Our flight to Miami had been delayed again, another two more hours of sitting in Bogota in an airport where we waited many times before. I sat back down and look out the window, wondering why we didn’t just take a direct flight as we did last time we went to Disney. The air was hot we were overdressed for December in South America, having spend Christmas at home in Lima, we were taking advantage of the low airfare prices between Christmas and new years to Miami where it was winter. I was getting impatient, my roller book bag full of my new Christmas presents and my beloved sailor moon figurine in my hand had all been toyed with long enough. I turned to my mom and gave her my signature look of exasperation. She simply sighed and sat her newspaper on her lap and gave me a long look, a long look that I only received twice before in my life. Once to tell me that we were moving to Tumbes, a remote town on the border between Peru and Ecuador and the other to tell me what death is. As if testing my maturity, my mom slowly began testing the waters by declaring, “We might stay longer than last time”. I tilted my head, and wonder what she meant. There were only seven Disney parks and two universal ones half of which I was too short to ride in either way, what else could we possibly do?
She looked down and said, “We are going to be staying with one of my friends in Miami”, paused and continued, “Fernando, my boyfriend”.
I was never one to question my mother’s actions, they were always for the best but this was big. I didn’t respond; her plan was clear enough. The late night long phone conversations all made sense now, but he lives in Miami, We in Lima… the gravity of her decision hit me like a ton of bricks. We were moving. To Miami. Now I understood why I had to pack “all my favorite things”. I clutched sailor mercury in my hand and sat back down; quiet till time to board our belated flight came. I looked down at my hands full of sailor mar’s hair, searched her black but very much plastic eyes and I settled it. It didn’t matter what my mom decided to do, I would go wherever she went.
Time flew by, the three hours between Columbia to Miami felt like two minutes, and the next I knew I was standing in a stranger’s house, in a strange neighborhood in a foreign city in a different country. Always been a shy child, I dig deeper into myself as Fernando shoved his hand in my face in a handshake and his mom open her arms in a hug. That was ten years ago.
I spend my first year in Miami, sitting in the front of the bus to school drowning out the other kids with audio tapes following along the cheerful voices with my finger running along the lines of different books. I caught onto to the language fairly quickly but never (thankfully) lost my accent. My love for math grew, discovering how universal it was (except for dividing, that was a pickle to get use to). I threw myself at learning, at school and from my friends. Fernando, my stepfather became one of my best friends and important figures in my life and soon I had a little sister, Michelle, on the way. I learned many different things, things I knew I wasn’t not going to come across as easily if I had stayed in Peru: I attended my first Hanukah meal when I was nine, I indulged in Creole food, I worked in a Vietnamese place spoiling myself in their culture and found myself in gay right parades and volunteering in homeless shelters.
My decision to stay with my mom, to not kick and scream and demand to be shipped back to my darling Peru to my dad someone who was familiar, someone stable, something safe, was probably the most important one I ever been asked to make and to this day I think I made the right choice. I love to influence and to be the influenced, I love to learn of differences and unique factors of others and I must admit I had a changed a lot over the course of ten years. I shed that shy Peruvian girl demeanor and transformed into the driving curious girl I am now, every now and then I look at sailor mars sitting in my night stand and am thankful for the courage she stirred in me to make my decision.