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Human will is a particularly powerful magic. Alchemy happens when a person truly decides something; when a mind is changed.
Tiny acts of violence enacted with words. Exchanges that had cut and left me bleeding, with my best stuff—confidence, clarity—pooling down, away from me, onto the floor. But not that night. No. Because that day I had decided to reclaim my might; to cease to be shrunk. And in my decision, I’d grown a new version of myself. My new skin thick like coconut shells, impervious to his attempts to crack my joy. My triumph at my accomplishments, my exultation with my own art, euphoria at this new power I’d discovered in simply deciding to change my mind.
Americans love to see Latins dance. Dance, fuck, fight. Anything, really, that’s meant to be done with passion.
Around me, I could feel their thoughts and assessments and presumptions. Anita de Monte, art star on the rise. Anita de Monte, winner of the Rome Prize, winner of the Guggenheim. Anita de Monte, a once-in-a-generation artistic voice. Anita de Monte, a one-trick pony. Anita de Monte, immigrant opportunist. Anita de Monte, wife of the legendary Jack Martin. Anita de Monte, lucky bitch. Anita de Monte, the most miserable bitch alive. No one realizing that I was all these things at once and more.
Later, when word got out that I had fallen (jumped? or, could it be, pushed?) out the window, this was what everyone would talk about. How they had just seen her! Anita de Monte. That very night! How she had been laughing. And how she had been dancing. And how, when she spun around and around, the silver sequins of her dress went flying. Up and into the air. Like the feathers of a molting bird.
now, he’d weaponized it. Transformed it into a blunt reminder of just how irregular to this place, to this world, to this corner office, she was.
And then I was sent to America and rendered invisible. Rendered lifeless. Alone.
The notion that less of her was worth more in the world had wormed its way into her brain and taken insidious hold over her perception of self.
The problem with being alive, I can tell you now, is that it happens so fast, we don’t have the time to make sense of it in the same way that you can once you’re dead.
It can feel so important to matter to someone. To just know there is someone who cares where your physical person is on this giant, wretched earth. To matter to another human being is the basis of having a life.
No, when I looked in his eyes, what I saw was the most dangerous thing of all in a man: insecurity. Because they will crawl over and push down anyone around them in their desperate thrashing to find themselves comfortably affirmed at the top.
