The Texan Warrior

 I feel a warmth in my chest staring out with a blue-sky envisioning walking towards the house with the white brick alongside Andres. I’m beginning to feel at home and gaining an understanding of what this is. There are flowers in the front porch with the wisp coming around a turn in which we begin to understand that this fantasy hasn’t been real for the past 20 minutes. The weight on my shoulders is gravitating while I’m in deep darkness after this occurrence and suddenly I’m feeling my eyes pry open.

I tried to go back to my room in this time but was dragged by a blurry vision with a barely recognizable face and fabric covering. It’s 4AM, I must wake up for Fajr, eat the first meal of the day, pray and then proceed to continue with our sleep. Mom get’s me up in the most altered mood and is surprisingly incredibly excited for the day which I refuse to acknowledge for myself.

“Ya Habibti! Don’t you want to get the day started? You can’t just pray and then go to sleep like that calling didn’t mean anything to you!” Mom said to me.

The most exhausted I’ve felt, “I barely keep my eyes open mama.”

“What ever you say Nalia.”

The day usually begins hard after this breakfast, I sleep for three more hours and then proceed to force myself to wake up and feel like I’m suffering for the rest of the day. It’s the seventh day out of 28 days of Ramadan and this year has probably been the worst I’ve felt since I was a kid. This is around the 15th Ramadan I’ve participated in since I started fasting at eight years old. There is nothing worse than realizing you have the wrong thoughts during this month. I should be printing out flashcards of Surah Al-Baqara and repeating them to Baba instead of laminating on the idea of a false narrative.

I participate every year during Ramadan but during different periods of my life, it wouldn’t be for the right reasons. One year I wanted to be skinny, so I fasted and pretended like it did anything after looking at the weight scale still say 157 pounds after four weeks. Another year I did it because my parents were expecting me to. The year before this year I decided on fasting for the sake of the people, not really for God which isn’t the worst suggestion but still. This year, I do it because there is something I look forward to everyday after I break my fast, a wish in my last prayer of the day that I will be forgiven for not always being right, for the life I used to live, and for the life I’m in the process of choosing to live, not even using words for the wish.

Andres Flores has been a friend now for around three years since I’ve been back in Temple. He’s been my companion at movies, the champion of murder mystery nights at the local bar, and a conspirator of history from the past. Creating all these new fine lines within the life I’ve known and will continue to know. I hold this weight of feeling like I haven’t been doing much right. There’s a world out there I want to experience, and I have a body that feels almost incapable of all of that which now leads me to resenting what I’ve been conditioned to think I am. Andres has seen that rawness and has known my true self since the beginning of our friendship. I think I’d rather hold my tongue about that in particular because this is unexplainable. I may have problems with who I am, but the turning of eyes is what draws me in and then pains me.

There’s no one else in Temple Texas with my name nor my background. We have around 93 thousand people in this city and there are only 175 Arab’s. We have maybe two Palestinian families here, and one girl named Nalia. I hate feeling like I stand out because there is so much to become scared of. One day someone will say that the olives in my container smell, the next they complain about how I can skip class when I need to satisfy my family’s salah, and even after that Mckittrick would say, “Nalia your last name freaks me out, my dad’s told me thing’s about the men like your dad who hit the buildings when we were younger,” in our fifth period history class in 9th grade. I haven’t even seen that kid since then and it still lives in my mind. We don’t belong. Not only do the kids in my class know it, but their parents also know it.

I’ve been telling Andres this since we got our dream jobs after college. I came back to this town around the same time he moved from Dallas to come here hoping for our lives to be afflicted in the same immigration team we work for where I’m a paralegal and Andres is the grant writer for the foundation branch. Andres comes from a Salvadorian family where the coffee grows strong, and the volcanos rumble more than the past that his family would try to leave behind. He really is the only person who got the gist of my problems when he saw me cry that one time in the breakroom after I explained my roots. Out of all the people in my life who’s dealt with my breakdowns, Andres has been the only one able to sit down and calm me down rather than rile me up.

