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20

Sometimes in life, things happen that you don't expect. Whether it's good or bad, it's just the way life is. You can plan things out, create a roadmap to navigate through life's twists and turns like I did, or you can float on the waves whatever may come. Either way, it's almost guaranteed that at some point, a tsunami is going to come and smash you to bits. No matter how much you've built up walls to protect yourself, no matter how many times you've imagined it happening, nothing can possibly be worse than when it actually does.

I remember watching the news about the tsunami in 2004. I stared at the television set with my mother, wondering if the people living there saw it coming. If they felt it deep within their bones, the unsettling feeling that something wasn't right, but - by the time they knew what was about to hit me - what could they have done? I asked my mom that, asked her why so many died when they could see it coming, because I didn't understand. 

She told me that there are some things in life that are unstoppable. You can run from a thirty-foot wall of water, you can climb to higher ground, but you can't escape the devastation it will wreak on the world around you.

Isn't it funny how something so innocent, so peaceful, has the capacity to cause so much destruction? You don't expect water to be one of the most powerful forces on Earth, and yet it carves through rock. It beats away at the coasts, washes away buildings, it pulls and pulls and pulls until there is nothing but a clean slate left behind.

Before you start jumping to conclusions, I don't have some massive skeleton buried in my past. I didn't murder someone. I'm not in the witness protection program. I don't even jaywalk. I wish I could say that I'm a reformed rebel, that I went to juvie when I was fourteen, but I can't even say that.

I'm just Cait.

I was born in Austin, Texas. My parents had a tiny little apartment they rented from my uncle in Montopolis, a not-so-great neighborhood on the southeast side of the city. One of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, I was one of the few kids with parents who put a heavy emphasis on going to school. Half the adults in my neighborhood didn't even have high school diplomas, and - being bilingual - I grew up speaking Spanish around the neighborhood and English at school. I didn't really notice that all of my friends and neighbors were Latinx, and - frankly - I didn't care. I mean, why should I?

The world that I grew up in was happy and filled with love. My parents worked hard every day to keep food on the table, they sent my older sister and I to school so that we could make something of ourselves, and - when my brother arrived unexpectedly nine years ago - they were overjoyed with the opportunity to shower another human being with love.

That's the thing about idyllic childhoods though. They don't last.

My mother's cancer diagnosis shattered the illusion of peace in my life. It came like a freight train pushing our entire family off the tracks. We didn't know what to do with ourselves. When you hear cancer, it feels like a timer is placed above that person's head and you're forced to watch as the minutes tick away. Unable to do anything to stop it, I watched as the woman who raised me - the glue that held my family together - wasted away.

I thought I'd have more time, you know? I thought I could make it last. I thought I could fit in all of the things that I needed to say, that I could make sure she knew how much she meant to me. How much I loved her. But instead, I watched those days pass by like water falling through the cracks of my fingers. No matter how hard I tried to hold on, there was nothing I could do to keep her with me.

A month. That's all I got. A month to cope with a dying mother, with a life shattered, with all the other shit that came with it.

Because in the end, I'm just Cait. I don't have secrets. I don't have a deep dark past to hide.

No, when life dealt me a hand, it decided that one thing wasn't enough. Losing my mother wasn't enough. That October, that was when everything decided to unravel. Everything that I thought I knew, everything I was raised to believe, gone in the blink of an eye. Overnight, I felt like my entire identity had been ripped from me as the burden of others was placed on my unwilling shoulders.

I hated my father for it. I was angry at everyone - at my dead mother, at my sister, even at my then eight-year-old brother - because I blamed them for not seeing what was happening. I'd spent so much time planning and preparing for my future, and I was horrified that it could be taken away from me. That their secrets, that their problems, that their decisions were going to impact my life - the house of cards that I'd painstakingly put together - only to watch it disappear in a puff of smoke.

Once my mother passed, I left. I couldn't be bothered with their burdens. I was going to follow the course set in front of me, doing what I had to do, and I was going to make it work. I just needed distance. I needed breathing room. After losing my mother, I couldn't begin to cope with the idea that my family needed me in a way that I was not equipped to handle.

At nineteen years old, I didn't want that responsibility and I refused to take it.

When I came to New York, I realized that it followed me like a shadow. I felt guilty for abandoning my dad and my siblings. My sister begged me to move home, to help support the family, but I was still so angry with my dad that I refused. Besides, they had my tía Marisa to help.

Eventually, every conversation I had with my baby brother chipped away at the wall of rage I'd built around my heart, and I realized that - as much as I wanted to pretend that this burden wasn't mine to carry - I couldn't abandon my family. I couldn't go back, not now or anytime soon, but I could push forward with the purpose of helping them. I could succeed in dogged pursuit of my dreams so that I was capable of carrying that burden, and I honestly thought that it was possible. I prided myself in my tenacity, and I had no intention of letting life derail me that way ever again.

But now, here I am. Trying to stop the waves with nothing but my bare hands as they smash into the life I've built for myself in the sand. Watching as everything is ripped away from me. Unable to do anything to stop it.

Tears poured down my face as I stared at the screen of my phone, my entire body shaking, as I typed in the words.