Someday I'll Love Diana Anaya

Diana Frances Spencer, Princess of Wales. In my memory, a tall, lean woman with fair skin, short, blonde hair, and blue eyes. She was like a birch tree, stark white against a backdrop of green, resplendent. Princess Diana looked like she had been plucked right out of a fairy tale, stuck in sleep as she waited for a man to kiss her back to life.

Besos y bendiciones!
Que niña más linda que tienes,
mírale esos ojos verdes, ese pelo rubio,
esa piel tan blanca… ¿A quién salió? Cuidado,
no dejes a esa Tía acercarse, tiene mal de ojo. ¿No oíste
cómo le nació su niña? Larga y flaca, con un pelo
negro como el carbón. Ay, pero la tuya
es como una muñeca. Que Dios
te la bendiga y cuide. Amen.

When I was still in the womb, my mother said she dreamed I would have blonde hair and blue eyes. That I would look like the fairer side of Cubans, the ones who mixed with the Spaniards who had colonized Cuba – not the dark-skinned Cubans whose parents were slaves brought from Africa, or the Cubans who had mixed with the few native Taino people left, the ones that weren't wiped by disease, massacre, or famine.

I was born with the light skin and blonde hair my mother had hoped for, but green eyes instead, which suited her just the same. She loved to tell relatives that when I was born, I looked like one of the porcelains dolls she'd sewn dresses for, a part time job she had in New Orleans.

Our family doctor said my sister and I would grow to six feet, every visit adding several inches to our growing frames. Over the years both my darkened, and my thickened, loose curls tightening into soft coils, eyes more hazel than green, shifting in the light, and my height a perfectly average five foot five.
Diana: virgin goddess of the hunt, the woods, women, and the moon. Roman for heavenly or divine. Often depicted with a bow and quiver, a tall young woman in a loose tunic running barefoot through the woodlands, hair swept up, loosing arrows on her prey. She was the goddess of healing, her restorative powers tied to the waning and waxing of the moon. Yet she was also the goddess of the absent moon, of black nights, those midnight hours of witches and magic.

I am void,sentient tsunami,the blessed gaze of medusa,those dead shining blips we fashion in a constellation,straw-colored river that flows in veins, star stuff, the fourth matter: plasma.

Blue, green, pink, purple splashes of gases, I am the dust we come from, anebulaof primordial beings, my black gaze co-opted as the look of a demon.I never smile, walk barefoot, and bare my breasts against the stigmaof womanhood, write about heroines who hunt the galaxyfor terrible men, burn their eyes out with our aurora.

My parents originally wanted to name me Blasito, after my father, Blas. This was because in the ultrasound I wouldn't uncross my legs, so the doctors weren't sure of the gender. "Antes de nacer ya fuiste difícil," my mother liked to joke. My sister was running my parents ragged for a year now, the complications during her birth and incessant crying blamed on her gender, so they were desperately hoping for a boy.

And so, two names were chosen: Blasito for boy, Diana for girl. Diana was picked after the late Princess of Wales, as well as Diana Ross, an American dance singer that my mother loved. When they finally learned I was a girl, my mother fought for the middle name Rose, probably an attempt to make my name sound even more like that of the singer, but my father wouldn't relent. "Segundos nombres dan mala suerte," he said. Diana Anaya would have to suffice.
Diana Ross is an African American dance singer with warm brown eyes, a halo of brown curls, and an...