One. Two. Nothing.

What can be said about the people we don’t remember? Do they predetermine the people we become? What hopes did they have for us? How have we let them down?

I am One. I am Two. I am Nothing. 

My mother’s parents died before I was born. I know them only in stories. My grandma was a hardworking woman named Tomása. She owned a laundromat in Spanish Harlem as well as a restaurant that no longer exists. My grandfather was a man known as Montañero, a building superintendent.

Grandma had leukemia and died from her blood. Grandpa was sent to a home for dementia and suspiciously died soon after.

How crude. I often wonder how my life would have been different if they were still around. I definitely would have grown up speaking Spanish. All I have now is an Air Force jacket with my grandpa’s last name above the breast pocket, and my grandmother’s name on my birth certificate.

I am One.

My dad’s parents were both alive in my lifetime, but my grandma was soon diagnosed with ALS. I hate to admit that in most of my memories she is confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak on her own. My parents love to tell me how impressed she was when my siblings and I were born. She used to love to listen to all the random things I learned in the books I made my parents buy me. Encyclopedias, mostly. 

I don’t remember any of it. I only remember the books.

When she died I was still in elementary school. I didn’t understand her passing. She was gone, that much I knew, but I couldn’t rationalize the way it felt. Here was the woman who raised my dad, who loved my grandfather, who was an irreplaceable part of my family’s lives. And yet, I knew nothing about her. I couldn’t remember much, I couldn’t feel much. She was just gone. She, a present stranger in my memories, was suddenly absent. I knew it hurt the ones I loved and that hurt me. But in that loss, I felt that I had no right to grieve. Maybe that was wrong. 

From that point on, I was raised on a strictly Jewish path. I was taken out of my interfaith Sunday school and sent to Hebrew school instead (my grandmother’s dying wish, I was told). I learned how to read from the Torah, and I became Two. 

The shadows of the dead can control the living. I lost One. But I gained Two.

Temple was fun most of the time. I made friends. I relished telling people that I was a Puerto Rican Jew. Adults three times my age would compare me to a character on a T.V. show from way before my time. I always smiled, though I never got the reference. I didn’t know how to speak Spanish, but I could read Hebrew.

I hated learning those characters. I hated learning that vowels were training wheels, the real deal wouldn’t have them. 

I loved my cantor. I loved that he played guitar and asked me to play with the temple band when I was still just learning. I loved taking my first-ever guitar solo in front of my congregation. All the chords in the prayer arrangements were 7ths and I didn’t know how to play them yet, but the root notes did just fine. Who knew Judaism could be so jazzy?

I hated the holidays. Birthdays, High Holy Days, and everything in between. I hated my manipulative aunt. I hated her abusive son. I hated the memories of bruises, nearly-broken noses, and being the butt of the joke for a kid five years older than me who was still biting his classmates. I hated not being able to tell the adults that he was hitting me because it would upset his mom, and God forbid we upset her highness. 

I hated listening to the Beatles and Paul McCartney at all those family dinners. I hated “Twist and Shout” for being the soundtrack to my misery. I hated everything about those holidays. And John Lennon was a piece of shit anyway, so why should I care?

I must have been six, maybe seven years old when he chased me through my grandpa’s condo. What started as seemingly-innocent cousin bonding became me fearfully sprinting to get away. I was a third his size, the runt of my litter. I rounded a corner, and he tried to follow me, but I had less weight pulling me. I dove into the next room, getting a carpet burn on my elbow and the fleeting taste of safety, while he dove head-first into the corner of the wall. The human head bleeds so much. He cried and cried and cried, forming a puddle in the division between rug and tile. My aunt shrieked like a cassowary and brought my antagonizer out, stumbling from his gushing skull as he repeated the words, “Oh God” through tears. I could only think of one word:

“Good.”

Too much rage for such a little body.

Two fucking sucked. I was Nothing.

I used to see my mom’s nieces a lot more as a kid. I didn’t see them so much as I got older. While my cousins on that side got closer with each other, I was stuck being the youngest in the bunch on the other side. If not for my siblings, it would have been harder. I didn’t speak Spanish, I didn’t learn about my mom’s faith anymore, I barely saw my Puerto Rican side. When I finally did, I felt like a stranger.

