A Flying Lesson by Elizabeth Acevedo
A Flying Lesson
Elizabeth Acevedo
“If you’re going to leave home,
it should be toward something.”
Mami didn’t mean to be all deep and shit,
when she uttered those words from her sickbed,
but I repeated them in my head like lyrics
you run back again and again.
I’ve left home so many times.
First when we left Moca for the U.S.
Then when Tía, Moms, and I moved from my tía’s house
in Miami to our apartment in the Bronx. From the Bronx
to the prep school Mami insisted I apply to—and when the
scholarship came through, the same school she forced me to attend
because she didn’t want me daily seeing how sick she was getting.
I wasn’t in charge of any moves, until this one.
And the only direction I wanted to go was upward.