Just like with abuelita, papá never talked about hurricane San Felipe. It was one of mamá’s first memories. She remembered the howl of the winds outside of the crowded shelter where everyone from her neighborhood gathered to take cover from the storm. “It was like a monster,” she said. “The walls didn't just shake, they vibrated.”

Some thoughts on Breast Cancer Awareness Month from someone that's been through the storm.

It's Izzy's last summer before her senior year of college when a family tragedy reveals secrets that crumble her plans for her future. Survival means returning to a place she barely knows and reconsidering what she thought was most important in her life.

One euphemism that took me a while to understand and perplexed me was le canto el gallo. The rooster sang to her. I was eight and in Puerto Rico for the summer when I heard it for the first time.

I'm working on a novel where the main character needs to drop out of school due a family tragedy and she needs to figure out a way back. It's based on my own personal experience fighting through the bureaucratic federal and state financial aid set up here in the US. Considering the cost of tuition now relative to the cost of living - there's no way in Hell I would have been able to afford attending SU in 2021.

The phrase is a cliche now: I got the rug pulled out from under me, but when you've had it really happen to you it really does make sense. It's that moment when you’re standing there, looking around and taking things in and you suddenly get yanked off your feet unexpectedly landing on your ass and wondering WTF just happened.

Mom would have been 80 this year. I wonder what she would have been like now as a grandmother. How would I see her as an adult?

I had a conversation with my son a while back about how sometimes we come across some policy or rule that just doesn’t seem to make sense. Sometimes we just can’t accept something as well, “that’s just the way it is” (thanks Bruce Hornsby for the earworm now). I don’t remember what prompted the conversation, but I recalled my own personal story from high school in NYC.

I'm not exactly sure when this story was written. My guess would be sometime in grad school since this story is based on actual events from my couple of years off from college between my junior and senior years (but condensed in time). It's the beginning of what was supposed to be a longer story that never happened. Maybe it will.