#105: Departure & Return

Reflecting on the beginning, coming home again, and the movies that held me as we flew.

When I was a little boy, in the years I lived in Florida, I had a cousin named Jandro. He still exists and so do I, but we don’t know each other in the same way. As children, we were best friends. He is slightly older than me and I looked up to him in the way children often look up to their child elders. My sister and I loved each other and still do, and were very close, but there is something different about having a sibling or cousin who is your same gender.

I knew early on that I was different than the other boys around me, and I was desperate to hold on to any facets of boyhood I could, before inevitably being swept away on the undertow of puberty and washed ashore on the tide of adulthood. My name is Alexander, and my cousin is Alejandro. We call him Jandro, we call me: Alex.

It was interesting to observe him. Is this what I would be like if I grew up around my Spanish-speaking Cuban family members? Would I have a personality similar to his? Would I use the same words and have the same interests?

As Cheryl Strayed says: We’ll never know of that other life, the one we could’ve led, but we must salute it, a ghost ship passing in the night, never wondering too long what could’ve been, and instead focusing on all that is. I’m paraphrasing.

When my family moved to Georgia, I felt a kind of loss. It’s strange because now I…