Author’s Note

I was working as a cashier at Home Depot, one of hundreds of jobs Ma held during my childhood. They paid her $7.50 an hour. She’s never earned more than that.

A couple months before, I had escaped the Gothic parapets and gargoyles of Duke University a semester early. My closeted-and-questioning, Colombian, disabled, obese, child-of-an-immigrant, formerly-unhoused self couldn’t afford that life. I was so different.

But I missed writing, so I wrote.

Nodding to Mario Suarez, Gabriel García Márquez, and Cormac McCarthy, I wrote an early draft of “desire homes.” I wanted to explore how the apocalypse might show up, show out in a housing project. I based the story’s setting on where I lived during high school: the Victoria Courts (RIP) and the Alazan Courts (still standing but barely) on the Westside of San Antonio, a place I had also spent years running from.

Then I stopped writing for fourteen years, my Ultramarine Period, my La Sad Gurl Fall, my Imago Years. This story waited for me.

When they talk about the “American Dream,” they never talk about the collateral damage of colonialism, addiction, the diaspora, intergenerational trauma, and childhood wounds. Nobody ever prepares you for a career of therapy and rehab. During this time, I’d return to this piece yearly, trouble a paragraph or sentence, then fall back into anhedonia and self-harm.

If I could tell you how I healed myself, I would, but it feels like magic. What I know is writing about my mother, my community, my queerness, myself has been essential to my renacimiento. None of us have ever stopped resisting.

Certain readers of my work, which centers the shrapnel of my life and this country, inevitably ask for a happy ending. Here are two:

Today, I’m a flamingo. (It will make sense later.)

I’m a Colombian dream.


aureleo sans is a writer based in San Antonio, Texas. He is an alumnus of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and the 2021 Tin House Summer Workshop and a reader at jmww. His work is forthcoming in Boston Review, the 2022 Roots. Wounds. Words. anthology, The Offing, Passages North, and The Commuter. You can find him on Twitter at @aureleos.