Marimacho.

Not tomboy. Not cute. Not sporty.

Marimacho.

Where I’m from, that word didn’t describe you. It warned people about you. A girl who looked wrong. Sat wrong. Laughed wrong. A girl who didn’t fold herself neatly into softness. This wasn’t Little League energy. This was, that one’s going to grow up strange. The kind of strange that made aunties tighten their lips and pray quietly in the kitchen.

Marimacho came loaded. Heavy with side-eyes. Seasoned with superstition. Sprinkled with panic. Too loud. Too rough. Too bold. Too comfortable taking up space. Sit with your legs open?
Finished. Climb too high? Suspicious. Run too fast? Problem.

Marimacho wasn’t just about how you dressed. It was about how you moved through the world without apologizing.

And let’s be honest, it wasn’t officially code for lesbian…but it hovered nearby.
Close enough to make adults nervous. Close enough to make them whisper. Because to them, anything outside the script felt like a threat. And the prophecy that followed Marimacho was always dramatic:

You’ll never get married. No man wants that. You’ll end up alone. Childless.
Living with a dog that doesn’t even respect you.

It was ridiculous. And it still stung.

Because Marimacho wasn’t said gently. It was said with a tilt of the head. With a smirk. With a warning wrapped inside it. It was a diagnosis disguised as a nickname. And Dominicans? We weaponize nicknames like it’s a sport. You don’t leave childhood without one. You don’t even earn it. It just attaches itself to you and refuses to die.

Chunky? That’s your name.
Skinny? That’s your name.
Big head? Congratulations. Permanent.
Slightly different? Oh, we got something special for you.

Marimacho.

That was ours. “Oh, Leonel’s daughters? The ones that look like little boys? Yeah, them.” Boom. Identified. We didn’t cry about it. Crying meant you were soft. And being soft was worse than being Marimacho. So we wore it like armor. Baggy jeans. Oversized tees. Sneakers. We weren’t making a political statement. We just didn’t want to flash the whole block in a dress while riding bikes. Half the time our mom picked the outfits anyway.

At school? We were fly. Ahead of our time. At home? We were under observation.

There’s a difference. The thing about Marimacho is that it policed joy. It policed volume. It policed posture. It told you exactly how much girl you were allowed to be—and punished you for exceeding the limit. Our brother could crash into walls, come home bleeding, climb trees like a feral raccoon.

“He’s a boy.” End of discussion. We did the same? Too much. Too wild. Too aggressive. Same behavior. Different verdict. And even with Chichi beside me, I felt it land harder on me. Maybe I was louder. Maybe I challenged more. Maybe I didn’t know how to shrink.

So, the correction found me first.

That’s the thing about growing up in that environment. Feelings weren’t illegal—just inconvenient. You want to cry? Do it quietly. You’re angry? Channel it into chores. You want fairness? Wrong house.

So maybe I leaned into Marimacho. Maybe it felt safer to be the tough one. The one who didn’t flinch. The one who didn’t react. Because reacting meant you cared. And caring meant vulnerability. And vulnerability got handled. Marimacho wasn’t just a word. It was a warning shot.

It told you:
Stay in line.
Lower your voice.
Cross your legs.
Be smaller.

Or we will name you. And once we name you, it sticks.

 

We’ve been trapped inside, the snow drifts from my husband’s leaf blower billowing higher and higher against the glass window pane, never insulated enough despite what we stuff the cracks with or what we tape over it. The three days without turning on my car or putting on real pants started off as fun, a luxurious hibernation in which we’d play endless games of Uno by the fire, pausing only to knead the bread dough and check the roast, the hustle of regular life dulled by the steady fall of fat, wet snowflakes. This glee quickly deteriorated into an itchy skin feeling, for all of us, including the dog, as we grew a bit more snappish, a bit standoffish, spending more and more time anxiously pacing around the house touching various surfaces while gazing out the window and cursing all the whiteness. On the third day, I do my makeup in the bathroom mirror, not because I am going anywhere but because I’m sick of seeing the same tired face in the reflection. As we do not have full length mirrors, I keep the sweats and stained tee shirt on for reasons I tell myself are based on practicality, less laundry to fold, less wear and tear on the good pieces.

