French Inhales & Mirrored Doors
Excerpts from The Diary of Isadora Vélez
In high school, I used to purposefully make myself pass out from huffing Freon because it would induce near death experiences (NDE). My lips would turn blue and sound would get wobbly before I'd visit this weird tribunal where three higher beings—for lack of a better term—would discuss my life and review it, like a VHS cassette tape in a VCR. They'd play different versions of what my life could be and explain why I had to return to my body. I couldn't see my physical self, any of these beings, or the setting of the tribunals in this dimension, but I sensed them in great detail. I didn't really understand this to be an NDE at the time but I felt so compelled by these encounters and was fascinated by the fact that I'd always get sent back to my body. I'd awaken, in awe, to friends huddled around my blue lips freaking out about whether or not they should call an ambulance. We took so much Freon out of my mother's A/C unit that summer that we broke it and I still feel guilty about how much it cost to repair it.
Lately I wonder about my life and try to locate the mysterious recordings those beings had of me. I don’t really remember what was on those tapes except for different iterations of my neighbor, Angel, running, as if in rewind or fast forward, around my pool. Why was it important for me to stay on Earth to watch him do that?
The aural hallucinations on Freon were the best. I was fifteen or fourteen. I held a large, black, gas-filled trash bag with a rubber band tied around its end like a balloon and inhaled. Alone, I’d pass out on my silver inflatable sofa seat with “Hail Mary” by Tupac playing at a very high volume from my CD player in my blue bedroom. The music would warp and stretch just before I’d leave my body. Other times, with friends, we did it next to the central A/C unit in the backyard. I’d fall on grass.
My mom was never home throughout this time. She used to go to a salsa club called Iguanas in a strip mall in the suburbs of Miami with her friend, Dottie, to pick up men. My parents divorced when I was eleven or twelve and because my mother was married so young—and pregnant—at age nineteen, she’d often lament that she never got to experience the recreations that accompany being a teenager:
She and her four siblings were orphaned at fourteen and sent to live with their aunt and uncle, where my mother, as the eldest, was tasked with caring for her younger siblings. Her father was shot dead when she was a child and her mother was a stripper who used to lock her children in the closet. The uncle she moved in with was eventually arrested for drug trafficking. He’d have a limo pickup and take my mother to and from high school but she never thought anything of it or the company of flamboyant men he kept. He was one of the biggest drug dealers in Puerto Rico at the time, a throughway for Pablo Escobar. Most of my family still denies it along with rumors of his closeted homosexuality. Coincidentally, he was imprisoned less than two miles away from where I huffed Freon in Miami, near Metro Zoo. We used to visit him on weekends. He is a very sweet man.
So now, in America, the land of the free, my mother could enjoy herself. She could have one-night-stands and abortions, be gone for days in the name of self-actualization and individuality. She wore expensive wigs made of human hair and felt like someone else in them. Someone who hadn’t been physically and emotionally abused by her parents, exes, and who knows who else. Someone who was never overlooked or neglected. Someone who could move with the night, like me.
When I was inducing NDEs I was the same age my mother was when she was orphaned and like her, I also never really thought anything of what was going on around me, how she’d go missing for days or what led her to behave like that. I only saw opportunity. I was unsupervised. This meant all of my friends could come over and do drugs. My mother’s absences left space that I filled with a pleasure-seeking death drive that felt so thrilling and unbound it haunts me with nostalgia to this day. I long for that feeling and search for it like a lost child. I can only catch glimpses of this apex in little things like laughter, like an answer to a question no one asked: When my mother rewrote herself nightly, did I erase myself?
I have consented to my erasure many times in my life. In middle school, I had a huge crush on a neighborhood boy named Freddy. He was four years or so older than me. He never looked at me like he looked at Calista, my best friend at the time. I was overweight, had glasses, braces, and terrible style. Calista was tall, thin, dirty blonde with hazel eyes. She wanted and could have been a model. She had headshots. Freddy and I had the same bus stop. Calista used to come over after school and we’d go to his house to smoke cigarettes till we got nauseous. We’d practice French inhales in reflections of mirrored doors only we’d call them “French exhales” because we were uneducated and ESL. Calista and Freddy would sneak away to experiment with each other’s bodies while I sat alone practicing in the mirror with my cigarette, oblivious and quietly begging for glamor.
The first time I got drunk I was with Freddy. I was twelve. I drank a Blue Raspberry MD 20/20 and I blacked out almost immediately. The only thing I remember is Freddy and I taking turns making each other pass out. He’d wrap his hands around my throat and count down till I disappeared. It was the closest I could get him to my body, by playfully offering it unconscious and in destruction.
My body felt unprecious and foreign. The only use I made of it was to test its limits. I later began to train more cognizantly for a pain I believed was inevitable just as these new curiosities about intimacies and attractions arose. I was diligent. I starved my body. I’d regularly let crushes bite me as hard as they could, repeatedly, on my arms. It was the only way I knew how to flirt, tangentially with overt masochism. I’d go to school, my forearms covered in horrible bruises. I wore them like badges, with dignity. A gallery of fine art that revealed my high pain tolerance and willingness for discomfort. When my tenth grade English teacher pulled me out of the classroom to ask if I was having trouble at home, I laughed and said no. In this moment I felt accomplished. I was a glass statue, an observable soldier.
No one could hurt me. And nothing romantic ever happened between Freddy and me. My experience with him improved my survivability in this society, even if it was to the detriment of my self worth. I can convince you. I am an observer and a brilliant performer. I want to belong. Freddy’s preference to Calista taught me that the less space my body took up, the more people would see it. To sacrifice my body felt rudimentary. It’d already happened in many other ways, this was just punctuation.
And so with each inhalation of Freon, I accentuated my nothingness. I lived my life as if I were immortal. Drugs became my eucharist, my absolution. Anorexia, my control. A confluence of will, chance, and biological disposition can override the trappings of a persisting environmental hell. Be it of my own creation or that of my mother and father’s. Children mimic their parents as they learn to become adults. If my mother is weak then I am weak. If my father is a monster then I am a monster. If my father broke my mother, then I too must have broken my mother. I don’t know what I was meant to give to this world other than the stories I tell myself. Sometimes it feels so banal.
I woke up in fits of laughter each time I died. I didn’t need to distinguish between life and death, because there was none. I meant nothing to myself and it was without pity. I was so out of touch but it worked out in a way that left me feeling blind happiness even if I had no vocabulary for my shadow, the Marianna’s Trench of memory and feeling that would eventually come for me. I had my fantasies and misperceptions. My cruelty. Dissociation was my guardian angel and drugs, my joy.
Today I listened to “Are you coming down this weekend?” by His Name is Alive.