America Maria

🌟 L’Etranger

You are currently reading “L’Etranger”: For Real Estate Lovers. Real Estate Entertainment - This is your reminder that there are no rules. Check the Tip jar at the Bottom of the Publication 🙂 

YOU ARE WATCHING “AMERICA MARIA”

Check the Tip jar at the Bottom of the Publication 🙂 

“There she is: Miss America!” (waving to the imaginary crowd of dolls, her cat, her TV in the background)…

My name is America Maria. You have to say the whole thing or I won’t answer you. Not just Maria. Not just America. Both. Always both.

My parents named me America Maria.

Maria because we are Catholic, they told me - and Jesus mom’s name is Maria.

America because of my great grandfather who was called Americo, the village breadmaker. I never knew him and there are no pictures of him because there were no cameras like we have now. They tell me he had flour on his hands every day of his life. I imagine him holding me, white powder falling on my head like snow.

One day, when I was 5, I discovered America. A place, a country far from mine, that has the same name as me. At first, I didn’t understand.

She lived in the TV. She made me laugh and sing and cry, even when nobody else was around. I wanted to live inside her glowing box.

I never been to America and no one in my family has ever been.

I saw the flag once, and it started singing to me.

At first, my parents thought it was cute. I demanded only American cereal, when I insisted on saluting the TV every time commercials came on, they filmed it for relatives.

I dragged my crayons across the walls, drawing maps of a country I had never really seen, not in its whole. Jagged states stretched unevenly, I pressed the borders hard until the paper tore. When mother asked why I was doing this, I simply said:
“Because if I don’t draw it, it will disappear.”

At night, I like to stare at the TV and whisper to it:
“I am America. America is me.”

Check the Tip jar at the Bottom of the Publication 🙂 

America owned me. She taught me how to walk, how to smile, how to tilt my chin just so. She whispered: Go for more. Go higher.

(puts on lipstick, kisses her hand passionately, smears it across her cheek like war paint)

(Getting caught by her mother) Mom (yelling): - “America! What are you doing? What are you watching? (snatches remote and turns the TV off). This is all you do, day and night glued to this TV. Get out of here! Go, go! And what’s that on your face? 

There was very little mystery in the small village I am from:

Walk to school in the morning. Same faces, same sounds, same dogs barking down the road. Same trees, yielding the same fruit at the same time, every year. Like clockwork. O tio Armando, plowing the fields. A Tia Arminda serving the coffee to the local working men. A professora, with her rosary in hand judging everyone promptly for their lack of morals. The cats hissing for the last piece of fish bones behind the garbage. The bells tolled every half hour. The creeks full of water, the snakes hiding in the grass. O tio Silverio is his piagio moped honking. honking, honking. 

All I can dream of was to go to America…

I like playing with my cats and going outside to play with the horsies.

But I do that while I wait for America…

Check the Tip jar at the Bottom of the Publication 🙂 

NEW DR. FIL COMING SOON

YOU ARE WATCHING “AMERICA MARIA”

I line up my dolls for parades. George, Abe, Liberty. I make them march across my carpet while I hum music from commercials. Sometimes I wave like a queen. Sometimes I wave like a soldier.

Sometimes when I talk, I hear another voice in my mouth. Big, shiny, and strong. She tells me how to stand. How to smile. How to wave. She tells me I am her.

That which we call America, by any other name would it feel as free…?

Check the Tip jar at the Bottom of the Publication 🙂 

3 years of US

This Content is Free. But if you enjoyed it, Tip the Artist.

Minimum donation $1.00

No Obligations.

Subscribe to our premium content to read the rest.