These lulls in energy and enthusiasm are harmless, they are human, and I accept them as such. I have developed a toolset to combat days like these. As anxious boredom sets in, I find the book that makes me feel good to read and knock on my teenage daughter’s bedroom door, negotiating quality time with a strong dose of humility and a few very minor ultimatums. Before settling down to begin, I remember the robe my mother-in-law recently purchased for me, the black velvety heap I tell my young son wearing “feels like a hug.” As I start reading from the text, I mentally remind myself to slow down, to read the pages like a play, coursing the intensity into some lines and pulling back at the others. In this way, I can become part of the story, and my similarly restless daughter stills, puts down her phone, folds her hands on her chest, listening quietly. After a few chapters, a half hour, I place the book down on the dresser with more gentleness, a solid layer of easiness having found me. The reading has emptied the air of its frenetic buzz, and while I don’t have bread dough rising in the kitchen, I go make a cup of tea and cut up an apple for the kids. It is in this way we get through the day, and it is in these moments that I truly feel thankful.

These three days stuck in the snow seem to drag by, but in early 2020, three months into the COVID lockdown, every day was an eternity. The initial burst of energy, of victory gardens and online yoga classes, virtual book clubs and exotic pen pals soon resulted in a tepid pool of discontent. The downy baby chicks we’d purchased during that first week of quarantine grew large and awkward, squawking raucously in our half bathroom, flapping their wings and defecating on the tile. My every paycheck was uncertain and my husband’s management job at an independent grocery store was suddenly held as essential, a frontline position wrestling with the moral dilemmas of selling every last box of toilet paper to one man with greed in his eyes and a Platinum Amex. Gradually, we’d taken to singing Happy Birthday to the kids on a Zoom screen and we began considering the effects this isolation will undoubtedly have on their developing brains. Gradually, we’d forgotten about our seed starters, our book club assignments, and our sourdough sat untended and abandoned. Gradually, we were faced with the limits of our interior walls and the image in the reflection of our phone screens.

It was at this point of acknowledging our limits that my mother and I made a pact to encourage a positive outlook by composing a list of five focuses of gratitude, once a day. We vowed to hold each other accountable with a morning text. It took time to ingratiate. My phone screen lit up at five each morning like clockwork with my mother’s diligent entries, but I slipped and forgot, only remembering the task hours into the evening and making the cutoff of that day’s submission just in time. My entries at first were unoriginal, the kind of gratitude we give around the Thanksgiving table, hands folded for grace. We are healthy, we have a comfortable home, we have enough. It took half a week to exhaust my acknowledgement of things I felt privileged to hold as standard, to look deeper within and begin to develop an awareness throughout my day of items that could be added to the following morning’s list. I really, really enjoyed listening to my new audiobook when I took the dog for a walk today. The new spray I used to clean the kitchen smells refreshing, even hours later. It was so nice to sit on the patio with my son this morning and talk for a bit before I opened my computer. I started adding these observations to my daily text, and with each passing day I began to feel a greater bounty of options, a wider armful of joy to carry from one day to the next. By pinpointing these fleeting moments of gratitude, I could more fluidly incorporate them into my days, I could fill in the spaces of idle frustration.

Bolstered by our improved moods and satisfaction with the exercise, we added in a sixth line, dedicated to our spouses and something we valued in them. Some days, this was an easy thing to add, others felt harder. My mother, apparently nearing her limits with my father, resorted to texting “All I can say today, is I’m thankful your dad is not, nor has ever been, a circus acrobat.” Some days the entries were purely transactional. “C brought my car in for an oil change” or “C helped me by picking up Lena because I was running late with work.” More often than not, they were telling of the character traits which made our husbands beautiful humans, reminding us of why we chose them. “I know that C values family time, he makes it a priority” and “C mowed our elderly neighbor’s lawn without being asked to.” I felt an attentive shift to the things I loved about my husband every day, even if they weren’t always dramatic proclamations of love or glamorous exhibits of exceptionalism. They kept me seeing the father, the neighbor, the friend, the man I fell in love with, calling my neurodivergent sister every week to talk about bowling and our pet cats, shooting basketball hoops in the driveway with our son, noticing again the strength of his arms, his chest, the way his eyes break, light shining through when he laughs authentically.

