It’s 11 p.m. and I’ve been out of the house for over 12 hours now, the usual daily toil. I’m wearing a navy hoodie I found in the children’s section of Williamsburg’s Salvation Army. I got it for free because the lady at the register didn’t charge it with the rest of my cheap finds. Two weeks later, I found a hole in the sleeve. That’s what I get, I thought.

I’m on the train home. I’m sitting with my feet flat on the floor so no one sees the holes in my shoes. There’s a hole at the bottom of my backpack. These holes keep plaguing me and I don’t know what I did to attract them. An Asian woman across me is staring up at the ceiling. She has the perfect shade of olive skin, the kind you can only get through genetics. Red lipstick glosses her lips and it doesn’t look tacky. Her hair is straight, black, shiny, and moves so you know it’s also part of her natural beauty. I see these women every day. They leave the house looking perfect and return home after their own 12 hours looking just as good. I see them and I don’t feel like a girl. My hair is always out of place and even when I use the Chi, it ends up in a bun on top of my head to be forgotten or ignored.

I admire these women. I admire their efforts to look like nothing fazes them, like if they simply retain their femininity, tomorrow will come with ease.

Asia digs through her purse for something. It’s made of black leather with a silver plaque to note the brand but I can’t read it from across the cart. She finds what she was looking for. I wait to see her pull out a tube of lipstick or hand lotion but it’s a Jolly Rancher, green apple flavor. It looks like a gem, a piece of jewelry degraded by the plastic wrapper that hugs it. 

I’m relieved. She just gave everyone a peek at her weakness and even though it wasn’t as blatant as the holes in everything I had, it was enough to prove she wasn’t just a woman. She was human. I closed my eyes and dozed off, assured that my tomorrow would come with ease too.

My best guess was southwest. I was on an Amtrak train to Philadelphia and wasn’t oriented to the exact direction it was headed. I was used to the grid-like, numbered streets of Manhattan and it was early on a Friday morning in April so I wasn’t going to strain my eyes to decipher a map. I was writing out a college assignment, copying it onto my yellow notepad. I kept messing up the writing because the movement of the train was more than I’d anticipated. I finally finished and got to stare out the window. The train was passing a run-down part of town right before getting into the 30^th street station. I knew we were passing north Philly because my writing professor had begged us not to go there. “I don’t care what you do in Philadelphia, just don’t go north,” he’d said. I’d expected the forbidden area to look like an urban war zone, but it was empty. It was actually kind of beautiful. The streets didn’t look littered from afar and the houses were pushed and shoved against each other to make a colorful pattern that blurred to brown as the train zoomed by. I’d only been to San Francisco once, but I remembered the houses there and these north Philly houses were almost identical.

We passed junkyards. Plants and vines crept over rusting car parts to bring the dying metal home, back into the earth. I wondered where the people were, if they were hiding behind the doors of the cheery-looking houses because they knew something I didn’t. There was a story here I wanted to know. This part of town was dangerous for a reason and I wanted to know why; what had happened.

The baby started crying. Her shrill and high-pitched, immature voice muted the roar of the subway train. I was on the uptown 6 train going into the Bronx and the demographic was what any New Yorker would expect. A woman had come on board at 125^th street and started preaching about God and that we needed to trust His word. She was at the other end of the train by now, and everyone was calm despite the baby’s cries. Her mother bounced her up and down on her lap but it wasn’t working. Then she started kicking. She swung her legs once, twice, and she kicked the young girl in the white and blue striped sweater sitting next door. The mother did nothing. The young girl spoke, her thick Bronx accent booming.

“You need to control your baby,” she said. 

And they were off. The mother retaliated with some name-calling, some “putas” and “pendejas” and her only English comeback was “she’s just a baby.” The girl repeated the same argument. Even though it was the only one she had, I was on her side. Her voice was aggressive and confident and it gave her power. Then she lifted the purse that had been covering her stomach and spit another insult out. 

“Bitch, I’m pregnant but I will fuck you up. You need to control your child. You are her mother so you need to control your baby.”

I watched like it was a movie. A man who’d been sitting next to them in silence the whole time, holding his head and gray hairs in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other stood up and joined in.