I’ve sat down more than I can count on days like those where I just must be the one to reassure that my life was meant to be this way and after everything, I am sitting here in the consequences of what I had to do. I pray, fast, do good deeds, yet absolutely nothing hits me right in a way where I can sit down and just like myself. I’ve been begging for a day where nothing will hit hard anymore, that through everything I will just forget what my parents had to do to get me here, what I had to do to get here.
            As the day moves on from the desk, Lawrence gives me the casual stack of paper’s I’ve been glancing over for our newer client who hasn’t been able to speak to us nor work towards the case for them being better. Andres and I have been speaking about Brian Perez for the past two weeks because it’s been the biggest weight of our lives. Brian came stumbling into the office on the 12th of June, telling us his story after his recovery process after being separated from his family. His file is from the university for finding certain issues out since his parents were detained by ICE and then were sent back to Guatemala. We’ve been working with Brian’s case now because he’s in the process of potentially being deported as well.

I caught the eye of Brian one day as me and Andres walked off to have our break which compelled something out of me to excuse Andres and spend the hour with Brian.

“Hey Brian, how are you feeling today?” starting the conversation was probably the most anxiety peaking thing I could’ve done on my empty stomach but there’s a first for everything.

“I’ve had better days, I haven’t been able to contact Lexie,” his foster mom now after his parents left, “and there’s a lot on my mind. I have paid any attention to the shit show that’s been my parent’s case, but DACA isn’t pulling in.”

“We’re trying everything we can at the moment, but do you think you can tell me about your parent’s?”

“They’re pushing through since being back home but it’s this constant feeding of my issues that I can’t seem to forget. They keep saying they’re fine, but they’re only being treated this way now because of me. I went to college to get a fucking degree in something so useless and now they pay my consequences. I haven’t been able to sit and sleep in my room since because of this guilt. Now because of this they’re on the brink of losing everything.”

            My head is immediately banging when Andres comes to tell me that our break is over but he clearly sees something’s wrong. I get up to go back to my desk but once I sit down I’m running down to the bathroom to sob for the next hour and a half. This kid is me. There are differences, but there is a life out here I have ignored for the past 20 years where this struggle is constantly a battle through and through from the rest of us. I haven’t been able to explain it but it’s this final guilt. Creating a life here has been nothing more than a constant disappointment. From the empty prayers, to the simple words to Allah, to a meaning I can’t figure out without my parents in the room. I sit and consolidate with the emotions Brian is feeling solely because this poor 19-year-old boy must face a reality of a world that is not built for people like us and to become something that is not to be minimized.

            I see Brian, I see the little kid who wants to achieve a world of blisses and beliefs that create nothing more than grievances for our family. In a life against a track of being what our families have always wanted. Andres has been standing outside of the Restroom to see my face immediately red and he already knows what the deal is.

“You finally heard the kid’s story huh.”

“It’s cruel. The things that keep happening is such bullshit.”

“Nalia, there is a lot of us in all these new kids.”

“I know but it never gets old, I never fail to see myself in these cases and in a way I wish I could tell my family the problems we see here and that they’ll understand why we did this.”

“They’re not meant to understand it, Nalia.”
“Then why do I constantly keep fighting for them Andres?! Why can’t they see that this work is all for them?”

“Because they were never meant to.”

            I’ve sat with this for a while after and begin to reel myself back into what Andres feels. He has been blamed by his parents for their hardships and has done what he loves even after it was a scary path, but there really is a light in all this. My mama and baba still let me come back home after all this, they still have their home even after their struggles. I need to remember my resilience needs to be enough to create Brian’s resilience. He’s still somewhat startled by my abrupt walk away from when me and Andres clock out and I go to talk to him.

Brian blurts, “I’m very sorry if I said anything really offensive miss. I’ve been so scared these past few months since my parent’s were taken away. It’s been a lonely road.”

“I know Brian, we’re all fighting here for you and I should apologize for me leaving so suddenly. I forget how much I see myself in you and how much you remind me of who I was in college.”

“That’s reassuring to know that since you’re not in the process of helping me, I did my work in college to try to become a lawyer.”
“Brian, I promise you from here on out, that will happen. I don’t care what hardships we will face, but you will be a lawyer here in this town or even in the Capital even if it kills me.”