Yes, It's Me

“…perdona nuestras ofensas como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden.”

The phone rang while David was somewhere far away, lost inside his own thoughts. It pulled him back almost against his will. It was Allegra.

“I am freaking out. Dad just got back, and Mom won’t open the door.”

“What do you mean she won’t open the door?”

“The Airbnb owners already came. She locked it from the inside. Nobody can get in.”

“How big can that Airbnb be?” he asked. “Maybe somebody should just yell for her. She’s probably asleep.”

“I am freaking out.”

He paused for a second before answering.

“Why are you freaking out? Why are you really freaking out? What’s the worst that could happen? Why are we already thinking about the worst? Just keep me posted.”

He hung up, and almost immediately his mind began filling the silence. Maybe she did it. Maybe Gracia finally did it. Maybe she finally found the courage to go against the Lord’s will and take her own life, believing that this might be the best solution to stop the war between her son, Angelo, and her daughter, Allegra — she is actually the only thing still connecting them.

The funny thing is, they were only supposed to stay in that Airbnb for about two weeks. Allegra is flying to the Dominican Republic soon to help her mother pack and move to New York, where she will wait for her husband's residency paperwork to be approved. So maybe it all made sense. Why else would a woman who had refused to move, refused to sell her things, and refused to let go of her old-ass furniture that has been sitting there for years, suddenly give up? China, and glasses she never used, not even during Christmas dinner. Why would she suddenly surrender and say, " You know what? You’re right. Things are difficult here; come get me.”

Why would a woman who had spent her entire life choosing her oldest son first—first and first and first—despite having another daughter waiting for her here, needing her just as much as her drug-addicted son, suddenly change her mind? Maybe that was the whole idea. Take me somewhere safe. Somewhere, where I can end things on my own terms.

It wasn’t until later that David realized what he had been doing. He had been waiting for the phone to ring again. Waiting for the keep me posted call and waiting for someone to tell him what had happened. Maybe she did it. And somewhere very, very, very deep inside himself, that made him happy. Even though she was his favorite aunt, even though she was the aunt he felt closest to. It made him happy.

To understand that moment, we have to go back years.

Angelo was Gracia’s oldest son, from her first marriage with the love of her life. When they divorced, she became terrified that her ex-husband would take the boy away from her, so she turned to witchcraft. She got involved with things David won’t even mention because they’re too deep, even for the human mind to understand. Maybe David is one of the few people still alive who knows that story. Not because he witnessed it—he didn’t—but because he overheard it. He knows enough to believe that whatever happened back then tied that mother and son together in a way that went far beyond being mother and son. The devil was there, and she was there too.

When she remarried, she and Carlos, her new husband, spent almost everything Angelo had inherited from his deceased father, who was a millionaire. Houses, apartments, beach properties, money; you name it. Everything disappeared before that boy was even old enough to decide what kind of life he wanted to build. He used to receive a monthly check, but when he asked for a full report one day, he found out there was nothing left. Later, Carlos disappeared too. Allegedly, he left with another woman. More recently, a relative mentioned to Allegra that there had actually been more than one.

The point is that Angelo never went to school, traveled as an adult, or did much of anything, besides doing drugs to forget his father’s traumatic death, partying, and going out with multiple women. Instead, he held on to the belief that he was nobody because everything had been stolen from him. To be fair, what was done to him was awful—his own mother, blinded by Carlos, stole his rite of passage to a decent life—but he has been lingering on that for the last 30 years. Worse things happen to people, and they survive and move on.

Now, Gracia is going through one of the worst financial situations of her life in Santo Domingo. Angelo lives in the same house with his second wife and his children. They both don’t work. They don’t do anything. Gracia’s husband is trying to support them financially out of guilt, while Allegra, in New York, keeps sending money to help everyone survive. Somehow, the people carrying the most weight have become the ones expected to carry even more.

So when Allegra called and said, “Mom isn’t responding,” David thought about everything. He thought about the years, the manipulation, the resentment, the exhaustion, and the impossible position Allegra had been forced into. And he felt good.

He felt really good.

Then he felt terrible.

Not because he wanted her dead. Not because he hated her, but because, for one brief and unforgivable moment, death looked like mercy. Not for her, but for everyone else attached to that situation. That was the thought he couldn’t forgive. Not the possibility of death, but the relief that came with it.

It was then that he realized that he was capable of becoming one of the voices inside the darkness. The voice of the murderer, the tyrant, the abuser. Not that he would become those things, but that he had the capacity to. For the first time, he became painfully aware of which wolf he was feeding, and it terrified him. He realized that we all carry within us the seeds of both good and evil. Not that he did not know, but it was not a present reality inside his head.

That self-discovery stayed with him for the rest of the day. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He kept replaying the phone call, trying to understand why relief had felt so natural and so terrifying at the same time. Last night, while revisiting Carl Jung, he finally found the language for what he had experienced.

