In part it was my fault for coming out before him. Diego and I both knew I had it easier, my mother (his godmother) was a black sheep that married a white man in an international family because she knew that way she’d get away; his dad (my dad’s cousin) wasn’t from the enterprising branch of their family, but rather the missionary one, marrying my mother’s most devout sister.
The way I see it: my father is an atheist longing for a daughter in Spain he couldn’t raise, with a latent fascination for femininity. His father still isn’t a pastor, gifting bibles after every conversation he has. Our mothers now are essentially the same.
As a kid, Diego and his sister would take turns, six months at a time staying with us in our big house in Queens, carefully maintaining their tourist visas. But the whole point of being international is to speak English, isn’t it? Some weekends he would lock the door of our room. I was six and he was twelve the year Shakira put out her song Whenever, Wherever in both Spanish and English. We’d play them on a boombox and correct each other’s pronunciations, while moving our hips in circles, obviously.
It’s not that Diego and his sister wanted my parents to be theirs, but that our blood was just so almost the same that how weren’t my parents theirs as well? My brother and I saw it the same way. We shared the same families with each other as we did with them. The same heights, hair color, skin tone. Diego and I were both gay.
Still, it was my fault for coming out first. Diego and his bracelets, those frosted tips, bright after bright jean my grandma would say to me when Diego was a teenager. I thought he looked like the attendants at MoMA PS1. Grandma says you look like an anime character I remember telling him once on a night I slept over at his house in Colombia, you know, the popular one, sometimes mean but always hot.
In many ways we wanted the same things out of life: grand metropolitan lifestyles worthy of being written about. Athletic bodies, impeccable hair, soft skin. Both did the little fashion thing for a bit, which he stuck with. In many ways we lived parallel lives.
For example: the last time I saw him I was 19, and I flew down to Miami where he and his sister had permanently moved to. I went with my boyfriend at the time, a Colombian with identity issues. One night they came over to our hotel room with strawberritas and a man I didn’t know. We all got drunk and high and even drove around Miami at night for a while. The man was never introduced as anything other than a friend with a car and the connection to weed. He was also Colombian, with a haircut just like Diego’s. I think Diego also dressed him— my boyfriend, and his, liked the way we looked too much to want to look like anything else. I could tell it bothered him, too.
The next day we drove in the daytime, just Diego and I on the highway from downtown to the beach. The wind blew in through the windows. The sun came in from the roof. We played Shakira and looked exactly the same. It made so much sense: I also introduced my boyfriend as a friend.
When I came out two years ago it was just a formality, everyone in America and Spain knew because they didn’t need me to tell them: so I just said it to Colombia because it was a Wednesday and I was getting bored. You’re ballsy Diego messaged me when the word got to him a day later. Love you.
It wasn’t courageous, really, I was just sick of being third in line in that family, waiting for two older cousins to come out so I could write about whatever I wanted, even in Spanish. Maybe I came to resent him for it. But it was his place, he was supposed to be the trailblazer, not the martyr of escaping-to-America.
A year ago on this day I was desperate and drunk covered in charcoal crying over a sketch pad on the floor. It dawned on me that I had no siblings, no parents, no cousins. It was just me and a magnum bottle of wine in the quietest apartment in the world. The darkest. The deepest in the ground. Everything I drew had hollow eyes and lived in smoke. It all pointed a finger at me. Page after black page.
But then I did what I hadn’t done yet, I wrote his name (what had I been so inconsolable about, my own loneliness?). It turned a light on in the room. I stood over the huge pad, and maybe I was drunk, but there were colors undulating out to the edges. When I told my mom about this the next day we both cried, she asked me if I drew the colors and I did. Just like how he used to dress she said, That is God at work. I didn’t point out that the name looked like Die Go.
Then I had this dream. In the first home my parents built together I sat at the dining table surrounded by all my cousins as children. Oh man, it was sweet, shit being flung around, the round table perfectly receiving the sun through the skylight like it always did at 1pm when I lived there. I remember lifting the dust with my shirt to make the room beautiful, and cool. Santiago and I shared a chair, I blew dust, he glued shapes into a notebook. My brother sent cars flying to hit the wall. Mateo sent the cars to hit my brother’s. Laura drew with four markers at a time. All our older cousins, but one, sat in the living room.
Where was this fabled last cousin? It didn’t matter. I could mold the dust with my hands at this point, which I sculpted and sculpted, standing on my chair, into a curly-haired bust of fiery glitter in the sun. Whose head was it? It didn’t matter. The cars disappeared when they entered it. This beautiful man-head felt like the end of my own life, like perfection has this deep grain, and decidedly bright edges. I reached higher to sharpen the round nose, but then I slipped—
From the back of my neck like a kitten Diego caught me and lifted me into him. We were silent as we looked at each other. What was there to say? That the world never recovers from the loss of great men? I couldn’t figure out how to bring him back to Miami, because when the dead are in your dream it is always a visit. Just silence, stillness and silence. Then he held his hand under my chin, and from it grew this grand cookie. I didn’t understand. I didn’t want his legacy, or his energy, or his blessing. I wanted him in Miami one more time after I came out. This isn’t mine Diego, I know I said to him. Die! Take your cookie. Go! He assured me that gifts aren’t yours to begin with. I ate the cookie, so warm and magnificent it almost tasted like flesh. No part of my body grew for him, not even spit, but maybe it didn’t have to-- I still had my hands. I climbed onto the table and the bust still stood. It’s yours Diego, it’s yours! But when I pushed it out of the sun it disappeared. He was gone, too, and I woke up feeling so sick I puked.
2/20/20 10:43AM