Finally, we once again pushed our threshold for gratitude and took on a seventh line, this time turning the focus of our gratitude onto ourselves.  This felt the hardest for me at the onset, after I’d exhausted the obvious lines of “I’m a really fastidious worker” and “I am disciplined with exercising every day.” Getting creative, looking deeper, I started recognizing pieces of me that I admired that had previously been overlooked. “I was patient when my son was up most of the night last night, I was able to be comforting despite my exhaustion” or “I’m a mindful shopper and make efforts to support small businesses over corporations or Amazon” and “I sent an encouraging text to a struggling friend, and offered solid advice and time to listen when she needed it.” Recognizing these moments throughout the day in which I portrayed an upstanding human made me in turn feel worthy, made me want to do more, be more. I was able to identify what made me feel full, and I was able to emulate it more easily.

During this search for moments in which to give thanks, regular life started to creep its way back into reality. It became time to dig out my neat blazers and low-heeled boots, office attire from a life before social distancing and the need for an N95 face mask to pump gas. I could feel the familiar push of schedules to keep and agreements to be reached across physical tables, and I could hear their emergence, a keening pitch growing nearer as my pulse began to quicken. I watched as the soft spots of slow isolation retreated, and it felt like something I thought I wanted very much but was suddenly ill-prepared to receive.

It was a decision made to maintain gratitude, to retain some of its tiny bounties, that drove me to the station a full forty minutes before my train was set to arrive that first morning back to work, the world seeming to stretch out in front of me vast and unfamiliar. I set out for a solitary bench along the Hudson River, glancing over my shoulder, still conscious to leave a six-foot orbit of space between myself and passersby. I sat, and I looked out at the water. The sun hit the brackish surface in a way that warmed my face against the dawn’s cool edges, and while I’d been unsure of how to begin, I realized it was in front of me.

A barge made miniscule progress on its course paralleling the west bank, and I watched as little ripples of its wake brushed the rocks near my shoes. Each wave offered up bits of glossy gelatinous weeds and water caltrops, the same ones we’d refer to as “devil heads” when we’d play farther north along the river’s wooded edges. I was making time to be here, I was offering it to something bigger, bigger than the emails I could have been reading or the texts I could have been answering, the videos on my Instagram feed made to summon a feeling inorganically. I was honoring bits of time and action that brought me gratitude. I was making it a priority, and that, to me, was a form of worship.

Maybe I wasn’t doing this “right.” My thoughts slipped and wandered, feeling nervous about the time well before it became warranted. Despite it, I remained conscious of my place in this specific fragment of time, placing purpose on the bench. I focused on acknowledging the estuary stretched before me, its oily surface pungent in familiarity, nostalgic tides pushing and pulling memory. The tang of dead fish and industrial discharge was, to my native senses, sweet. A single gull picked through the wet rocks nearby, stopping its pursuit to regard me with a quizzical tilt of head before returning its focus to the treasure in the muck.

The coffee in my travel mug was by this time lukewarm, but I could still detect the amber trim of the vanilla extract I recently took to adding as a small nod to simple pleasure. I sipped and made plans with the day, agreeing that within the hours allotted, between the collision of new and old, I’d attend to the opportunities to feel grateful. I finally allowed my hand to reach for my phone, and after glancing at the morning rush of notifications I’d missed, I opened a new text to my mother, and began my list.

I signed the forms.
Agreed to the procedure.
Nodded a last-minute consent with a polite smile.

I’m told to fast the night before.
This.
This I am good at.
Ash Wednesday. Good Friday. Lent. Vigils that stretch past midnight.

Jejunium pro peccatis.
Hard pews. Bruised knees. Sit. Stand. Kneel.
I am good at rituals that demand suffering.

But this is a bizarre, unholy ritual—
no ashes smudged on my forehead,
no murmured bless me, Father,
no absolution whispered through a screen.
And definitely no feast at the end.

Not fasting to atone for sins or worship a god—just so I don't choke on my own vomit.
Wait—what sin am I paying for, exactly?

