‘I love daddy’, – says my daughter.
‘I love daddy, too’, – I feel my eyes swelling up.
‘I love Spiderman, too’, – she adds.
My face instantly breaks into a smile. The ways of my daughter never seem to amaze me. Our time together is precious.
Call me a hypocrite.
For someone who has zero patience and can’t stand to wait, for anything, I sure am happy that time exists. Time heals. Time softens the sharp edges and helps us forget.
What happened in London four years ago does not seem as dramatic to me today as it did back then. Maybe because I had been through worse, and still, today, I am ok. Time does heal.
I had not been in a detention center before. I do not see myself having the need to be in one for anyone else but Beno. He was that kind of person – he’d find himself in the worst and the best situations, and he’d always manage to take it easy and smile.
I had gone to see him the next day. I was allowed to swap the heavy backpack with the rolling suitcase, which was much easier for me to handle. I had to go through so many security checks I stopped counting them. Beno was on his way to visit my family, yet he ended up in the stone cold building surrounded by barbed wire.
It felt like a movie. Never ever had I thought I’d be in a place like that. But there I was, amongst the other women, having come to see their men.
I broke down when Beno finally came in. I expected him to be equally crushed. Instead, he was close to smiling. How was that possible?
‘Baby, I just finished the game with the boys’, – he told me. I had seen him down, but this was not the occasion. It really annoyed me that he seemed to be ok.
He had a roof above his head, he had a bed and he had food, and he had plenty of time to work out. He told me that many men staying at the detention center had nowhere better to go, so they kept coming back there and play basketball all day long.
Seeing Beno did not cheer me up. I wanted to be as close to him as it was humanly possible, as I felt that ever since we were ripped apart, I could not manage to feel whole without him. Unfortunately, we had to sit on the opposite sides of a plastic table and we were not allowed to touch each other. Life during that hour did seem cruel.
I left in a worse mood then when I had got in.
In a couple of days they were sending Beno back to Mexico. What was I supposed to do?