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Freshman year, I thought control would save me. I planned everything — my classes, my internships, my future. I left no space for mistakes. I color-coded my calendar like it was a map to the person I wanted to become. I thought if I worked hard enough, if I stayed disciplined enough, if I stayed perfect enough, nothing bad would happen. Nothing unexpected. Nothing unfair. But even then, even before anything shattered, there was this restlessness in me… this feeling that I was

It’s been a little bit more than three years since my brother passed away.  So much has happened since he’s been away…big events in my life so far, such as getting my internships, studying abroad at Vienna, Austria,  moving to Seattle (miraculously especially because my niece and nephew are living there right now) to work at Amazon for the summer (and actually on Friday, I got a job offer to work there full time!), and almost graduating.  There are so many things he hasn’t wi

My father grew up in Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica — a place he insists he doesn’t hold much affection for. He’ll say it plainly, almost matter-of-factly: “Era como vivir en un huequillo.”  It was poverty, difficulty, limitation. A place where nothing came easy. And yet, whenever he talks about it, something warmer slips through the cracks — not quite nostalgia, but an unspoken tenderness for the people who raised him there. His grandmother. His mother. His three sisters. A house

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if I will ever experience the kind of love people talk about in movies — the kind that chooses you, the kind that doesn’t have to love you but does anyway. Not the love I receive from my family or my niece and nephews, from my parents or friends, beautiful as it is. A different kind of love. A love that feels like a hand reaching for yours in the dark. This fear usually shows up on nights when I’m lying on my flower quilt — lilac, pink, yell

When my brother died, people kept telling me that grief was about letting go. They meant well, but they didn’t understand. My grief has never been about letting go — it has been about holding on. Holding on to love, to memory, to the pieces of him that still live in the people he left behind. Before he passed, my older brother Juanjo and I made a promise — not spoken in some dramatic moment, but understood in the quiet way siblings understand each other. We promised that we w

When people talk about grief, they often reach for the “Seven Stages” like they’re reading off a script: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and everything in between. It’s the model that shows up in movies, therapy worksheets, and even casual conversations. Society has turned the Seven Stages into a kind of emotional checklist, as if mourning were a staircase we climb: one step, then the next, until we eventually reach the top and ring the bell of “acceptance.

I look out of the window - out of the car’s window, out of the bus’s window, out of the train’s window, out of the plane’s window. Each time, I have mixed emotions. I don’t really know what to feel. I can only hear myself think, “Todo va a estar bien, Cami. Tranquila… todo va a estar bien.” When I was moving to the University of Michigan for the first time, I remember feeling the moths in my stomach, the tingles in my chest, the dizziness of overthinking, and the numbness of

When my brother passed away, I thought grief was supposed to come once and then leave. That I would cry, go home, and eventually move on. But it hasn’t really worked like that. Since then, I’ve realized that grief keeps showing up, not always in the same way, not always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet.  Sometimes it’s in the little things that end without warning, the people, places, and versions of myself that I’ve had to leave behind in my 20s. Grief didn’t just teach me about d

I had an experience that had been building up ever since February of 2020.  My brother, who was 34 years old at the time, had had a heart attack.  He started to get better from 2020 to 2021.  Unfortunately, he was then diagnosed with cancer again in 2022 after having suffered from this illness 17 years ago.   Throughout the treatment process, he went through surgeries and after one of those surgeries, he had a hard time breathing because of the amount of liquid that went into

What if this  is it? The question comes unbidden—a whisper, a constant beat, pulsing beneath everything I do. What if this is all I ever know of me? Am I the person I want to be at this moment, right now? What if I won’t get another chance to be here, to be me, to show the world the best version of myself? I feel it most when I’m alone, in a crowd. Conversations begin, laughter fills the air, and inside, the thought surfaces again: Make it count. This might be it.  I shift, I