Nothing is lonely. I longed for One.

I served my time. I got bar mitzvah’d. I read from Bereshit. I did the seders every Passover. I went to family dinners and birthdays. I got belittled for saying I wanted to play music for a living. I got belittled for wanting to go to a school with more merit than my cousin. “Do you think you can actually get in?” “Don’t you want to go somewhere smaller?” I got $25 cheques on my birthdays as if that would undo the hate I refused to acknowledge.

My Tío died. The wake was just One. The tears were just for One. I tried to get out of seeing Two as much as possible. I went to that school I wanted out of spite. I played my guitar at the finish line for the New York City Marathon out of spite. I grew my hair out of spite. I got tattoos out of spite. Finally, I existed out of spite. I’m an angry, bitter person.

Hate is a double-edged sword, but it kept me alive.

White people have so much to say when they’re talking about your culture. They can learn one sentence in Spanish on their trip to a gentrified resort in the middle of a bankrupt Pueblo, and all of the sudden, “it’s like I’m more Hispanic than you!”

It’s not like Spanish was alien to me; my family spoke it. I knew how to pronounce things with an authentic boricua accent, but I never used it in Spanish classes because if I made a mistake, a fair-skinned classmate would snicker. I always hated those snickers. Under-the-breath scoffs that cut like knives. Why did I care so much? Why did I let it bother me so much? I learned how to put up walls, how to pretend I was confident, but deep down I was dying of shame. All that rage I wore as an armored shell protected nothing. I was pathetic. No matter how hard I tried to reconnect, I always felt like an imposter. I can cook habichueles con gandules, I listen to Willie Colón and Paquito Guzmán on my bus commutes, I moved three blocks away from my grandmother’s laundromat in Spanish Harlem, I read books on my Taíno ancestors to better understand the zemis and Borikén, but somehow, it will never be good enough.

So tell me. Was I not “really” Latino when that cop accused me of stealing in CVS the night before the 2020 election? Was I not “really” Latino when that employee harassed me for my “large bag” (I didn’t have one) in the Met? Was I not “really” Latino when I applied for a job at GuitarCenter and an employee told me I’d be better suited for construction work? And conversely; when you look at me, is Jewish the first thing you’d think of? What am I?

Am I One? Am I Two? Am I Nothing?

My sister broke the connection. Two turned their backs on her when she had too much to say. Fuck Two. I love my sister. I blocked their numbers, I unfriended them on Facebook, I sent cheques back in the mail. They could keep their money, I don’t want it. Now, who am I?

I am Me.

I am someone who’s gotten panic attacks since I was 11 years old, feeling crazy for having so much anxiety despite my limited experiences. I am someone who will always doubt my feelings first, thanks to the years of ignoring the rage I felt toward my own blood. I am someone who has the capacity to hate, almost as intensely as the capacity to love. I am someone who didn’t drink until I was in college, because Two told me One were a bunch of alcoholics, and I shouldn’t be like them. Now sometimes rum feels like the only sleeping pill I can swallow. The comforting burn as it slithers down my throat feels like burning away my connection to the people who made me this bitter. I am someone who didn’t think I would live long enough to write this essay. I am someone who knows fear, pain, isolation. But I am also someone who can look for the light in the pitch-black because if I didn’t look, I’d die. I would die in the dark, and I would die alone. 

I have a hard time maintaining connections with people because there is nobody I’m not willing to remove. When you can sever ties with the people you were raised around, where do you draw the line? I’m still learning. I’m still sabotaging myself, one relationship at a time. But I’m trying. God, I promise I’m trying.

I am not One. I am not Two. I am not Nothing. I am Me. And for the first time in my life, I think that’s enough.

Jon Thomas is a writer and musician based out of New York City. He is a senior Creative Writing student at Pace University, looking to make his mark on the world with his words. He is known for being the frontman of the indie rock band, Spitphyre, and the writer of the personal essay on grief, "Words Live Forever," published in Across the Margin Magazine. He currently lives in NYC with his two best friends and a calico cat named Pebbles.