Revisiting Finger Nail Shaped Moons

(A short narrative I shared sometime ago. Written while in grad school; it is a story I had the pleasure of sharing with a young man earlier this week. I told him to make sure he had a clear vision of his situation, that without a clear vision, your vision's not clear. At times we have to make adusjtments; kind of like a boxer that spends too much time getting hit during the first few rounds of a prize fight. If adjustments aren't made by the middle rounds, odds are the championship rounds never materialize. History doesn't always repeat itself.)

Finger Nail Shaped Moons

Why do we look at things the way we do? Is it due to the mothers and the fathers of our mothers and fathers and their wisdom? They made fun of mi jefe’s tacos wrapped in tin foil when he was a child. Could this be why, I am forever ready to toe the line? “Tienes que trabajar lo doble, para ser lo doble” my dad would say. “You’re going to have to work twice as hard to be two times the man.” He knew what was hiding behind words, and he knew of euphemisms, without knowing such a word existed.

Is it possible that my 3rd grade teacher belittled me because of the brown color of my skin? She knew I had a tough time with numbers because we told her; mom, dad, the 2^nd grade teacher, and me. It didn’t matter as she insisted I go to the chalkboard, day in and day out, up until the day I yelled something to the effect of “I can’t do this, I try, but I just can’t,” and concluded my tantrum by shattering a piece of chalk at the problem on the board.

She also found ways to make Jaime, Santos, and Jorge cry. Did influences such as these somehow lend a hand in Jaime’s death just a couple of years after fathering his first child, just a couple of years shy of twenty? How about Santos, who hung himself on the monkey-bars at Pearson Park, discovered by a jogger, there hovering like a masterpiece above his daughter’s name etched in sand. The detective mentioned it had been written with a branch, just before letting go of the ghost? I remember how Jorge would clench his fists until his overgrown nails indented fingernail shaped moons across the palms of his hands. It would be twenty-five years before they faded to black, to an overdose, in front of his mom, wife, and daughter. Eventually, we all find freedom. I have found my freedom with words.