Change

I don’t know if I like my changes subtle or abrupt. Subteltly has the backdraw of insidiousness, it makes it so tough to see whether change indeed has occurred, and lets out hints regarding it’s possible resolution.

Change has been constant in my life. I sound like a fucking tenth grader, although I’m 31. The first change I can think of (big one) was my dad getting sick. We had a very tenuous ecosystem going in my family: my dad worked too much, my mother felt too much, his kids from the previous marriage bothered her too much, and my dad did too little about it, or what he felt was the best case scenario, which was never enough.

One day mom tells me dad has to wear a wig, because he is sick. I remember the thing: compact like a rug, in salt and pepper tones. His face was already yellowish, and lacking in fluids. It seemed deflated, it seemed like a fake mask tightly wound around his head.

I consented to the wig, and he was careful to always wear it around me. Other times it was a hat, that hid nothing, but marked the beginning of the end. My dad got sicker, no one said cancer out loud. The summer approached. The thing started one day when he was in the United States, working and getting a checkup with his brother the doctor. He hadn’t been feeling well, no one could hit on what was causing it. But the brother did, quickly. Tumors, metastasized, 17 in his brain. My mother quickly became white-haired, only 35 but from one day to the next, a whole area of her head turned white. My dad returned from the trip, and brought me a Tracy barbie in her prim wedding dress, I still remember the feel of the satin on my fingertips, her groomed honey hair, her high neckline, decent and catholic. She was getting married in this? Obviously that change meant the end of breasts, which in barbies, as everyone knows, are pointed hard things that would make a regular woman double in pain at the weight to be carried, standing single-handedly above the minute minute waist, under the ever-smile.