Where I tell you all about that beautiful Peruvian goddess who rescued my soul.

According to the Council of They, those unnamed shadow experts who we cite whenever we start a sentence with they say (come on, you know you do it all the time), the opening line of any book might be the most important, so here goes mine: in the fall of my senior year of high school, I fell madly in love with a girl name Annalise, who saved my miserable teenaged soul from a fate most foul. That sounded dramatic, right? Exaggeration 101? No embellishment, just the truth, so help me. That’s the first time I’ve mentioned her by name, isn’t it? Annalise. Our Girl.

I was going through some serious stuff at the start of senior year, and I was about as mixed up as a mixed kid gets. I know, hardly groundbreaking news, right? No need to alert the church elders when a teenager is a little screwed up. Normal. Typical. Ordinary. I get it, but listen, my life at the time was anything but ordinary, trust me. I mean, yeah, there was all the normal stuff you’d expect: college loomed on the horizon like an invading army, teachers were getting more annoying with each passing class, and I was struggling to keep my grades up where they needed to be. I was typical in those ways.

But in my case there was much more than that going on behind the scenes. At the time Our Story begins, my sad teenaged soul was drowning in the depths of a terrible Bleh, a concept Annalise first introduced me to, and one I'll elaborate on in a little bit. But for right now, think of it as representing the darkest recesses of the human experience, encompassing a range of negative emotions from your run-of-the mill crappy day, all the way to the deepest abyss of human darkness.

So why was I in that state? Well, a few years before I met Anna, my parents finally decided to euthanize a rapidly devolving marriage. In the packing of my father’s suitcase that followed the screaming and hateful words, my life became collateral damage, that poor bastard who’s standing next to the terrorist right before the drone strike hits.

After Dad decided he'd had enough of us, mom's neurotransmitters got up to their old tricks and gave the middle finger to Serotonin, and the daily routine of uncontrollable tremors and crying began. Her days, which became my days, went something like this: crying and trembling in the morning before getting Xanax down the hatch; depressed catatonia around lunchtime, sometimes accompanied by a nap, sometimes without; a little more crying in the evening, and finally a trip to bed to retire for the night after watching a little too much mindless TV. Now imagine what I just said, if you can, and multiply that experience by days, weeks, months, years. You get the idea. So between the rapid descent of my home into some kind of madness never before seen by the eyes of man, and my natural tendency towards all things weird and dark, it was a less than ideal way to start my last year of high school.

But wait, we haven’t been properly introduced yet, have we? My name is Logan Santiago, Logan Rosario Santiago to be exact. How Hispanic do I sound, Jesus! It’s a mutt’s name, like your narrator himself, the fulfilment of immigrant dreams from Southern Europe and the Caribbean, all of which found each other in the same place all immigrant dreams met up in Twentieth century America – Queens, New York. So, anyway, I’m Logan, and I'll be your fake Spanish narrator. I’ve called myself fake Spanish my whole life because the truth is, although my mom spoke it as her first language, I didn’t learn a word outside of a few phrases that no rational person would call fluency. No matter if my name made it sound like I was straight outta San Juan, within the community, if you can’t speak the language you might as well call yourself Bob Smith from Duluth, Minnesota. Fake Spanish all the way.

So what did I do? How did I handle this next level stress and anxiety I felt 24/7? I started a club. I know, I couldn't sound more nerdy if I tried, unless I showed you my variant Spider-Man Todd McFarlane covers one at a time, all professionally rated and everything. I mean, what self-respecting seventeen year old starts a damn club? That's some little kid stuff, right? True, and my only saving grace was that I started it when I was still fifteen, which is a little more acceptable.

The Kids of Sick Parents Club (KSPC if you wanna sound cool) was started by me right after my mom's breakdown. It was then that I realized, among a lot of other realizations that would come later, that the kids like me, the ones being raised by parents who were less than themselves because of some ailment—whether it was mental illness, or alcoholism, or a medical sickness—we all had a few things in common. I wrote them down in my charter (that’s right, there was also a charter).

1: We grew up too damn fast, mostly because we had no choice in the matter of how long we got to hold onto our innocence.

2: We saw and heard things no kid should have to ever see or hear, usually in our own homes, where no one else saw or heard those things but us.

3: We were tough in ways that could never be replicated with any other life experience, a kind of shell that you only get by going through the things we went through.

