Writing About Lives

Last night my good friend Rowena and I completed our Columbian journey together. Sure, we have a few more readings, to turn in our theses projects and to eventually graduate, but the hard part – the course work, the committees, are done.

She arrived to New York from New Orleans where all her things were in storage at a friend’s place. A few weeks later Hurricane Katrina destroyed almost every remnant from her childhood except for a box of journals. We were in our first nonfiction workshop together and decided to go hear Toni Morrison read in New York at a Katrina awareness event. As we had breakfast we compared notes on our lives we kept saying “You too? Me too?”

Mystics would say we have a similar soul history and yet we couldn’t be more different.

I’m black. She’s Pinay. (You’ll have to look that one up.)

We both have mental illness in our immediate families.

She fled medical sales. I fled journalism.

At separate times and without knowing each other;
We both did UNO’s study abroad program in Madrid under the same professor.

I laugh loud. She laughs louder and then claps.

We struggled with whether writing nonfiction is cultural treason.

We go to the same church on Sundays and eat Asian afterward.

We go walking through Chinatown and then poke around a bit.

Fittingly we both ended our time in the same nonfiction workshop again where we had a wonderful experience with the professor. Last night after our last event, we walked down Broadway to 120th. She turned right and I kept walking. It’s a path we take regularly to rehash events from the day.

Since the fall of 2005 until now, time I have bonded with a lovely woman by the name of Rowena Cruz in ways I can’t even document. She went from being a wallflower barely speaking up for herself to rolling her neck with the sassiness of a snake. “You think I’m gonna…..” You ought to see it.

When my mother met Rowena she said: “She’s so cute. If I was as cute as she is I’d be out dancing and snapping my fingers every night.”

Dance, Rowena, dance.