I’m sitting here, overcome with emotion.
Oh, I’m levitating, but I’m also feeling something I don’t often allow myself to feel: tears in my eyes. Out my eyes. Down my face.
The groceries are done. Fortune cookies still must be gotten and mailed to my nieces and nephews, alongside well wishes and the spirit of my family’s talent for and tradition in the kitchen, as embodied by a couple of Levi’s x Target aprons and some bruschetta mix.
Thinking about my last-living grandmother in Peru, who’s to turn 95 next month…. I miss visiting Peru, and I miss her, of course. I would really like to see her right now and at her house with family and friends, para un lonche más, and be around that energy, and have another chat with her. A good one. Oh how she loved and doted on me, and how she protected me fiercely. She always loved me (for the me I always was, am, and will become), y’ know, and I loved her for her. Talk about a survivor.
A few years ago, she had a heart stroke, and away went her speech, half her motor skills, her independent life. Her life in the kitchen, in her garden, in her community. Understand, she’s still there, still fierce, but she’s also there…in a state. The Queen Mother of my family: half benched from the world during her golden years (what a party we had for her 90th!), and completely fucked over by fucking COVID-19, a reality that has kept the lot of her loved ones away.
Oh how I’d love to get her take on the state of the world as we know it in 2021, dahling. I know she knows what’s up (my father, who lives with her and was so her knight in 2020, upheld the strictest of quarantines last year, no small feat considering how many uncles and aunts I have). No matter, I’m rather relieved she did not have to overcome the horribleness and ridikolousness of the last few years, there, here, everywhere, like the rest of us did, because she was living her life.
Always bigger fish to fry with her. She’s still – she just can’t fry ’em herself.
She had the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine a few days before I did almost a month ago (I lucked out, because I managed to snag an appointment as soon as I became eligible, but Walgreens, reportedly in an effort to get their scheduling system up and running ASAP, managed the timeline for a cohort of second Pfizer doses on the Moderna schedule… – and now you know). And she got it because she has the courage and conviction to carry on and be part of the pandemic solution, Karens.
It has been an emotional up/down suite this past month of waiting for my second shot o’ Pfizer (and for another taste of pizza, to which I last treated myself right after my Dose 1). I’ve gone from hella grateful to mad as hell – because some people out there still believe what they ignorantly and stubbornly want to believe, and obtrusively act on it, prolonging the shit for the rest of the world – and mercifully, back again. I realize and really feel right now that I must focus on what I can control, and that is myself.
I need to stop feeling bad about surviving, and about not succeeding in the fucked-up ways my environment celebrates, and about not being what I think other people might want me to be, and simply be, ’cause here and now is what my spirit needs, and because I actually am here and now and I am living my bestest life, and I wish only the same for you.
But by all means, y’all keep going.
Our cup runneth over. And we carry on. Doing our part so we can get together.
Let’s go. 👉🏽
Try and catch up.
King of Cups 