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📓 Tuesday, December 9, 2025 — 10:56 p.m.
Tonight I’m walking through the cold — green beanie, green jacket, black socks, Nike slides — passing the newly reconstructed house on the corner near my block that looks like it’ll be up for sale soon.
The streetlight above me throws that soft gold across the sidewalk, and the whole scene feels like a film I accidentally wandered into.
And I keep thinking: This isn’t a story I heard. This is the story of my life.
Earlier, nothing felt dramatic.
My mom had bought me some WaBa Grill and left it for me on the kitchen table.
I ate it, felt good, and later walked back from my studio/garage to the front house to heat up my sopa de fideo.
That’s when my mom told me she’d had a weird interaction with my dad.
She said it quietly — the way people talk when they’re trying not to admit they’re hurt.
She even kept her voice low so my sister wouldn’t hear.
She and my sister had gone to Ross to buy Christmas gifts.
That’s where they ran into my dad — buying clothes he sends to his second family in Mexico to resell.
My mom approached him gently, smiling big:
“Hey, what’s up?”
And he snapped at her as if she’d done something wrong.
“Why are you spying on me?!”
Then he shooed her away with his hand — sharply, angrily —
as if she were an inconvenience.
They aren’t husband and wife anymore — they’re roommates under the same roof.
But still, she felt confused, embarrassed, and angry at his bullshit behavior.
The marriage ended the night his infidelity led to a newborn child and a new family.
She took it personal.
I could see it in her eyes, in the way her voice dipped.
So I kept telling her, gently but firmly:
“Don’t personalize something that doesn’t belong to you.
It wasn’t about you — it was his trauma reacting.”
She tried to understand, but hurt doesn’t disappear just because truth shows up.
My sister overheard us while looking for Scooby’s leash.
She stepped closer.
“Why do you think Dad reacted like that?” she asked.
So I explained the thing nobody teaches you growing up:
People blow up because they’re emotionally immature.
Trauma freezes a person at the age they were hurt.
They age on the outside, but inside they stay stuck —
reacting, defending, exploding, avoiding, never reflecting.
Adults pretending to be adults, but emotionally twelve.
My sister listened with this strange recognition, then said quietly:
“I’ve heard this before… and I believe it.”
Something in her softened —
like she finally understood the shape of her own life.
A little later, while we were all still in the kitchen,
we heard our front gate open.
You cannot miss that sound.
It’s a clanky patchwork of scrap metal welded together by a half-drunk welder my mom hired years ago after thieves stole the original gate.
It rattles like old bones before it swings open —
a sound that always announces whoever is coming in.
This time, it was my dad.
My mom tensed immediately.
I felt it — my cue, exit stage right.
“I’m leaving, Mom. Have a good night.”
But she whispered:
“Go ask him if he wants to eat.
Please don’t leave yet.
I don’t want to be stuck alone with him while he eats.
Just stay until he’s done.”
So I walked down the hallway and asked:
“Dad, do you want to eat?”
He didn’t look at me.
Didn’t acknowledge anything.
Just said, flat:
“Sí.”
So I stayed.
He began eating… and he has developed this horrible habit of chewing with his mouth open, smacking loudly.
It started because he ignored a rotten tooth for a decade until it literally decayed in his mouth.
Even after fixing it, the habit stayed.
So he sat there — crunching and smacking through his food,
finishing with his usual almonds,
eyes glued to videos on his phone.
Completely ignoring us.
Acting as if nothing had happened at Ross.
As if he hadn’t hurt anyone.
As if he wasn’t sitting three feet away from the two people he wounded —
my mom at the kitchen table beside me,
my sister in the living room watching TV.
That’s trauma too — not just the explosion,
but the disappearance afterward.
The isolation.
The denial.
The refusal to share the same emotional space as the people you hurt.
Sitting there, I thought to myself:
People with trauma don’t listen.
They can’t.
They’re inside the storm.
And later tonight, when I stepped outside to breathe,
I saw a stick lying half-stuck in the grass near the stop sign.
I picked it up with two fingers,
twirled it between them,
then tapped it into a spare tire someone had abandoned by the curb.
The stick felt… soothing.
Now, walking beneath the streetlights,
I understand why it caught my eye.
Trauma is that stick.
It looks heavy because it’s been stuck for years.
But once you actually see it — once you understand it —
it lifts easily.
The weight wasn’t real.
The stuck-ness was.
Now I’m walking home,
past the hydrant,
past that same golden streetlight,
breathing in the cold night air.
Thinking about my mom, my sister, my dad —
and all the invisible wounds people live inside
without ever realizing they’re wounds.
Thinking how everyone mistakes their reactions for their personality.
How ego gets mistaken for identity.
How trauma gets mistaken for truth.
How loops get mistaken for destiny.
But people aren’t their reactions.
People are their wounds.
And once you understand that,
you stop taking storms personally.
You stop inheriting pain that doesn’t belong to you.
You stop confusing trauma with truth.
You just see clearly.
And something inside you — quietly, slowly —
gets free.
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