It’s rare for me to find something that grabs my attention enough to read from beginning to end. Before I ever started writing (for people to read that is), I used to think writers were some of the most narcissistic people alive. I still believe that, but I also understand now there’s something natural about wanting to see yourself in a story—to read something you can relate to, to understand where you fit in it, to walk the same streets the writer describes and feel like you’ve been there too.

I came across a piece written by a Dominican author about gentrification in the Heights and the rezoning act, and to my surprise, I found my eight-year-old self in the same street he wrote about, at the exact same moment, maybe even standing a few steps from him. It felt like flipping through an old album and suddenly seeing a picture of yourself without remembering you were even in the frame.

The piece was a recollection of a memory from the 90’s, around the time Kiko Garcia was murdered, and protests were breaking out in the Heights. I had just arrived from the Dominican Republic that summer and was heading back to the Bronx after visiting my aunt. We were trying to get to St. Nicholas to catch the M36 bus to cross to the Bronx, but the streets were blocked because of the protesters. I was living in the Bronx then, so I was used to hearing sirens all the time, but this was different. People were angry and scared. My mom was confused, and I could tell she was scared too.

That was my first memory of New York City, and it stuck with me. That memory was buried deep. Even now, when I try to dig it up, it comes back in fragments, broken and scattered. I used to think I had imagined it, or made the whole thing up, because it felt so surreal. I asked my mom about it, hoping she could remember and tell me what was happening, but she never did. My arrival story was blurred into the background of burning cars, shirtless men running through the streets, and broken windows broadcast on the six-o’clock news—until I rediscovered it in his writing.

The author states he didn’t know where he was coming from, “but the hood was on fire.” He describes standing on the corner of Saint Nicholas and 186th Street, watching everything burn. He was about eight and had just arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic himself. Him and I were only a few blocks apart, close enough to hear the same sirens and smell the same smoke. We didn’t find each other on those streets that day, but somehow we found each other years later in the stories we write, and his story made my story make sense. And maybe that’s the point, the purpose of why we write. So that others can find themselves in them, in the streets we write about and the bus rides we remember. Because in doing so, they may not only find themselves, but also the stories they’re meant to tell, and the ones they’re meant to remember.

But this year, everything changed. My daughter had a violent allergic reaction, her body blistered from the very waters that once nurtured me. The doctors explained it was the algae, the sun, the chemistry of the sea. For her, Boca Chica is now a place she can never return to. The irony is hard to miss: what was once my refuge, my inheritance, became her wound.

I’ve been on a journey to connect more deeply with my roots. Part of that is writing, my novel In Case She Forgets Again was born from the same longing: to hold onto memory, to keep our stories from being buried, to pass them down before they slip away. I fear that when my grandmother is gone, so much of my connection to the island will go with her. And yet, in telling these stories, I am fighting against that loss.

What happened to my daughter feels like a lesson in inheritance. That what nourishes one generation can hurt the next, and yet both belong to the same tide. This is what I explore in my book — how memory, family, trauma, and love are passed down, reshaped, and carried in ways we don’t always expect.

We flew home sooner than planned, grateful for the doctors who do the quiet work of healing. She’s recovering now, thank God. And I’m left wondering: what happens when the places that made us cannot hold our children? Maybe the answer lies in the stories we tell — stories that carry our inheritance even when the sea will not.

✨ If this story resonates with you, I invite you to read more in my novel In Case She Forgets Again. It’s available now on Amazon — a book about inheritance, memory, and the tides that carry us from one generation to the next.

https://a.co/d/ar90uW0

So I kept writing—but not for the world. I wrote it for myself, and I kept that version tucked away, just in case I ever forgot how it all happened… or how it felt. That process didn’t just help me heal. It helped me forgive.

But more than anything, it helped me see—and what I saw surprised me. The story I remembered wasn’t the story that happened. I had been remembering my feelings, not the events. And I think a lot of people don’t realize those two things aren’t the same—until they sit down and try to write down just the facts.

I’m still untangling what really happened from what I felt. But I’ve come to believe that both versions matter—the memory that lives in my body, and the one that can finally be named on the page.

Sometimes there are two stories to tell—the one you write for yourself, and the one you write for the world. Both matter. Both are true in their own way. But what matters most is that you keep writing, even when you’re not sure which story you’re ready to tell.