The Truth Is

by NoNieqa Ramos

who wrote the Book of Love? Who gets to decide whom, and why, and when? I’m fifteen and I’m supposed to fall in love like any minute now. It’s biology. My moms is a nurse, so she knows this better than anyone.

The way I see it, love is just like your period. One day you’re bleeding out of nowhere and it hurts, and that mess goes on for mostly the rest of your life.

Mornings to me are like holy water to the devil.

Anything that’s right with me comes from my mother’s side, anything wrong from my dad’s.

like how long has it been since Jesus has been here? Two thousand years. I remember waiting for my dad on the porch for hours when he didn’t show up for a visit. Two thousand years is a long time to wait on a porch. Yeah, I’m bitter a little bit.

step into the shower stall full of lotions and creams Mami stocks in here so I will smell like the botanical gardens. Because all girls are supposed to want to smell like flowers. Be a flower.

“Couldn’t God put morning later in the day?” I prop my head on my right hand and stir my coffee with my left.

I know I have it good. Mami is a nurse, but everyone in the family calls her doc and hits her up for advice when they so much as have a sniffle.

My dad’s present does not have room for his past. I haven’t seen him in weeks.

There’s over a million Puerto Ricans in New York alone, but they ain’t one single one who did anything worth writing about in any textbook?”

“What about that Sonia Sotomayor?” “That’s one, Ma. White people get a thousand. We get one?”

Everybody’s heads are down like they’re praying. But in reality they’re texting. I mean, kids are sitting right next to each other, but texting each other anyway.

I mean a POC may kill you for your wallet. But at least they are not killing you for your existence.

As much as my vocabulary is off the charts, using words with actual people is my Achilles’ heel. I never know what to say to anybody.

So it’s week four of freshman year at my new school and I have the same three friends, me, myself, and I. And even they sometimes don’t speak to each other.

with books you’re never alone. And the characters never have to die. Because when you reread you resurrect people.

Or like you could read up till the part that breaks your heart and just stop. ...

Really? Consecutive passage???!!!

Maybe life is Candy Land. Every once in a while you get stuck in toffee. But it’s still toffee, man. Life is life.

just wish I didn’t have to work at it. At—being Puerto Rican. I mean white people don’t work on being white. They just born like that. Nobody says to them, you’re just not white enough.

Yes, like our children having to work at being Mexican. It sucks a bit sometimes.

We sit. We’ve been told. When you see blue, do what they tell you to.

adults can’t even handle this #blacklivesmatter #alllivesmatter shit, but we have to make sense of it? We are all little snow globes that are getting shaken too hard.

We’re getting unglued. Cracked. The water is spilling out and none of us know if we can breathe actual air.

Like cogs, they head to White Castle, McDonald’s. They are the people in your neighborhood we learned about in kindergarten—service workers, transportation, construction. We dressed up as them on Halloween. The same people we are taught never to be by middle school.

The train above my head carries the weight of people and their dreams. People walk by with the force field of their phones.

Me, I have my armor too. My book. That stupid trope where nerds crash into things because they’re reading is bullshit.

look, if I know a book has a stupid ending, I’m not going to waste my time reading all the shit before it.

Maybe life isn’t a novel all the time. Where we’re always trying to see what happens in the end.

Maybe sometimes it’s poetry. Every syllable of living counts.

Sometimes those syllables got to be like ooooh, Sweater Vest brotha, mmmmm—

Thing is, even when your dad is a complete asshat, you’re wired to love him forever.

In conclusion and to be fair to men of all cultures and colors: YOU SUCK.

After I catch up with my savior. That girl. Guy. Person. Damn, this gender stuff is confuzzing. Anyway, I have to say thank you.

mean you aren’t open to love. You always feel like you got to even things up.”

“Everything changes but change itself.”

If girls gotta wear skirts, why don’t guys? Why I gotta wear a bra or I’m a slut? I’ve seen plenty of dudes who could use support bouncing around the track at PE. Why don’t guys gotta worry about being raped ’cause they running around without a shirt? My moms always tells me to close my legs like a lady. But those pendejos on the subway sitting with their legs spread over two seats?

feel. Like skin is supposed to do. I can’t even get a paper cut without overanalyzing it. Does this hurt? It would hurt most people, so I can determine that it is painful. Therefore, I should react. Freakin ow.

Emptiness is space of such sacred design that only death and music can fill it.

Speech is just clutter, thoughts scribbled sloppily by the tongue.

I can never cry through my eyes, but I can do it through my fingers. Sadness is something I read like sheet music.

love is like water and it slides over the smooth places. Sinks into the cracks.

Emptiness is the fullest thing there is.

real kind of listening. The kind of listening that makes you come out of your cave.

“I don’t think gender is a preference. I’m sure everybody would prefer that they were born in the right body.”

“I love secrets. And pockets. But especially secret pockets.”

Most people wouldn’t be aware of not thinking about their hair, but I’m not most people.

I’m always aware of what I’m thinking, of when I’m not thinking about thinking, and where the ibuprofen is located.

“I mean, Jesus, you’re wearing a dress. So I can wear a fedora. And suspenders?” Yes. And so what if I want to dress GQ, suave and powerful.

But in the end, despite my blasphemy with Jesus, I dress basic, because basic is my invisibility cloak.

Friendships require encounters at regular intervals. Where I can’t predict the setting, the stage directions.

Don’t want to be asked if I’m suicidal. Don’t want some doctor judging me because I have a bullet wound like I was the one who shot the gun.