Quibdó, 18 April 2018

Sometimes I feel these letters have less poetry in them now, that they’ve become functional and nothing more. And that makes me a bit sad. I think perhaps it’s because my life has less poetry in it, even though it’s dedicated to poetry – in the sense of contemplating and then condensing what you feel into precisely the right words. I spend my time solving problems and dealing with day-to-day issues, and not contemplating very much.

Motete is growing. And it reminds me of the twelve-year-old Velia, who was so different, so easily upset, not very sociable at school, a loner at breaktimes, and who hadn’t got used to her new dimensions: she was too skinny and had grown very quickly, so that she was too tall for how skinny she was.

I kept outgrowing my shoes, and since I’d had my first period, my aunts insisted I stop wearing the boy’s shorts I liked so much. My cousin Yaja began to develop curves. She was very pretty, whereas I had no breasts or hips. I just went on getting taller, and my two front teeth stuck out more and more. All my top teeth, in fact.

So every day became a struggle to get to grips with my new dimensions. And meanwhile, I broke every glass object in my path. I was always tripping and falling over. A couple of times I fell in class and got mercilessly teased. At home I felt safe, or safer, though it was also quite awkward: since it was my aunt’s house and not completely mine, it was embarrassing to keep breaking things. But out and about, I didn’t feel good at all.

I’d only been in Cali a few months and it was a very difficult time: a new school where I was singled out because I was black and a good student. For various reasons, I don’t have fond memories of that period. But that’s all beside the point.

The important thing about those months is that with a lot of effort, or just because that’s life and what can you do, I took my time, but eventually I got used to my new size. Little by little, I adjusted to that new body and learned to love it. A body with breasts that never did grow ‘big enough’, and with teeth an orthodontist later straightened slightly. My upper jaw and teeth don’t stick out any more, but the teeth never came together in the supposedly perfect way I was promised. I was left with a diastema, and several other gaps where teeth were extracted to partly compensate for how toothy I looked. I had to learn to take more care than other people not to bang into things or break them. By the time I started eighth grade I felt more respected at school, and I felt like I’d earned it through my discipline. Up until eleventh grade, people still made fun of my hair a bit, saying it was like the mane of the lion on Channel A, because I sometimes wore it loose and it was curly. People teased me for being a virgin and said it caused cancer, that I should ‘do it’ with the one boyfriend I had while I was at school, who I was with for three months or so, not long before graduating. Of course, he broke up with me because I wouldn’t. Then Fabio, one of my friends, used to say that chewing gum and corn arepas went together better than my outfits, because I wore skirts with T-shirts and trainers or hiking sandals, but by then I didn’t care about the teasing. By then I was a young woman who laughed, loudly, showing off her sticking-out teeth and wild hair.

Later on, when I arrived in Medellín and started university, I went through something similar. I didn’t feel comfortable in the spaces where my classmates hung out; I was used to meeting up to dance, and in Medellín people gathered to talk and drink. In the queue in the cafeteria, people used to pull my hair to see if it was real. I didn’t really know how to dress now I was a student, and I always felt awkward. I only realise that now. The change wasn’t so obvious in my body at that age, but essentially it was the same thing: I was growing.

Now Motete is growing, and since I’m in charge, or since, in a way, Motete and I are one and the same, I feel that familiar sense of measuring myself anew, getting to grips with my size all over again.

I’m not sure of the dimensions and that puts me at great risk of being clumsy, of stumbling and falling, but now falling doesn’t just mean making my classmates laugh: it means risking what I’ve decided is my life’s work.

I have a terrible fear of breaking things. And I worry that other things, like my clothes when I was twelve, don’t fit me. It’s scary not knowing how to divide my attention: I might waste time getting used to my new size, and meanwhile other situations might slip through my fingers.

In physical terms, Motete is bigger. We’ve taken the second floor of the building for another 500,000 pesos, and that’s where we’ve put the kitchen for preparing snacks and lunches, as well as the offices and cake-making area. I have a lovely office, full of natural light, where I feel like I can think better, be by myself a little, read in peace. I’m just finishing making it beautiful.

I think a lot about which things we need to do and which we don’t. About what we want to grow towards.

For now, I hope these growing pains, the kind that follow any big change, don’t hit me too hard this time around.

Kisses and hugs,

Veliamar