VOICES
delirium from the By Mariana Janer Agrelot
I
was sitting in my grandparents’ living room listening to the local nightly news when a reporter with a brown bob and wide eyes announced: “The tropical storm has turned into a Category 5 hurricane. It is called ‘Hurricane Maria.’” The screens went yellow, blue, and red with swirls akin to Van Gogh. The radios were on all over the house and new batteries were bought and stored for when the ones in use failed. There was barking and yelling as water kept pouring and pouring from every orifice in the house. I could hear my dementia-ridden great-grandmother screeching and fighting from the other room, where I had to frantically run to hold her down at times to make sure she did not fall. The signal of the battery-powered radio in her room was scattered as the monotone voice of the newscaster became background noise. My grandma would talk incoherently for hours, screaming in anguish. Other times it would be completely rational things: “I want to go home, please take me home,” but we couldn’t take her home; we couldn’t even leave the house because the roads were blocked and looters were ravaging the city. In the longevity of the damned night, I began to hear new noises. The battery-powered flashlight by my bed emanated
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a cranky, mustard yellow noise, screeching as if it were begging to be turned off. I didn’t dare turn off that flashlight. I felt like I was five again and completely afraid of the dark. I was sleepless in the aftermath of the hurricane, in the pitch black, sweaty, sticky nights. Before the hurricane, I hadn’t known what real wind sounded like. It is not the mere swooshes of a light breeze; it is arrows laying siege to my house. It happened so many years ago that I don’t think anyone cares anymore. It is not on the news, and therefore not on the daily minds of the American people. Even while writing this I feel like I’m complaining, milking a subject that was once heavily discussed only to promote somebody’s political agenda. Puerto Ricans are citizens of America; our passports say it. But suddenly, whenever my trauma was triggered, I was not an American citizen anymore. I was just a childish Puerto Rican, ungrateful for all the slapdash aid that the American government had given the island. Yet, this aid didn’t help that, with every daily action, I felt like screaming at the top of my lungs out of pure fear. Children like me were left in a state of emotional daze, forced to move on quickly and focus on the future. We weren’t going to achieve progress if I cried. We all wanted to go back to a sense of normalcy so fast that we stunted our emotional growth. I am angry at my school for making me go back so quickly, to feel sweat dripping down into my laboratory notebooks in a drowsy,