A mind inherited.
A body out of alignment.
A failure to move through the world with appropriate gratitude and ease.

It's okay, though—I lean into the hunger because it helps.
My empty body is pliable, quieter, easier to say yes with.
And when the time comes,

I walk.
No.
I am walked through the underground tunnels by a minder from the unit, who sports a high ponytail and chunky sneakers.

Her ponytail bounces with each clipped step. She glances back, pointed, as I lag.

We arrive. The waiting-room door clicks shut behind me.

Locked.

I sit in blue—sticky, institutional chairs.
My minder: watchful, bored.

I... I want to scream.
I want to tear it all down—
rip every laminated sign from the wall,
flip tables and chairs,
send clipboards skittering across the floor.

No—

I want to unzip my skin,

peel it off, leave it in a heap on the tile.

Step out of this fasted body.

Become bare.

Unnamed.

Unchartable—

But I don't.

I stretch.
I scroll.
I uncurl and curl my fists.

I listen.
Listen for the clinical hum of current from the next room.
Hum.
Shrill.
Electric.
It climbs, then drops.

I clack my teeth in time with the pulse, counting each interval—
like measuring seconds between thunder and lightning, waiting for the strike.

Sometimes I start crying for no reason.
Tears slide silently onto my shirt.
One tissue.
Handed over brusquely.
Measured care.
Silent, tidy crying is acceptable.
Any sob—too loud.
Not allowed.

Weeks pass, and objections lodge further down my throat:

No.

Wait.

Stop.

I don’t want—

Week by week, I fade. Dimmer.
Present enough for my body to be perpetually terrified. Terrified of forgetting anything.

Which is strange—
to fear losing a life I have little interest in participating in.

I’m not afraid of forgetting the big things.
The big things can be relearned.
It’s the small ones.

The smell of violin rosin.
Looking back at a friend mid-paddle on a canoe trip, laughing.
The weight of my dog pressed against my leg, chin resting perfectly in the crook of my knee.
My students’ hands tugging at my sleeve.
Tiny shoes I helped tie—
each loop and knot
a gesture of tending.

Small.
Insignificant.

But the things that make me me,
even as parts of me vanish.

My name is called.
Sweater.
Phone.
Glasses.
All handed over.

I shuffle half-blind into a room—
too bright, too clean, too crowded.

A kind nurse shows me pictures of his dogs.
I’m supposed to smile, right?
Say, I’m okay. This is fine.

Oxygen.
Electrodes.
The oxygen smells wrong.
The gel is cold.
The electrodes tug at my hair.

“Consent confirmed,” says the psychiatrist.
As if my body signed.
As if my pulse agreed.
As if terror weren’t its own refusal.

The anesthesia starts.
The room stays.
But I don’t.

Something slams.
Not sleep or floating,
but a cliff.

Pinned.
Muted.
But aware.

Large, heavy hands on my shoulders—the first physical contact I’ve had in months.
“You are safe,” the kind nurse says.
But I don’t believe him.

Time fractures and skips.
My body gone—

then suddenly dragged back.
Too fast.
Too sharp.
Too loud.

Air forced in.
Again.
Again.

“Big breaths, Brianna.
You’re just panicking...”

I choke.
Flail.
Sputter.

I’m not dead.
Not maimed.
Not disfigured.

What I am is furious.
Not at the wires, the electricity.
Not even at the cold, clinical precision of it all.
At needing it. At knowing I need it.
At having to say yes while my body screams no.
At how quickly I can stop existing—
how fast I fade.

I’m rolled back to the unit.
Efficient.
Routine.
Resolved.

A juice.
A cookie.
Just like Communion.
Take, eat.
This is your reward.

A reward for learning to disappear politely.

Twenty-six times I complete this ritual,
a novena to some unknown god.

And after the last—
I take my body home—
but not all of it.
Some pieces stay behind.

They ask,
“You feel better, right?”

“Yes,” I say.
Because that’s the correct answer.

My body hesitates.
But how can I say anything else?

I signed the forms.

