Esmeralda's Road

I want to write. I want to write. I want to write. The words I repeat much more often than I dedicate the time to do so. The words I repeat much too often to friends, family, acquaintances. Shame. I feel shame for not doing so. I feel anger at not doing so. 

Cozy. A word so foreign to a family of blue collar immigrants. Blue collar immigrants from El Salvador who moved their two baby girls to Los Angeles all the way from New York, where they met. 

Where are you from? Wow, your English is so good. The look on their faces when I use words they deemed above my knowledge. The fact they think “your english is so good” is a compliment. Subconscious superiority. Subconscious beliefs that “people like me” are something to pity. Something less than. 

Cozy. A word that I will never forget yearning for as a 12 year old. My dad had started a small business. A used car dealership. The location had a small front area with enough space for about a dozen cars. The house, not office, was large enough to house our family in the back and use the entry/living room to tend to sales. Large enough that we didn’t have much furniture beyond our beds and the couch at the front of the house by the “office” area. I don’t remember ever sitting there, though I’m sure I did. I remember my mom finding my sister’s page of lyrics she’d written down to one of DMX’s songs, her anger at the vulgarity of said lyrics. 

Cozy. I clung to that word. I read it in my books. So many books I read, so few I remember reading. But cozy. That is where I learned that word. Through reading, through someone’s description of it all. What it meant to feel cozy, for a space to look cozy and inviting. 

I will never forget one day I so desperately tried to achieve that word. Cozy. I pulled an office chair into the one room in the house that was completely void of furniture or anything else. I pulled the office chair in there in order to have some peace and quiet to read my book. I grabbed a blanket and I made a mug of some warm liquid or another. I like to remember it as hot cocoa. I remember a golden light, perhaps a candle, perhaps some small lamp. The room as dark as I only wanted that warm light in order to feel… cozy. 

The word and feelings it was meant to inspire remained foreign to me. How could one possibly feel cozy in an office chair and a bare room. I’ll never forget trying to “curl up to read with my hot chocolate warming my hands and chest.” How does one curl up in an office chair? One does not. Because one cannot. Blanket or no. Hot beverage or no. Warm lighting or no. 

I remember eventually giving up on the idea that I could achieve that word, the same day perhaps.