Sunday, October 05, 2008

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I wonder what happened to a girl I once knew. She was from El Salvador and had graduated from her high school in LA with very high grades. Yet, she still had problems with writing essays in English. It made me kind of mad when a certain professor told her she just had to keep working harder and "if he could do it, she could do it." Maybe he meant to be inspiring but it also made her feel bad. I'd heard stories about his college days from my roommate (who admired him) and they didn't seem like my friend's stories. She shared a room with her sister and drove her to work very early every morning, and they lived with another sister and her husband, who was very controlling. There was all sorts of other trauma from her childhood and teenage years that she'd been through and witnessed. She had fun with me because I wanted to learn things. Sometimes we'd go salsa dancing, too. She'd help me pick out clothes and things to wear when I went to Peru, and she would give me all sorts of advice. When I was wretchedly depressed about people in my family being sick, she took me to the chapel and stood with me and watched me cry and was there with me. Me and her and another girl, originally from Poland, became a kind of threesome on campus. They both came with me to the island where I had grown up, and we met up with an older woman who had done things to take care of my sister and I, such as keep us at her house when our mother was on business trips. We did some kind of divination thing...I don't remember if it was "angel cards" or what...but her sister had come with us and when she translated the messages to her sister (in Spanish) they both started to cry. She had been engaged to someone back in El Salvador and then he had broken it off and she had not moved on from it and that was why they were crying. And we had a kind of drumming session in the basement, too, I think. It was good. I wonder if she ever met Jorge Ramos or graduated or did what she wanted to do. Actually, I wonder what happened to any of them!

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