Jung wrote about what he called the shadow, the parts of ourselves we reject, deny, or refuse to acknowledge because they don’t fit the person we believe ourselves to be. We spend our lives distancing ourselves from them, convinced they belong to someone else, and we are only capable of “loving thy neighbor.” We point to murderers, abusers, addicts, convinced that darkness belongs to them and not to us. The shadow survives precisely because we refuse to recognize it as our own.

He was as bad as Angelo, who has put Gracia through misery ever since he discovered his inheritance was gone.

Yesterday, his shadow spoke, and it didn’t speak through violence or hate. It hugged his subconscious with a warm embrace that gave him peace. It suggested that perhaps everyone would be better off if the suffering simply ended. That was enough to shake everything he believed about himself, even with all his understanding of his own good and evil.

To his surprise, a few days before that call, he was speaking to a friend about all the things he contains. The conversation started after rewatching “The Life of Chuck.” He mentioned a list of all the bad things he has done, and that he was ashamed of, but that he also accepted, because it made him what he is, a body full of contradictions, “I too am untranslatable,” as Whitman says in his poem “Song of Myself.”

What terrified him wasn’t the thought itself; it was realizing that the capacity for that thought had always existed within him. Recognizing his shadow didn’t make him a murderer; it made him aware of his imperfections and humbled the shit out of him.

This morning he came across a passage from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago that stopped him — the idea that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between nations, classes, or parties, but through every human heart, shifting back and forth over the years, and that even the most evil-consumed heart keeps some small foothold of good, just as even the best of hearts keeps a corner that never fully roots out its own capacity for evil.

And then he thought, there I was, sitting among all the best of hearts, and wishing Gracia was dead. Solzhenitsyn reminded him that even a soul that refuses injustice, one that breaks at the smallest acts of unkindness, still has the potential to reach for the apple and offer it to Adam.

Today, Spain won the final against Argentina in the FIFA Cup. David had always found sports fascinating, not because of the game itself, but because of what it reveals about humanity. There are few places where you can witness the best and the worst of people in the span of ninety minutes. Strangers become heroes or villains overnight, people celebrate people they have never met, insult people they’ve never met, and convince themselves that winning or losing says something about who they are. Maybe sports have always been one of the safest places to rehearse tribalism.

Yesterday, while England and France were playing, his phone rang. He was sitting on the toilet when he answered. It was Allegra. At first, he thought she was crying. Instead, she was laughing nervously. Like saying you were right, all this time. There was no need to freak out.

Earlier that morning, she had called in a panic. Her father had returned to the Airbnb, but Gracia wouldn’t open the door. The owners couldn’t get in. Her other brother couldn’t get in. Eventually, they called the fire department. They all feared the worst. David did not fear it; he needed it to happen.

“She had been asleep the entire time,” Allegra said as she continued laughing.

Sleeping, if only for a little while, after years of stress and battles that never seemed to end. Away from the son she had spent her entire life protecting. Away from Angelo’s wife, his children, the financial strain, the scarcity, the neighbors calling the police, the evictions, and the endless reminders that Carlos had stolen the inheritance that should have been Angelo’s. She was finally resting, alone in a cold room with the air conditioner running while England scored its first goal.

Allegra laughed the way people laugh after surviving something they were certain would end in tragedy.

“She was just sleeping.” She repeated.

“I told you,” David answered, almost annoyed. “There was no reason to panic.”

He hung up, and he found himself strangely disappointed. Not because Gracia was alive. He was disappointed because, somewhere deep inside, he had already accepted another ending. Part of him had believed that her death would bring relief to everyone she was leaving behind. France kept trying to come back. They couldn’t. In different ways, we both lost, and their monsters prevailed.

Nietzsche warned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

David understood, now, exactly what that meant. He had spent so many years believing himself to be the reasonable one — the nephew who kept everyone calm, who told his cousin there was no need to panic, who prayed the safe prayer every Sunday without ever really listening to the words. He had built an entire identity around not being like Angelo, not being like the men in his family who let their wounds become their whole personality. But the abyss doesn’t ask for an invitation. It had simply been there, waiting, the moment his aunt’s door didn’t open. And when he looked into it, if only for a few seconds, something in him had looked back and recognized itself.

The danger, he realized, was never in having the thought. The danger was in mistaking the thought for a stranger — in refusing to fight it precisely because he refused to admit it was his to fight. A monster you deny is a monster with nowhere to be watched. Fighting it meant naming it: this is mine, this happened in me, and I am responsible for what I do with it now.

For most of his life, David thought becoming a good person meant eliminating every contradiction within himself. He thought goodness meant reaching a point where certain thoughts would no longer be possible, where darkness would finally disappear.

He doesn’t believe that anymore.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.

His prayer changed after that full-circle moment.

He no longer asks God to forgive his sins as he forgives the transgressions of others.

He asks Him to help him recognize how capable he is of evil, and to refuse the idea that it only exists in others, because of his few good deeds; it does not exist in him.

Now he prays that he is always self-aware of his actions, and his ability to harm others, to harm himself, and to harm the largeness of all the multitudes he contains.