagalog just not with words. with lumpia and pancit and bitter melon that tasted so foreign. with pearls brought from home and stories of their lives before me. with hugs and heavy blankets to keep me warm.

when that boy said mahal kita I wondered if he knew what romantic love meant. I sure as hell didn’t. mahal kita was my family love, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

but mahal kita is what I say to my lola when I look upward to her in the clouds now

because those words that language to me will always mean family.

csk

there we sat. me and a man who had become a mentor, one who I had recently realized was the only authority this close that I could truly trust. even then, I had some difficulty confiding in him. confessions of anxiety and depression brought tears and red cheeks in front of a man I had assumed went through his wonderfully illustrious career without doubts, hardships, blips. and of course I was wrong—this man sat in front of me, a university professor, teaching survival in a field rife with discrimination, abuse, poverty. either way, I spread my guts to him. twenty-one years of my own damn personal problems. he nodded and smiled and frowned until I was finished and then he asked

“where’s home for you?”

and before I could tell him that I grew up in the valley and I moved out for college and that I wanted to stay in the city I said

“home is a person for me.”

the man in front of me, the authority figure with the illustrious career

cried.

csk

tell my mother I’m proud to look like her. tell her I smile when I’m called her nickname— ligaya, tagalog for felicity,

translate my mother’s name back into the mother tongue for my mother’s mother. felicitas.

tell my mother I wear the resting bitch face I inherited from her like a crown.

tell her she showed me with her working hands that “strong” and “capable” are terms that describe brown women.

tell her how my smile glowed when I got my first freckle and laid outside until I had more painted just like hers.

tell her that her wrinkled fingers lola’s hands once looked like mine I hope that I can cook like that once mine age that way.

tell my mother I wouldn’t have my job if she hadn’t taught me what she had taught herself.

tell her I know she didn’t mean to repeat her mother’s mistakes in forgetting to teach me my anatomy but that I learned her power and I had it when I found my limbs.

tell my mother that I delight in being her spitting image

but I cannot return to the nest this season— I must define ligaya for my own.

csk

when I hear her name fall off your tongue I can watch it tumble out; bounce, brittle, and break she is no longer yours but your time together is no secret yet I have no trouble hushing the prickly whispers in my jealous mind that sound their alarm at her mention.

because my fragile name      could never fall      off your tongue. you would not allow it. I have heard you sing it into      the sky whisper it into my      listening ear but most often cradle it between your lips and catch it in your willing hands, protecting it until you are able      to return it      to my care.

it will always be mine but it is yours to keep.      I’ll take yours someday, too

csk

many days of damage have been done to this body so much so that she looks unfamiliar most nights.

reclaiming her is daunting.

she hurts. she screams. she disappoints.

reclaiming her is daunting.

you are rebuilding me—no— you are helping me rebuild me. returning the molecules, speaking the strength into existence until I believe you

reclaiming me is daunting.

but though I am all yours, you have not claimed me the way men did before.

reclaiming me is possible.