Your Life Came to Repair Mine

     Black Cloud

It was around eleven-thirty in the morning on that March 20 that would change Diana’s life forever.

Dina, as those closest to her affectionately called her, couldn’t stop crying. She kept asking herself what her mother’s reaction would be upon learning the news that had enveloped her life in a black cloud, the kind that foreshadows the most stormy days.

At the moment of discovery, she was in her school bathroom shortly before the bell rang.

A positive pregnancy test and sweaty hands prompted the need for an immediate escape to a secluded place where no one could find her.

However, she assumed that the right thing to do was to smile, since she had always heard adults say that expecting a child is synonymous with a blessing.

For Diana, confirming the hypothesis that her slight little body would be the carrier of a small growing human being meant the worst mistake of her adolescence.

Twenty minutes that would delay her future career, her dreams, and her possible plans to leave Cuba.

Bathed in a concoction of nervousness, the barely fourteen-year-old girl could not silence her invasive thoughts.

Her mother had lived through the same situation she would experience shortly before finishing ninth grade, and it was impossible not to feel that history would repeat itself like some kind of curse.

     Gray Cloud

Diana’s life had been very hard, with a childhood marked by frequent arguments at home, self-esteem issues, and even personality disorders.

These experiences would lead her to attempt suicide shortly after entering her current academic level.

The event terrified everyone at the middle school, but gradually, like everything, it was slowly forgotten.

Her current family nucleus is limited to her mother, and they live in extreme poverty on the outskirts of the city.

Survival in deplorable conditions, without a father figure, with a diagnosis of depression, and expecting a child were, without a doubt, difficult situations to face, especially at such a young age.

Amid lamentations and questions, she tirelessly sought answers in her mind. Her worst and greatest ally.

She needed some of her mother’s determination and the certainty of whether the gift of becoming a grandfather would have prevented her father’s abandonment.

But later, something would change in her way of seeing things. Despite how complicated it was to imagine a different life after experiencing scenes straight out of a horror movie, Diana had always wanted to be a mother.

     White Cloud

Still fearful and doubtful, she gathered her strength and decided to tell her mother about the baby, a week before the sex-revealing appointment.

Her mother, both mother and father at once, with a brittle voice and a somewhat reddish face, simply kissed her cheeks and wrapped her in her arms. The same arms that carried her when she was little and made her her driving force.

On the day they both learned the gender of the creature forming in the first-time mother’s womb, the tremors in Dina’s body resonated more intensely, but somehow she felt happy and a little strange.

She thought it was normal to feel that way, inexplicably.

Diana was a girl who would give birth to another girl in a world of men. In a society that does not distinguish and points with both hands.

The girl with long curls and a rebellious laugh could not help but see herself in her daughter, in the one she did not yet know but felt tightening her soul.

She: I want to be myself in a new life. No, sorry. I want her to be herself. In this world and this little corner of town. That way, perhaps with such certainty, I might be able to repair myself, she thought.

They might not have enough resources to offer her a better life, but what was no longer in doubt was that the girl in gestation would live in an environment full of affection.

Happiness doesn’t pay for a school lunch, but it complements a person’s existence in many ways. Just as Dina longed for throughout her childhood.

Diana, who was close to turning a marvelous fifteen years old, had experienced several aspects of her life undergo a radical change since she knew she would enter the world of motherhood.

From her way of thinking and acting to her future projections.

If I were given the chance to go back in time and once again be certain that you would soon be in my arms, I would love you from the very first moment I knew you were on the way. Your life came to repair mine.