 

I’ve done more than my fair share of travelling—and travel flinging, but this jaunt around three small East African nations almost put an end to my singledom. It starts in Kigali, Rwanda’s clean, organized, and overall pleasant capital. My couch-surfing host, solemn and ambitious Naser, doesn’t live in a mud hut like some of my other African friends, but in a spacious, modern apartment with actual bed linen. It’s practically another planet when compared to most of Africa.

The reason Rwandans are different from their carefree neighbors is apparent: the recent horrors of the Genocide have taught them that life is not about fun. The bus stations all over Africa are populated by hawkers, but here they’re rife with people crippled in the conflict.

The thought of their countrymen having hacked their limbs off—while the rest of the world sat and watched—is wildly disturbing. Rwandans have suffered so much that now, united, they work twenty-four seven on building a better future. They are far more interested in reducing poverty and resolving environmental and health issues than partaking in continent-wide competitions for most stunning hairstyles, longest fingernails, and tightest pants. Here, the dress is simple and unpretentious, and the dominant hairstyle is short for men and women alike.

Mugisha, a waiter I met in Kigali, considers himself lucky to be working fourteen-hour days for fifteen dollars a month. The young man used his last pennies to study and spent months looking for work. He lost his twenty-year-old girlfriend in the Genocide, but he doesn’t seem resentful or embittered. In fact, his patriotic optimism is a life-affirming phenomenon.

I find a very different Africa in Bujumbura, the capital of neighboring Burundi. My host, Nestor, rents a room in a spacious compound with a communal pit in the middle, serving as both toilet and shower. Every porch in the courtyard is taken up by a grasshopper-frying mamma. It looks like a blissful occupation. Nestor is the odd one out here, like a dragonfly in a beehive.

We cross the hectic city to the compound where Nestor’s cousin lives. A younger and busier place; here adolescent mothers crouch next to their gas burners plucking chickens and stirring pots, babies tied to their backs and toddlers hanging off their necks. Groups of men are solving the world’s problems over multiple beers. So much mystery and intrigue swirl around me that I feel as if I’ve just wandered into some other world. Nestor’s cousin is making dinner, and I’m watching life as it happens. It was worth it coming to Burundi just for this.

It takes two days, innumerable modes of transport, and all the slow patience I can muster to track the short distance back north across Rwanda. At some point, I count eleven of us in a small rust bucket of a car, someone’s baby nestled on my lap, the mum holding two other kids. My destination is Lake Bunyonyi, just across the Ugandan border.

“Where are you heading, girl?” A car pulls up as I’m brushing the road dust off my backpack on a street corner in Kabale, a high-altitude town close to the lake.

“Lake Bunyonyi?” I check out the three friendly, smiling faces.

“Come we give ya a lift! We’re just heading that way ourselves.” The three engineers are charged with inspecting something or someone at Bunyonyi.

For the next two hours, we zip around this nondescript town, buying item upon item, making photocopies, picking things up and dropping them off. The triumvirate chatting in Swahili with the vivacity of Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters. I could have made it to the lake ten times over, but I’m letting the currents take me. One of my goals for this trip is to be flexible. Leaving Kabale at last, we don’t go to the lake yet, but to a nearby hill—to show me the view. Just as well, this is the first and the last I see of the beauty of this body of water with its terraced shores and many islands. It’s almost dark when we board a boat and set sail past the tiny Punishment Island where, until the early last century, pregnant unmarried women were left to die unless they got picked up by men who didn’t have enough cows for “proper” wives. Our destination is Bwama Island, the site of a former leper colony converted into a medical facility. My new friends say we’ll be here for about ten minutes, but I already know the drill.

I spent the next couple of hours with four volunteer doctors from Slovenia. The work they’ve done in the last few months is phenomenal: previously, the hospital had neither furniture nor medication, but now people from around the lake come here for help. One of the doctors’ comments on a fundamental physical quality that differentiates us from the locals: “Compared to Africans, we’re made out of a handkerchief.” In my case, a paper one. “What do you guys do for entertainment?” is my last question for the doctors sitting on the hospital porch as I pull off into the watery darkness with the engineering trio.

