When We Left Cuba

by Chanel Cleeton

The thing about people telling you you’re beautiful your whole life is that the more you hear it, the more meaningless it becomes. What does “beautiful” even mean anyway? That your features are arranged in a shape someone, somewhere, arbitrarily decided is pleasing? “Beautiful” never quite matches up to the other things you could be: smart, interesting, brave.

“Because I was tired of things happening to me, and I wanted to make things happen for myself.

I lied before when Nicholas Randolph Preston III—soon-to-be-married U.S. senator—asked me about freedom. I would savor it—for a moment. And then I’d fight like hell to ensure it was never, ever taken away from me again.

I never accepted any of those five proposals, never really considered them, because while most were nice enough men, some odious but in possession of perfectly nice fortunes, they never made me feel anything. They never slid under my skin and rattled me. In one evening, Nicholas Preston has.

You can love someone and still not lose your reason.

“Isn’t that the whole point? Why are we doing any of this if not for the romanticism of it?”

Do we all have secrets lingering beneath our skin, private battles we fight?

My body was easy to share; the rest of it more difficult. Ironic, really, when you think of all the times my mother and Magda worried over my virtue, guarding my virginity as though it was the most prized part of me. They worried far less over my heart.

“The only way to stop being afraid of something is to confront it. To take away its power over you.”

“I don’t even know what ‘safe’ means anymore. I was so busy living in a bubble, I didn’t realize how tumultuous the rest of the world was, how badly people wanted to tear down everything we’d built. None of it was real. It was all just a pretty illusion we fooled ourselves into believing. I won’t make that mistake again.” “So you don’t believe in anything anymore?” “I believe in myself.”

“It’s not in my nature to back down.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t discount me because of my age. I am so tired of people telling me I don’t understand the world around me because I am a woman or because I am young.”

I could see you were there, but you weren’t, and I wanted to be wherever you were.”

“I’m in a unique position. I was born into a family that hasn’t had to struggle for the basic things other people in this country are fighting for. I have a platform and a voice thanks to my last name, and I want to use it to do some good in this world. I saw firsthand what comes of not speaking up for what you believe in when I was fighting in Europe, what silence can do to a man, and I want to make the world better than I found it.”

Change is all around us, both at home and here, and where I once fought so hard for change, now I must admit I fear it, a bit.

“But much more boring. There’s nothing wrong with having different opinions as long as at the end of the day we always remember we’re on the same side. We’re Perezes first and foremost.”

If I’m going to have regrets in this life, I’d rather them be for the chances I took and not the opportunities I let slip away.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s choice. I want them to be mine.”

The thing about hope is that when it fills you, when you hold it in the palm of your hand, the promise of it is everything.

“It’s personal for me. It must be nice being able to put it out of your head and pretend it doesn’t matter, that it happened to other people, that it doesn’t affect you. Some of us don’t have that luxury.”

“You don’t get it, do you? People don’t immediately dismiss you because of the way you look, don’t flash you a condescending smile and tell you some conversations aren’t meant for you, you’re too young, too female, too pretty, too sheltered to understand the world around you. You aren’t treated like a painting, or a delicate vase, or a broodmare, as though your worth only lies in your beauty and what they can barter for it.”

When I was a child, I believed if you wanted something badly enough, if you worked hard enough for it, if you pushed your way past the obstacles presented to you, well, it would be yours. But now I’m learning it’s not simply a matter of will or desire; some things are perpetually out of our reach, and no matter how badly we wish it were otherwise, there are some battles whose outcomes are decided not in our hands, but in the stars.

“Don’t act like I’m some problem you have to fix, another person for you to take care of, some silly woman who needs a man to look after her.”

In the end, life always comes down to timing.

There is something special to be found in conversations with old friends, former lovers, and family. That sense that you are known, that there are words that need not be said, emotions that need not be voiced, yet are felt from miles away.

At some point, you must do the right thing, even when it hurts.