Growing up, he was often confused.
His mother told him so many stories that they would fill his mind in a steady stream. Images of another time would ring clearer than his own every day activities. Every morning he half-expected to wake up back in his old room, with cold dirt floors and crowing roosters. Why hadn’t the roosters crowed yet, he would wonder. As he waited for breakfast, past meals would replenish his hunger. He would almost smell the rich feasts of Nochebuenas past back in Habana, every dish seemingly etched into his tongue by the pen of his mother’s words. Relatives seemed to live so close to the heart, yet so far away, that he was always torn between these two.
It had seemed that his home address was lying to him. Every letter that arrived came to the mailbox with the words “Miami, Florida USA” as his mother read aloud. But wasn’t he there, in Cuba, with them? So much of his life had been spent in an area where Cuba seemed at once everywhere and far. Every shop and storefront had seemingly been described in tales of old. Maybe this had been the store where mom had met dad, or the restaurant where his mother had first tried flan when she was in grade school. He had tried all these foods before, seen all those signs before. He had lived in a fairytale of life in the past. So until he arrived in elementary school, he had the strongest impression that he had been living in Miami, Cuba.
Original photo: http://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/asm0530&CISOPTR=1271&CISOBOX=1&REC=8
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