Graf #4

I am a twenty four year old, pale-skinned, hook-nosed, first generation Mexican-American whose paternal grandmother has disowned because of my "half-breeding."

I am daughter to a woman who was pregnant with me when she was finishing up her Bachelor's and now believe that's where my extreme thirst for knowledge came from. I sat with her for nine months and listened to the professors lecture. My mom thinks I heard everything.

I am the younger sister, by seven years, who shares a mother but not a father, and grew up in a house where that was a simple technicality that never influenced how we loved each other. My sister is not my half-sister, she is my sister and my dad is not her stepdad, he simply is dad.

We grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, an embarrassment at the time, perhaps only a topic of social awkwardness now, but an experience that has ultimately shaped my life and beliefs.

I am physically small, being only 5.2" and, even after gaining 15 pounds since addressing a Vitamin D deficiency, I am still petite at 120 pounds.

I have scars from several surgeries, one to remove a black-as-coal appendix, another to diagnose endometriosis that may eventually lead to a total hyterectomy and two more when I was twelve and fifteen to fix a genetic chest defect.

I engage in intellectual love affairs with anything that makes me think, wonder and question, and I house a fascination for the odd and unexpected. I particularly enjoy reading (anything, everything) art, music and a well-brewed cup of hot coffee with enough cream to make anyone else cringe.

I like to go to random, hidden-in-a-hole thrift shops or used book stores where I enjoy running my fingers along the dusty sweaters and cracked spines. I daydream of who once owned them.

I like to go to bars, dark, questionable bars, where I sit alone and watch the bartender spin bottles and drinking just enough, that perfect amount, for the world to turn smooth and silky. My husband hates this particular trait because of the implications of danger, and I get tired of my gender being a handicap.

I live with, and deeply love, my husband, more than twenty years my senior, who loves and accepts me more than I could reasonably ask anyone to.

A good portion of my time is spent at work, in a rehab and living center, where I take constant physical and emotional care of the elderly who are demented and dying. I view them as my second family, which I know is a dangerous game my heart plays, but makes me damn good at what I do.

And, always, as soon as I wake I begin thinking, thinking, thinking, a whirlwind of thoughts and ideas that does not end until I lay my head down to dream in bright, rich, vivid colors of houses I've never been in, sitting in furniture I've never seen, a life I might not live.