Telling the Truth Wasn’t an Option
|
Version 0 of 1. Before I was even old enough to have a boyfriend, I had been trained to lie to him. My secret, my mother said, could be used against me: “You can never tell anyone you’re undocumented.” The first time I lied was in 11th grade, at a party with my crush, Chris. When the police arrived in response to a noise complaint, I took off running into the back yard and jumped the fence. He said I overreacted, not knowing I could be deported if caught. My parents, who had been living and working in the United States for years, brought me from Mexico to join them in Texas when I was 11. Three years later, my U.S. visa expired, and I became one of 11 million undocumented people in this country. As a young girl, I didn’t understand the implications of my immigration status, only that it was as a weapon that could be used against me. My fear of discovery was ever-present: at school, where I excelled, in college, where I graduated cum laude, and in my first finance job in New York City, working for Goldman Sachs. When would my lies begin to unravel? Every phone call or email I got from human resources would make my blood run cold. Yet it never happened. After Chris, I lied to nearly every man I ever dated. More than a decade later, newly single, I downloaded Bumble and matched with a bearded hipster. After telling him about my past, I never heard from him again. [Sign up for Love Letter, our weekly email about Modern Love, weddings and relationships.] Next I swiped right on a handsome Mexican man with sun-kissed skin and a flirtatious smile. On our first date, he told me how he used to build fighting rings for his wrestling toys as a boy and now worked at an architecture office. My mother would approve, but would she still want me to lie? I told him I was a writer — there, one truth — and he told me about his travels to Europe. “I never traveled anywhere when I was younger,” he said. “And I knew as soon as I could afford it, I wanted to see the world.” My favorite trip had been the one I took to Mexico to see family after getting my papers, but I couldn’t tell him that, not yet. In college, I finally pushed aside my mother’s advice about hiding my status with the guy I was then seeing who had driven me an hour to eat my favorite tacos. On the ride back to campus, I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t have papers.” With each admission that followed, I exhaled with relief over speaking the secret that had been crushing me for so long. A few years later, after he and I moved from Texas to New York City, I discovered that he was cheating on me. Having found the woman’s number, I threatened to call it. “If you call her,” he said, “I’ll call ICE.” After that, it took years for me to share my immigration status again with anyone. The next time was when my father had passed away and I couldn’t travel to Mexico to be with him. In a moment of desperation, I shared my undocumented status with my then-boyfriend. “I can’t be here anymore,” I said, weeping. “I’m going to move back to Mexico.” The pressures of my immigration status left us with two choices: break up or get married. We chose to elope so we could stay together in the United States. But after saying “I do,” our entire relationship became about filling out paperwork, meeting with lawyers and having interviews with immigration officials to prove our love. We never had a honeymoon. I became a U.S. citizen, but the yearslong process extinguished our romance and we eventually divorced. Long after, here I was on a first date with witty, kindhearted Fernando, wishing I could unburden myself and speak honestly. But I was too scared to trust that doing so wouldn’t ruin everything before it began. So once again I chose the lie of omission. Soon it was 2 a.m. and the restaurant was closing, seven hours after we arrived. “I had a great time,” I said. “When can I see you again?” he said. A few weeks and many dates later, I was headed to Antigua for my best friend’s wedding, with a layover in New York. As soon as I landed at JFK, I realized I didn’t have my U.S. passport, which I would need for my flight the next morning. I panicked. The only way for me to make the wedding was if someone were to drive my passport to LAX and place it on the last overnight flight to JFK, a service I didn’t even know existed. Fernando’s office was only a few miles away from my apartment, but I hesitated. My U.S. passport was in the same drawer as my Mexican one, which I had not updated since my divorce. Mexican passports for married women require them to list their husband’s last name. I hadn’t told Fernando about my first marriage. Now he might see my name conjoined with my ex-husband’s. What if Fernando saw that and thought I was still married? Would he ever let me explain? I thought about all the friends’ weddings I missed because I couldn’t travel outside the country and how much I regretted not being there for the people I loved. I couldn’t do it again. If Fernando eventually came to love me, he would need to understand or at least accept my need to hide the more difficult points of my life’s timeline. “OK,” he said, “I’m on it. Tell me what to do.” I gave him the combination to my cat sitter’s lockbox for keys and explained where to find my passport. The next morning, I picked it up from the airline counter and boarded my flight. As we ascended, I decided I would tell Fernando everything when I returned. I was tired of the evasion and lies. I am an American citizen, and if I couldn’t finally be free of my past, then all those years of anxiety would be for naught. Maybe Fernando would run, as had so many others, when he learned the truth: that I had spent more than 10 years undocumented; that I had used fake papers to work at Goldman Sachs; that I was divorced at 33. Would it all be too much? Would he ever trust me? Romance may thrive on mystery, but love can’t be built on lies. “I’ll always wonder what’s behind door number two,” one man had said as he was breaking up with me. He had felt duped, as if I had tricked him into falling in love. When I got back home — and what a glorious word that is, home — I met Fernando at a quiet bar down the street from my apartment. We sat on a red velvet couch, his hand resting on my lap as I told him about the wedding and thanked him for rescuing my passport. Then I paused and bit my lip. “Is everything OK?” he said. “I have to tell you something,” I said. “I’ll answer your questions but let me finish.” He sat up. “OK?” he said, but he never let go of my hands. As the truth flowed from me, backfilling my past, he never looked away, raised an eyebrow, or signaled any judgment. “That’s it?” he said. “I thought you were going to tell me you killed someone.” He pulled my hand toward his face and kissed it. “Life is complicated.” He didn’t ask where I bought my fake papers, why my parents didn’t fix my immigration status, or why I hadn’t gone back to Mexico if things were so difficult here. Instead, at the end of the night, my future husband asked me the same question he had asked after our first date: “When can I see you again?” I had spent so many years keeping people at arm’s length, believing that isolating myself was necessary. I carried a heavy load of guilt over all the lies I told to stay in this country, to grasp onto the few crumbs of love I was given. I accepted crumbs instead of looking for a whole person, someone who understood that love, for those of us who have had to hide the truth to survive, sometimes drives us to take seemingly indefensible actions. For my entire life, I believed finding love was all up to me. If only I could figure out the perfect formula of what to omit, what to say and how and when to say it, love would be mine. But what I really needed was someone who doesn’t judge me, fault me or question the difficult choices I made to carve out a life in America. Now that I have found a home in Fernando’s heart, I refuse to hide or apologize — for any of it. Julissa Arce is the author of the memoirs “My (Underground) American Dream” and “Someone Like Me.” She lives in Los Angeles. Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com. Want more? Watch the Modern Love TV series, now on Amazon Prime Video; sign up for Love Letter, our weekly email; read past Modern Love columns and Tiny Love Stories; listen to the Modern Love Podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play Music; peruse our T-shirts, totes, sweatshirts and temporary tattoos on the NYT Store; check out the updated anthology “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption”; and follow Modern Love on Facebook. |