4: We were sad as hell, but the last thing we wanted was your pity, your ‘awws’, or your attempt at understanding something you couldn’t understand. Mostly we just wanted a break.

So I was the founding member of my club. Really, I was the only member, though I know a lot of you out there are honorary members, even though we never met and I never gave you an official card (I made them, they looked awesome). I knew that I wasn't the only one like me, but I was the only one I knew at the time, at least until I met Annalise, and then the Kids of Sick Parents Club became an organization two strong. We're still growing. As you can tell, I was a little bit of an oddball, but I wore that like a badge. I have no shame in saying that I was an eccentric, artistic, angry, punk rock kid who was a little too into comics for his own good. Maybe that’s why Annalise and I found each other, we were fated by the Gods of Weirdness and Dysfunction to meet one day.

Annalise.

Okay, let’s pause for a disclaimer: this is the part where I give you the warning to brace yourselves if you want to read any further, buckle your seatbelt, and prepare for some minor turbulence. Some love stories make no sense at all. That’s just the way it goes in real life. A lot of things make no sense, if you were to stop and consider their peculiarities, and love most of all. Those strange aspects of love don't make it any less real or impactful, but if you grew up on a steady diet of corny romantic comedies and contrived TV shows, then I can understand your resistance to a lack of convention. We weren't raised to be unconventional, we were raised to believe pop songs should be playing in the background of all our most intimate moments, and that love stories should end with people in love. But that's some movie shit, a diet of falsehoods fed to us like we were animals in a feedlot. Real love is different, it’s messy. This is a real love story, so read at your own risk.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I have to do my narrator thing and figure out how to encompass Anna’s particular flavor of Goddessness in a way that’ll make you understand the feeling I had when I looked into her eyes. Well, she wasn’t that girl your mom always told you you'd meet one day. If you're a guy you know what I’m talking about, that mythological female your mom had a need to create in her head as your future wife. Maybe she was the daughter of a close family friend, or just some invention of the maternal mind, who knows. That nonexistent, theoretical girl who’d love you unconditionally, make your happiness a priority, give you plenty of attractive babies, that sort of thing. But reality isn't a mother's best wishes, however pure they might be. Reality is an illogical, random series of events guaranteed to mess up all of mom’s best laid schemes something awful. Annalise wasn't the ideal girl; she wasn't part of the plan, but she was still perfect to me.

Let’s start where it makes sense to start. Yes, she was beautiful. Crazy beautiful. I-didn’t-think-girls-like-you-really-existed beautiful. Wait, now. That’s too common of a compliment, isn’t it? Every man says it about the woman he loves, and every woman humbly accepts, not always believing that it’s the truth, but loving that he cared enough to say it. In actuality, we aren’t specific enough, because there are types of beauty, and there are types of beautiful. She was the type you read about; the type you see on the big screen but never actually know in person; she was the type of beautiful they meant when the word was invented. They were thinking of Anna, they just didn’t realize it.

But let’s get past the superficial stuff. What was she like? For one, she was low maintenance, no fancy designer bags or anything like that. She had the kind of frugal practicality that only a poor girl could have; a unique view of material things that makes romance more challenging than advanced calculus, ‘cause I couldn’t buy her shit without a lecture. I tried to get her flowers this one time—a dozen roses—and she just looked at me like I had lost my damn mind because, well, flowers cost money and then just die, so why bother? I could buy groceries for the week with the money you spent! She was wanderlust embodied; fragility in strength's clothing; someone always just barely keeping her inner demons at bay. But she was also really weird and funny at the same time. Check this out.

The girl loved to sleep. She'd sleep in till like 2:30 in the afternoon on weekends, text me good morning, and then take her lazy ass back to sleep! And can you believe that when she'd wake up for real around 3, she had the audacity to tell me she was about to get breakfast. Are you joking, I'd ask, there's no such thing as 3:00 pm breakfast, it just doesn't exist. You, my friend, are about to have lunch, and a fairly late one at that. Lies, she'd tell me. That was her word, lies, she'd say it as a way to tell me she disagreed with whatever I was saying. And boy did she love to disagree with me - I think it might have been her favorite thing to do.

