MY FAMILY ONCE TOLD ME / BRYANA LORENZO

My grandmother once asked when I’d write her life story into a novel like I promised when I was eight. I’d write it in Spanish—obviously, even if my turns of tongue and word choice could only rival a kindergartner. But I’ll figure it out. I come from poets. I come from storytellers. Safe to say—I come from liars. My mother once said that every Cuban had a tall tale about themself. My father weaves a few exaggerated yarns here and there about himself. My grandmother is still bugging me to weave all of hers into a book.

My Great Grandmother passed on recently. I told her that I’d visit Cuba one day. Then I didn’t. Then she died. I made her tear up once when I said she’d live on in my heart after she passed. Now I mainly remember her for a life story she weaved that my dad said was definitely fiction—a life where she was young and poor and pretty and her Papi wrote and played guitar and could spin a tale like no other. And all that was true. But she never mentioned slaving away in poverty, working as the maid for a rich family. She never mentioned the quiet desperation of being in the bottom of a land that sold out to the top.

And maybe that’s why she never hated Castro the way other Cubans did—the way her family did—despite taking her daughters away to the near shores of America, a curtain of salt water keeping them apart instead of iron. She was very good at storytelling, to weave a web where the revolution was merely misguided and where she was happy and free now. And now I recall her stories and keep them close to heart in Spanish—her mother tongue. And maybe I should get to writing my grandmother’s book before she loses her chance to tell it.

I once asked my Dad if he missed Cuba, and he said no. Then one we got to speaking on great Latin artists from the mid-twentieth century and suddenly we were listening to “Que Sera” by Jose Feliciano and suddenly we were speaking about the immigrant pain of separation—of missing a land you were desperate to leave and yet desperate to stay in. My Dad said he wasn’t traumatized at all by the crossing—despite my grandmother’s horror stories of abuse from the guards as people left, of another mother on the boat clutching a baby that my grandmother had realized later was dead, shot by one of the guards. My Dad said the neighborhood that held my grandmother’s house was really nice before all the white people ran away. My Dad didn’t have a name for the history of what he’d been through, because they’d just been facts of his life. My Dad likely didn’t know what the Mariel Boat-lift or White Flight was before I told him after an AP Human class.

My teacher once said I was living Human Geography—holding history in the palm of my handed down memories of a country I’d never been to and a time I couldn’t imagine. But I was more a collector of stories about history, because I was collecting tales from Cubans, and we Cubans can’t be at all trusted to tell reliable tales from memory. My grandmother once told a story of how she fell in love at fourteen and had a son at seventeen. My grandmother keeps asking me to write down her memories of life. I should really get on to writing those down. 

BRYANA LORENZO / ORLANDO, FL

Bryana Lorenzo, still technically a child, is haunted by the memory of the time she broke down in tears after not being able to successfully access a Canvas quiz for an online Sociology class she was taking at a local community college through Dual Enrollment. Was this a recent memory and thus not a failure that should lie in her mind like a telltale heart of Victorian ages past? Yes… but it still haunts her because she’s an overachiever that puts academics over her own mental health and only writing can release the pain she feels from her own self-inflicted mental suffering and overwork.

Find more of her work through the link in her bio on her Instagram, @bryanastarwrites, or on her Tumblr, bryanastar.tumblr.com.