“Miss, she is just a baby! I have 13 kids, 29 grandkids, and 9 great grandkids and you need to be more respectful. She is just a baby, and you are wrong. You are so wrong. You and your baby are going to hell!” Now it was two against one, but I was still on the girl’s side. The preaching woman had come back to our side and was projecting with more volume, trying to cover up the profanities of the argument. The girl was flustered but she didn’t back down. She knew she was alone in this and that everyone else sitting across from her was judging her. She was maybe five or six months pregnant, an endeavor that probably hadn’t been planned. The mother had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. The man bent over when he stood. These three stories had collided in a part of New York City where people tended to be more aggressive than reserved. This was where conflict happened right in front of you and no one cared if you stared or looked away.

I got a few more glimpses of deserted north Philly before populated streets and modern buildings started filling the frame of my window and I wished I could’ve made a stop in the ghost town. My professor warned me against it. But he also once told the class to “stay with the people.” The people who work the unglamorous jobs at irregular hours. The people that live in constant conflict because they’re trying to make it in a country that isn’t home. I would’ve disobeyed my professor’s orders and headed into the danger. The stories would have been right in front of me. If the northernmost part of Philadelphia was anything like the northernmost borough of New York City, a borough where the minorities were the majority and fights broke out at the point of contact between a baby’s foot and a young woman’s leg, I wouldn’t have had to do anything else but make my handwriting on the yellow notepad a little more legible for the stories to breathe.

There were six more days until my 20^th birthday. I’d gone out into the stairwell of my friend’s Manhattan apartment building to answer a phone call from my father, who I heard from every few months. I found a comfortable spot on the checkered stairs and squeezed against the wall so I wouldn’t block anyone’s way. I tapped the green “Answer” button on my phone and tensed my vocal chords like I did any time I spoke with him. Everything had to be measured. Everything had to be exact.

“Hey dad, how are you?” A perfect replication of all my past phone greetings.

“Hi Khiarita. I’m good, and you?” The predicted response, with a brief exchange of how I was doing in school, the weather, my health, and if I’d talked to my sister recently. No jokes, no sarcasm, and nothing personal. I was almost two decades old and my father didn’t know who I was.

He started talking about his job. He was an auditor at Underwriters Laboratories, a product safety certification company that kept him absent for most of my childhood while he traveled to almost every United State and Mexico. He’d been working there for over 15 years and was telling me that he wasn’t sure about his job security with the company. He told me this even though he’d boasted several times before that he was their lead auditor. He’d already left the company once and been begged to come back with salary incentives. He didn’t say he was getting fired so I didn’t understand what he meant when he told me he’d be financially unstable for the next few months and would have to stop supporting me completely. The cheeriness in my voice didn’t waver and I showed no signs of panic. I had years of practice learning how to do that.

“No, I understand completely. I’m so sorry to hear that. Do you know what you’re going to do?” Asking him that was a risk, maybe too intrusive, but I wanted to know. He gave me a vague answer so I didn’t inquire any further. I was scared but I wasn’t going to show him that because I was supposed to have a plan. He told me to rely on my mother from then on. 

“She has money, Khiara. She can support you. You need to stop asking me for money all the time and start depending on her.” My mother was manager of the bookstore at a Christian television network called Daystar in Bedford, Texas. She hadn’t remarried yet. She didn’t have any money. My father was indirectly telling me to start depending on myself.

Luis Eduardo Ortiz grew up in Pasto, Colombia. He was born the fourth child out of a Brady Bunch family of three boys and three girls. His father was a smoker and alcoholic. His mother, my grandmother, died from heart failure when he was in high school.  His father never did anything to help her health and my father is resentful about that. But that resentment got him out of Colombia, into the United States, and into Boston’s Northeastern University for the engineering program. He supported himself completely, working several jobs as a full-time student and living in a basement that wasn’t warm in the winter. He graduated, went back home to Pasto, and married my mother. But the resentment wasn’t gone, so he took it out on her and then on me when I became old enough to pick on. My sister’s escaped it and I’m not jealous; I’m thankful and hope that she’ll always have a better relationship with our father than the one I’ve tried to improve but can’t.

