“Do you ever feel like a cliché?” she asked and looked up at him.
“Always,” he replied with a sly smile.
She threw back her head and laughed and continued slowly dancing to “Volver, Volver.”
Category Archives: Cuentos
Dissonance
“The Hurt Locker… I think I saw that movie with you.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Let me check.”
“But you did, I know.”
He got up from the bed, walked toward a shelf by the door and picked up a large ziplock bag from the shelf. He walked back to me and sat in the bed.
He fished around for the orange ticket stub amongst more ticket stubs, photo booth strips, homemade cards, simple notes scrawled in the morning, and more mementos of our 18 month relationship.
“Here it is! Yup, I saw it with you.”
“I knew that already,” I said as I looked through the clear bag. I stopped and then spoke without thinking.
“So, is this the stuff you’re going to burn when I break up with you?”
“Probably not. I’ll just put it away, but it depends on the terms of the breakup.”
“Oh.”
I’m a funny little thing
One day, I’m going to tell this story. I won’t leave anything out. For once, I’ll be honest. At least as honest as my memory allows. I’ll recount the beginning, the middle and the end.
End? You ask.
Of course. There will be an end. This isn’t the kind of story with an ever after.
Globos
Ten… nine… eight
I didn’t join in the countdown, I just steadied myself against my cousin and others in our group in anticipation for the chaos at midnight.
And it was chaotic. Balloons fell, cheers broke out, people around me hugged and kissed. I didn’t join in. No boyfriend or date by my side to hug tightly and give a sloppy drunken kiss to in celebration of a new year and decade.
Instead, I swatted the silver balloons falling around me and settling at my feet. There were a lot. They crowded the floor so I couldn’t move, not that there was much room on the crowded ballroom dance floor.
As Jesús hugged Mariana and Jenn, I stomped. I stepped on one silver balloon. It popped easily under my heel. I popped a second, then a third, a fourth and so on until the area around my feet was clear.
A tall white guy — whose silly sunglasses I had borrowed a few minutes earlier for a photo to add to the weird eye-wear files — asked, “whoa, where is all this aggression coming from?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know.
I felt out of place at the Roosevelt Hotel’s New Year’s Eve party. It was too Hollywood. My simple black dress wasn’t shiny, short or tight enough. And my heels didn’t look like a torture device. Still, I was having a good time sipping on free drinks and dancing. My original NYE plan fell through, but Jesús saved me (hah!) with a last minute opportunity.
I snapped a few photos. The tall white guy kicked another balloon my way. I stepped on it with my heel and relished the pop.
Sunny California
My mom didn’t watch much TV when I was growing up. In fact, I rarely saw her just sitting around doing nothing.
“No real work is done when you’re sitting,” she’d remind me as I’d take a seat while folding laundry.
Still, she did turn on the TV for background noise when she ironed. Most of the times it was the afternoon newscast. That was practical. She could get an update on rush hour traffic and know when to expect my dad and get the weather forecast.
In listening to these newscasts, I mistook the anchors’ “Southern California” for “sunny California.” This made much more sense to a kid growing up in the drought years as Tony! Toni! Tone! sang “It Never Rains (In Southern California)”.
I write all this to give you an idea of why I’d complain after four straight days of rain during dinner with my advisor and fellow grad students.
While my fellow advisees — tired of sloshing around campus, traffic and taking the bus in the rain — felt my pain, my advisor did not.
“You need to leave California, Cindy.”
She had just returned from a work trip to Michigan and surely some rain and lows in the 40s were little to complain about.
I pouted.
Lotería Chicana 