Back to this breakfast thing, though. So I'd reiterate my point cause I was right, and I wasn't about to just let it go. I mean, there's no breakfast at 3:00 pm! You couldn't even make a valid brunch-based argument at that hour. No, I told her, you're just the girl who slept through the real breakfast, and now had a bad case of the I-Slept-Through-Real-Breakfast-So-I’m-Gonna-Make-Some-Shit-Up blues. You can’t just change all the known rules of social behavior in order to accommodate your own laziness. Just accept it; you messed up, start thinking about what you want for lunch. Lies, she'd repeat. She had this habit of letting me go on short rants to make my point, only to reply with a single word that was intended to transmit that everything you just said is total crap. You tried it. Get your life message. No lies, I'd continue, I speak the truth and you just don't wanna admit you lost the argument cause you're competitive, but that doesn’t make you right. Well, she'd say, I guess it's 8:00 am somewhere, right?

She was the Catholicist of all Catholic girls (yes, it’s a word, I just made it up). Like I said, Peruvian, so I guess there’s no small amount of redundancy in calling a good, Spanish girl of any ethnicity a devout Catholic, it kind of comes with the territory. But she went hard. Catholic hard. Like, don’t-use-the-Lord’s-name-in-vain kind of Catholic; like, my neck will be adorned with a cross at all times kind of Catholic; like, no you can't put your hands there, I'm saving myself for marriage kind of Catholic. That last part was my least favorite one, but I guess that’s obvious. For her, Sunday wasn't a day off from work, it was God’s day, and I'd get a text only after Sunday prayers with Mamita was a wrap. She loved her huge family more than anything. Again, redundant. Spanish girl with a big-ass family. Even without a dad in the house this girl had two sisters, a mom, and about forty cousins. All the damn cousins!

I always got them confused when she told stories about her extended family. Probably because she began each story referring to each and every one of them as my cousin so-and-so. Who, I'd ask. My cousin, so-and-so, you know, the one with the Hispanic name that sounds like the other Hispanic names. Oh, right, them! I never got them all straight. But it was confusing by sheer numbers alone, which were extreme by non-Hispanic standards. And to make things next-level confusing, the older cousins she was close to she’d refer to as her uncles, even though they weren’t. Every time I dared call her out on her complete lack of genealogical understanding (they're your cousins, you can't just call them by another title because you feel like it) she'd flip out and threaten to stop talking to me until I called them her uncles. Fine, I said, they’re your uncles, not your cousins, how dare I ever say otherwise. Girl literally made me say uncle.

But bizarre family trees aside, family always came first for Anna. She lived with her two half-sisters and her mom in a small basement apartment that they rented, in a part of town that you could have accurately referred to as the wrong side of the tracks. Her oldest sister was about a high school career older than Anna, and the little one was just about to turn double-digits at the time our story begins. I didn’t really know either of them because Anna never let me in her apartment, but I’ll save that for later. But I knew that each of the girls had a different dad, none of whom were around, and that their mom was a Peruvian immigrant who understood more English then she ever let on, but spoke almost none.

Annalise taught me more than I can fit in these pages, and maybe I did the same for her, but more than anything she taught me about hope, even when she had none herself, and she taught me about forgiveness even when she couldn’t muster any for those around her. Hope is for suckers, she’d tell me, and nothing good happens without something bad happening, too. It's fine, she'd say when I tried to comfort her, I'm used to it, I'll live. Mom used to say the same sometimes. I’m okay, baby, don’t worry about me.

Mom. She's as much a part of my story as Annalise is, but the complex truth is that they're intertwined in a way that gets hard to separate logically, like when you put your keys and your headphones in the same pocket and try to pull just one of them out. Doesn't work. Their stories are stuck together, glued only by the impact each had on me a long time ago.

Brace yourself for an elastic metaphor. I call it elastic ‘cause I'm gonna stretch it out, like Plastic Man used to stretch his arms to save people who were in trouble. It won't break, I promise. There are people who migrate through our lives like the background characters in a mediocre movie; the B actors of life who live on in freeze-framed memories, but who don't really matter in any way that you can conceive the word matter to mean. But then there are the ones who are cast in the important roles; the roles that matter and forever alter the narrative, and upend the lives we know, leaving our existence forever altered. We only get a few of these people, no matter how long we live, and Annalise was one of mine, she was the one. Loving Anna didn’t make me, but it may have saved me, and that’s a story that needs telling, so here it is.

My book.

My love letter.

Our Story.