Open Waters

When I picture my father, he is in a small wooden boat, white and wood chipped, gently floating in open waters. I am standing at the edge of a dock, rope in hand, waiting for him all earnest and eager like I was four again. I give my waiting a place in my hands, and whisper to the tides of time: please bring him back to me. He is getting older and so am I; we both carry a thinning patience, widening the distance between us, trying to get our point across. When I get angry, the tide rises and sweeps over the dock— its strength gently pulling at my ankles. An open threat or declaration of my own potential to sink. Our conversations become harsh and my feet splinter from waiting, so I coil the rope in my hand and take it back with me. I’m not sure if there is a word for children who grow up splitting from everything their parents believe in. To break prophecy is to be the bastard of a dream. To be destined for a punctuated future. To shelf their own dreams for a life also prescribed to them, only for me to be vastly different. I can only think of defining the aftermath as betrayal. In that light, I try to be softer and weave a stronger rope.

When he does manage to drift back to shore, it’s a moment where he feels more alive than above water. When the energy is there, so is a story to tell. I remember my father used to repeat his stories over and over, and I loved listening to them anyways. I’ve been able to piece together a timeline with those stories and make sense of how he came to be. He was the first one to be born in the house, the first one to see light when my aunt became a librarian and was able to afford electricity. He watched TV through the window peering into his neighbours home. He was always working, shining shoes or printing on to socks in a factory. When he found out he was able to immigrate, he took his last paycheque, a suitcase, and got on a plane for the first time. Everything he lived through informs my upbringing, especially his lessons grounded in fear. I learned how to swim because of the echoes of children drowning in the river near his home.

When you are born to war torn bodies, you are always swimming against the grief of everything taken. Missing children’s sign at every gumball machine and a 90’s commercial that played every night at 10 o'clock asking parents, “Do you know where your children are?”. This, and a history of young mothers and violent men, turns my home into a vault where I am kept, but I keep swimming until I meet calmer waters.

The memories and stories of my parents piece together my timeline, I try to wrangle the time warp that is immigrant time vs. North American time. To be at the places my friends find themselves with their parents versus, the seemingly delayed universe only inside my home. Poetry allows me to travel time and pull into place the life I live here.

One day I asked my dad what he wanted to be as a child. He told me he wanted to be a news reporter. When his aunt tells him that, “There is nothing for you here”, was that the shadow of his mothers guilt? When I ask him if he ever wanted to go back, he said yes. I think part of the Salvadoran-Canadian experience is that sometimes I wish he did too.

::

Forgotten fragments

of civil war

sink

Becomes a place

to hold a child

in utero

I swim amongst

grief

The conception of two displaced bodies

Hopeless as sustenance

The violent batting

of linear time

or immigrant time

a cicada birth

I am born by the call of my name

Summoned by rain fall

and the crackle of leaves

My mother holds me

like she holds her angst

a tight clenched grip

After the first rupture I never stopped bursting

never to be caught in hands again

A premature motherhood

comes premature issues

I am too small for this world and

too big for my mother

I hear mixed narratives of my birth

postpartum depression

nameless for days

untimely

sickly

They give a name

flaccid tongues can pronounce

Tanya with a Y instead of an I

I don’t remember much

I know that I was incubated

and that I am loved in dialect

and in Spanish dialect

there is a multitude of ways

to say I adore you

Querida

Linda

Corazon

Dialects birthed by the equator

tend to be warmer

unlike the wrath of my mother tongue

both its history

and in my angry mother

Hay fuego en mi

When you are born to an angry mother

confrontation is another language you survive

but I meet her tender gaze

just before long trips

in warm milk

greasy soup

and photographs of her youth.

The question was, what do you want people to take away from your story? The first thing that came to mind was compassion. Particularly for those so close to us but sometimes hurt us the most. When I write poetry, I often return to writing about my parents. They remain the most consistent source to my background while also being living archives of the past. As in the ways the past has its way of reliving itself in the present. This feels like a theme that other first generation Canadians can relate to, always jumping through time and dealing with the very different present realities that show up in our lives.