Dear MJ,
Many years ago, when I was just a kid visiting your place in the peninsula, I couldn’t bare your seclusion and after a couple of months I asked permission to come back home: to grandma’s place. I know. Your house was always full of people, but just as me they were all visitors, and they left as soon as sunset and it was the two of us alone, only you and me where it used to be crowded.
In the last days of summer vacation I got homesick, yearning a busy house with the same faces, my brothers yelling for nearly everything and my mom’s sweet goodnight kiss at bedtime. I missed the corny soup operas filmed in Miami, dogs barking for no reason, unexpected visitors arriving while I was eating lunch. My family raised me in order to miss them, to always keep them in mind, to stick to few things in common that don’t exist anymore or maybe never existed. ‘Have a big family’ grandma used to teach us, ‘Look at the neighbors, so old and they have no one to take care of them’ she alleged as I dreamt of living by myself, as I considered your lifestyle as my own way.
Now that I’m older, I can’t help to feel uncommon. I’m twenty-six and I live away from grandma’s home, with my sweet boyfriend, who is the sweetest man I’ve met. Leo is at work most of the time coming back at night, and I spend more than four hours alone, catching up to some pending reading or writing a short story either in English or Spanish. Home alone for four full hours, Geez! Venezuelans always keep tight to their kin; they live with their parents until they get married or pregnant. Two of my uncles live with grandma, and also my aunt, the youngest of them just turned fourty-five.
I always wondered about father’s siblings’ life choices, since my dad was the only one who left home, got married, made his own business; he even worked enough to ignore me and my brothers. ‘Why they never left home or got married?’ I asked my parents, the replies were never convincing. But I always knew I’d rather live alone. And now I do, just like you kept living by yourself at the peninsula for over thirty years.
Sincerely,
Jair
