Blog 21-My reality was flipping and I caught my breath

I asked Patria what she left behind to come here and she laughed. “All that seems so far away. When we met twelve years ago I was already trained as a nurse but Elpidio Padre wouldn't let me get a job. After I got rid of him I worked for years in the Hospital Militar, and believe me being a nurse is useful here. I even make a kind of living being one of the Palenque healers. Most of the time my pay is barter, like this pineapple we're eating. It wasn't hard to leave my job. We'd been downsized and there'd been a speed up and the hospital was hell. Elpidio, Lagarto, kept telling me there would always be a job for a nurse. He doesn't know about golden cages and retirement packages and all I would be forfeiting.
“And then my boss, Alpha Bitch, yelled at me on the last hour of a 12 hour day and I said, fuck her and fuck this. Sometimes I panic. Will I be able to pick up that life after we are out of here? Most times I forget to think about being out of here.” She dropped her voice. “Elpidio sees the look on my face and tells me not to worry. He says, 'We'll make the revolution and the money you would have saved won't even still be money. We'll change their money and make it worthless, and after the revolution you won't need money anyway.'”
I smiled at her. “We never made our revolution.” She gave me a thoughtful look. “Not unless our amazing sons are our revolution.”
I studied Patria's face. “Amazing? You are not the same woman who used to scream,”Pig” at her drunken, drugging son Tomas.”
“How I hated him then. I was afraid for him, that he was going to die. I didn't understand. He and his friends are not taken in by aspiring middle class colonized pretense that things are fine when they are not. They show their struggles. It can be easy to start believing that they are their struggles with alcohol and weed and...”
I caught my breath. “My reality is flipping! You're so right. He's become his struggles in my eyes and now I see it, like those drawings that are devils until you see the angels...he, they, are warriors, Tainos, fighting for their lives and all our lives. They are literally digging holes into the faldas of El Pico to save us.” I realized that I was sobbing. Patria took me in her arms.“ I noticed the lull in the drums playing in the darkness. “Is the music coming from Beachside or Hillside?” She stood and took our dishes to the small sink. “Tonight, the hills. It's them, you know, our boys and the others.”
We were quiet for a bit. I spoke softly. "In the silence I can hear the secret percussion, the pulse of the surf." She nodded. "Sometimes at night in the rare quiet moments I can feel that the earth sea is a creature, alive, benign, Pachamama. Sometimes I imagine I can feel her breathing.” I turned to face Patria fully. “I feel that. Sometimes I can tell I am inside the creature, safe, unkillable, immortal, even."
She nodded. "Since I've been living here, very late some nights, I've felt a presence inside me that has never died and always lived. ”
She looked into my eyes. “Those are glimpses of the creature we might be in a rational world. The creatures Tomas believes we were before the Primera Colonia and their failed genocidio. It's clear to me in those moments that terror is the child of exploitation. At this moment our species has accumulated enough wealth and resources to shelter all of us, offer all of us a good life. Terror has ceased being a creature of nature and is fully a creature of humans.”
Patria! I had a new friend! She said she'd help me find Ori. She knew how to keep a son. She knew how to see the goodness in our sons. She knew that life was good, even here, or maybe especially here.
I rose to go and she followed me outside. We looked up. “In the City you forget stars. Here stars fill the sky and rise up forever like my childhood night sky in Ventura. I'd forgotten how I loved that night sky.” She spoke softly. “When I look up I can feel myself having to decide whether to be reassured or terrified.” I recognized myself in her. “Hard to choose beauty, our beautiful Island, this place where one way or another so many of us are taking a stand over terror. I shudder whenever I remember that just a few yards away inside that camp our warriors are being tortured.” We held hands and I felt both of us tremble. For a minute, with Patria, I let terror rise up. I felt the terror fully, coursing through me. I felt my body shake and shake and then the terror subsided. "Terror isn't bigger than we are."