The phone call escalated to my father yelling at me about things that weren’t true or that I couldn’t control. I let my body get tense so my voice would stay controlled. I tolerated the final minutes, said goodbye, and hung up. I called my sister. 

“Kamila, is dad leaving UL?”

“Yeah, he said he got a better job though.”

I wanted to scream, but even in an empty New York City stairwell there’s no privacy. I started to rant. I told my sister what my father had told me and I told her to be careful. I told her to keep loving him but that she needed to be doubtful. I stopped myself from saying too much and told her we’d talk again soon.

That was almost a year ago. After that phone call, something clicked in me and I’ve been in survival mode ever since. I found a better paying job to pay for half of a bedroom in a Harlem apartment and for a metro card to take to me to school, work, and my internship. I’m not excusing my father for having lied to me, but I’m thankful for it because it gave me the push I needed to stop depending on someone who’s been unreliable my entire life. It was the most extreme and sudden lesson he’s taught me and I pride myself in having learned it well.

I didn’t feel it at graduation. I didn’t feel it sitting in the front row of the top ten students from my high school class of almost 700. Not even after all the speeches were given and Donovan Woods from choir sang some inspirational pop song because he was the only one who could handle the acoustics of the Fort Worth Convention Center. All I could think about was when I’d get to eat lunch and that it would take forever to get to the parking lot if my mom and I didn’t leave early. That was the first week of June, a month after I had finished all my AP and IB exams and our teachers started bringing movies to class or asked us to sort through textbooks. I didn’t feel the end at all.

When I think about the end of high school, I remember the lazy days at friends’ pools or days at Bob Eden Park playing volleyball even when the sand was too hot or going to the theater for two or three movies at a time because at the cheap Texas price of $4 before 6 p.m., my friends and I could afford it. I remember going to Pho Noodle House with my tall, skinny Mexican friend Roel and ordering the same thing without having to say a word because I was a regular.

I didn’t get a job like I should have. I told my mom I deserved a summer off after graduating fifth in my class and getting my International Baccalaureate diploma, but I could’ve taken a couple of shifts somewhere. I didn’t know that “expensive” in New York wasn’t the same as “expensive” in Bedford, Texas. And I hadn’t planned on developing a coffee addiction.

I might’ve started feeling it when my room started looking empty, when my mother and I went shopping for winter coats because I’d never needed one before and now I’d need at least three. It was already August and New York seemed just as far away as it had in June. I felt it the morning my best friends and I woke up before the sun had fully come up to go to IHOP for the last buttermilk pancake stack of the summer; when we put our feet and heads together in the parking lot while hugging each other, saying that Christmas wasn’t far away. And yes, I definitely felt it when I loaded my carry-on bag into my mother’s van the morning of our flight. I was sad about leaving but even sadder that I couldn’t explain to our little French poodle I wouldn’t be right back this time.

Now I only feel it when I think about it, when I miss it. I miss coming home from school and watching Gilmore Girls at four in the afternoon on my tiny Sony television that I covered in Hello Kitty stickers. I miss going to the grocery store with my mother and always adding more to the list than was necessary. I miss driving. I miss the winters that weren’t winters. I miss my sister. That’s how I know it ended.

Colombia, July 2011.

Peru, January 2011.

It wasn’t a soda bottle delivery. The bulky red truck pulling up to the restaurant next to my grandparents’ house in Pasto, Colombia broke the mountain silence. I was ten years old. I didn’t deserve to see anything besides a soda delivery. The driver turned off the truck, killing the choking motor, but I didn’t get my silence back. I stared.

I was on the annual vacation my family took every summer to visit our relatives in Colombia. Four of my father’s five siblings still lived in the town where he grew up, the town where he met my mother and married her a month later. My mother’s brother still lives in Pasto, too. He sleeps in the same bedroom he slept in as a child. His closet has ironed shirts instead of school uniforms but the maid still does all his laundry. His two sons, my cousins, spend the night with him when they’ve exhausted their mother’s patience and she thinks my uncle will do them some good.