“We sit here and brush our teeth...for a very, very long time,” echoes across the lake. The next morning, a bus designed to carry sixty-seven passengers packs in double that in warm bodies; the residual space is filled with bananas, pots, and sponges. When it hits the dusty road to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, the vehicle goes into resonance and keeps bouncing even when the road smooths out; watching out for my backpack in case it goes flying off the roof is a full-time job. When we cross the equator line, I have a brief hallucination that we have arrived, but no, the engine is kaput and now the passengers with their pots and chickens are on the roadside, mere kilometers from the city. I grab my bag and walk into Kampala.

Kampala! Smog, crush, and organized chaos. I park my bones at a sensational backpacker’s. Never the one to take cold beers or hot showers for granted, I scrub myself clean and hit the city’s famous nightlife with some new friends I’ve made at the hostel. On a Tuesday night, this city rocks with live music, beautiful crowds, and dancing until dawn. But the highlight of my evening is Adroa, a friend of the hostel receptionist, all cute dreads and grooves as smooth as his chiseled face.

Here I have to make a sidenote. I know at least half the reason why, in my younger days, I often found myself decidedly lacking a boyfriend. Becoming romantically involved with me was only for the brave. From anyone who dared to try, I expected the intellect of Isaac Newton, the nobility of D’Artagnan, and the kindness of Mahatma Gandhi. I was quick to pigeonhole prospective partners as either gadget-intensive, workaholic, or playboy types. If I felt my interest dwindling on a date, I’d been known to say things like: “I like my conversations a bit more sophisticated than that. Do you think you can manage?”

The subjects of my experiments ran without looking back. Still, I dated profusely—usually once per candidate—the thrill of hope coupled with natural curiosity and tinged by a little dread that my collection of disappointments would grow. And boy, did it ever.

I did not apply my usual tests and trials to men I happened to meet on my travels. From the outset, I assumed tormented lives were archived behind serene and tranquil faces—lives they’d hint at in limited conversations, leaving it to my imagination to make up backstories worthy of bravery awards and bestseller biographies. The same language barriers gave me only the vaguest measure of the depth of their intellect, but I always assumed they were smarter than they let on. If ever they did anything objectionable, I wrote it off to cultural differences. Contemporary dance served as our main communication medium...It was escapist and easy to fall for unlikely characters from faraway lands. The trouble was, I often made the mistake of taking these flings seriously.

What happened in Kampala is lost in the annals of history. All I know is that I didn’t visit half the places in Uganda I was planning to. I wish I had the presence of mind to see my dark prince for who he was, but my direct and peripheral vision were taken up by his many charms. One thing I did know was that he wasn’t using me to get out of the country. My boy was a big boss of his own company and traveled freely to Europe and back. It took all my strength to catch my flight back home, with a promise to return as soon as possible.

***

When I come back to Uganda some six months later, on the very first evening Adroa offers me a ring. Whatever semi-manic trance I’m in at the time elicits a yes, and I was brought up to believe that when I promise something, I have to deliver. The wedding is set for two weeks later.

The circumstances keep spinning. What stands between me and a decisive plunge into the crazy is New Year’s Eve in party-heavy Kampala. In a mega-club with seven dance floors and thousands of revelers, the delusion that Adroa and I are a perfect couple is instantly shattered. While I am being stomped on and branded with cigarette burns in the neck-to-neck crush of the club, my freshly baked fiancé drifts through the room as if he owns it, scattering his charms with expert ease. He clasps every dark beauty by the waist to toast the New Year, his glass forever raised, his smile shared with all and sundry. Adroa likes people and Scotch, but more than either, he likes the steady tribute paid to his smashing good looks and his refrigerated poise. Meanwhile, I am left to fend off stray elbows and ash, simmering in the realization that the accidental nature of him being my future husband is not some private doubt but a spectacle, laid bare for all to see.

My beau is sleeping off his hangover while I’m packing my bags the next morning. Before he gets a chance to flash me his signature smile and make it impossible to be mad at him, I leave the ring on the bedside table and slip back into freedom. Lions scratch and hippos stomp around my chest cavity, but once I’m sitting on the plane, it becomes just another escape, another adventure. Another rake I stepped on in the hope of avoiding a similar rake in the future. I’m not terribly upset, but somewhere between the Equator and my front door, I begin to suspect I will always stay single.