The one thing I'm really enjoying about jogging is that it gives me time to think. And after the sleepless night I had, I needed it.
I was thinking about the reality of living in fear.
When I was around eight years old, I loved staying in our apartment while my parents went to work. I had school in the afternoons so I had the mornings free. I would sleep until late (which as a kid was around 10am, not the monstrous thing I do now sleeping until 2pm). I would get up and make breakfast for me and Gabriel. I might watch Cartoon Network, maybe Nickelodeon for a while. If I was in the mood, I would play cars with my brother because he had this awesome Hot Wheels track and he let me play with him if I promised not to use his Max Steels as Kens for my Barbies. It was 'me' time, but it was also 'siblings' time.
Then one day we went to a BBQ at my Grandparents' house and when we came back, the house was a mess. My Barbies were on the floor, my matress turned around, all the drawers in the closet were taken out, one was broken. The TV was gone. The Tommy Hilfiger clothes my Dad sold in his free time because his job and Mom's weren't enough to support us, were gone. Gabriel's Super Nintendo was gone and he started crying when he realized it. He was just 6 years old. The house was an absolute disaster.
Dad sent me to the neighbors with Gabriel. The police took hours to come and more hours to leave. We fell asleep on the neighbor's couch, Mrs. Gladys was her name. I inanely remember she had a lot of red curls in her head. When we returned home the next day it was full of a white powder that showed the fingerprints of the thieves on the walls and our furniture. We never heard from the police again and six months later, we cleaned the powder.
After that, I refused to stay alone home in the mornings. I was scared. I told Mom I'd babysit Gabriel if they took us to Grandma's every morning and she agreed. She was not so relaxed herself. I stopped playing in the apartment complex's park. I got nervous if we were out until late. My mom was worried about me, because my brother hadn't been so affected, but I was never very brave.
But humans are nothing if not resilient. A few months after, I forgot. I forgot, grew up and was happy again to be alone. Then we moved to a house and the memories were totally buried.
I would come back from High School and nap to my heart's content. (I have a thing about sleeping). I was relaxed and I felt safe. And then the house got broken in.
By then, I was older, the country's safety situation was way worse and I knew it. No one had been at the house when it happened and nothing but Tvs and DVD players had been taken. I brushed it off. We added electrical fences, more multilocks doors, reinforced the bars in the windows and got over it. I still could sleep in the afternoons. It was okay. Shit happened and all that.
Then when I was 18 and I took my brother to Ireland so he could learn English we got a call from home. The house had been broken in again. They had climbed the neighbor's still-in-construction-wall up to the roof, jumped over the electrical fence, broke a window, cut the bar and gotten in. Quite the Mission Impossible move, to be honest. I was almost impressed.
Mom was sad. She had gotten a ring from her company as a sale's award, one she totally adored and it had been stolen. Along with my baptism gold necklace (the only gold thing I had. I used to have a ring passed to me from my dad's mother, but that was taken in the first break in). No one was at the house, so we were sad, pissed but we were fine. Killed the credit cards to replace the TVs and little by little bought some new things that had been taken. Obviously, we didn't call the police, nor this time nor the last. It was useless. Things went back to normal.
A few months ago, around mid-February, I was coming home because the riots were bad at school and it had been cancelled until further notice, which meant weeks. But they were worse here so Dad convinced me to go see Mom instead. He was very insistent which was a little odd but I went with it. Call it instinct or good luck, but Dad was absolutely right.
This time they didn't break in. They put a gun at my dad's head while he cleaned the garage and made their way in. They told Dad plain and simple, they were leaving with everything they could, including his car and him. For all further purposes "you're kidnapped from here on." And then they told him, with no fuss, they were going to kill him. They didn't bother much covering their faces because of that. One of them was particularly mean. He kept telling him he wasn't yet decided whether he wanted to stab him repeatedly in the gut with his knife, or blow his head off with his gun. Dad knows about guns. He knew it was loaded, he knew the safe wasn't on. And he could see in his eyes the man liked to inflict pain. He tells me he knew he would be murdered and recalled again how I was supposed to be there too but wasn't. Dad has faced death more than once before, both previous times traumatic and a miracle for him to survive, but I don't think they left the scars this did.
Fortunately, a lucky neighbor called the police and for the first time in my experience, they acted like they should. Like protectors, like defenders. Like people we could count on instead of fear. Corruption is that heavy here. They didn't know what house was broken in but they looked around, saw the garage open, the hydro-jet on and dancing around the ground like an enchanted snake and realized that was the house. Fire was open and the mean guy who couldn't wait to murder my Dad was killed inside our car, in our garage. The others escaped, one wounded. I got texts from friends asking me why our house was full of bullets and officers and I had no idea what had happened.
The first few weeks, Dad and I slept with our bedroom doors open and the AC off so we could hear each other. When we were in the house, we'd be always in the same room, always aware. He didn't allow me and I didn't insist to be alone in the house. If he was leaving, I went with him. With time this all passed too but the paranoia didn't.
I no longer can nap in the afternoons, and falling asleep at night takes a lot of effort. Like last night, every little noise startles me. I hear a crack downstairs, and I grab my pepper spray (as if that'd stop an armed man or three intent on raping and murdering me), go downstairs, check all the windows, all the doors and the dark corners, until my heart stops beating fast. I then go back upstairs and to my bed, looking at the ceiling until another sound startles me and the process starts all over. Eventually, I shut off my brain enough to sleep.
But it's always there. The fear.
And I'm not even going into the +3 times I have been mugged in the streets. It's not worth it.
So when I tell people I want to leave this country... it isn't because there is no toilet paper or ketchup. It isn't because the president is a monkey. It isn't because the inflation rate is one of the highest if not the highest in the world.
It is because I'm scared.
Because I'm just twenty one years old and I'm already tired of living in fear.
dededos
titsay
annaxmalina
origamiaround
vaporwave
areudirty