This was the first summer I’d had to find someone to take care of my first real pet. Beta fish, snails, and ladybugs didn’t count. My father had bought me a black guinea pig I named Zoe who we would later find out was pregnant. He wouldn’t be happy about this, but I’d see it as a three for the price of one deal and be disgusted yet fascinated at the birth that my mother would record on our family’s film camera. I left Zoe with my best friend at the time, Jami, who had three of her own guinea pigs and had inspired my absolute need for one of these domestic herbivores.

In Colombia, guinea pigs aren’t the equivalent of a hamster or a rabbit – something to buy your child as a transition pet to make him responsible enough for a dog. Guinea pigs are killed, skinned, and roasted for the delight of the gustatory system and their crispy skin is dipped in some red sauce that’s too spicy for me to enjoy. I was always aware but never bothered by this. It was like eating a chicken except chickens were ugly and I wouldn’t ever want to pet one. When my parents offered me a bite of their Cuy, the Pastuso term for guinea pig, I’d shake my head and say my chicken and rice was fine. I was the only one at the table who didn’t like the taste. Back then, that was the only reason I didn’t eat Cuy. But the day I saw what came out of that red truck, my reason became about more than that.

I kept staring. The driver got out and yelled at some of the kitchen boys to help him unload. I forgot what I was doing outside in the first place when the gray color of the sky signaled rain and my younger sister was waiting on me to play hide and seek. One of the kitchen boys opened the back door of the truck with a crash and I was finally able to make out what had been muffled a few seconds ago.

There were live guinea pigs in there. The boy climbed into the truck and I waited to see him come out with crates of pigs. Instead, he jumped out with a bag made of a net-like material, bulging with dozens of squealing guinea pigs. My eyes got wide and I lost control of my jaw. They were swimming in each other. Their teeth and nails clawed at the holes in the bag, missed, and hit one of their own kind. The boy looked at me and mumbled something to the two other men that I didn’t hear. I was only thinking of what was going to happen to those little animals and that, as loud as their squealing was, it was warranted. He adjusted the weight of the bag with a bounce that made them all give one last shriek. Then he walked into the restaurant and closed the red door. One of them would be my family’s next meal.

I’m trying, okay?

It was the sixth month of paying my own rent on three hostess shifts a week as a full-time student and an intern, and I was $100 short. I made the call home. My mother wasn’t happy. Neither was I, but for different reasons.

She didn’t understand that in New York City, money comes in as fast as it goes out and that isn’t because the window displays are irresistibly tempting. Food is twice as much here as it is in Texas and no, I can’t cook more because I’m only in my apartment when I need a bed to sleep in. I leave the house at nine in the morning and come home at eleven and Tupperware isn’t an ideal thing to tote around in a backpack that’s already ripping at the bottom.

I admit I had a shopping addiction my sophomore year of college, but that was only because working at Urban Outfitters brainwashed me into thinking a piece of clothing I wouldn’t normally look twice at might actually fit okay so I’d end up buying it to leave in my closet, forgotten.

I got out of retail so I’m safer now. I’ve purchased less than ten clothing items this semester and I’m late on rent for March by twenty days. April is a weekend away and I haven’t answered my landlord’s calls even though he’s always nice to me. My portion of the electricity bill remains unpaid too so I’m thankful every morning when the bathroom bulb turns on and I have light to tweeze my eyebrows.

This is what living here is. I’ve never cared too much for money. It’s never been more than green paper that’ll get me coffee or lunch or tampons.  On the weekends, it gets me alcohol and if I let it sit in my bank account, it gets me a few pennies a day. The only time it hurts to swipe my Hello Kitty debit card is when I have to pay for Uniball Vision Elite pens because my handwriting will be illegible in any other brand. Lately, my mom’s thrown the word “budget” at me more times than she’s said my name. But it isn’t that easy. I just went to Starbucks to get a fifty-four cent refill on coffee that turned out to be $1.09 because “the prices went up.”

I poured some of it into the trashcan to make room for milk with zero remorse.

Overall, it is worth it. I passed high school calculus, but I’m not good with numbers so I consider being happy in this city about 35% of the time worth it because I’ve accomplished more here in three years than I did in eighteen living in Texas. What’s that, a sixth of the time? I think I’ll stick it out a little longer.

taken during SXSW 2011.