All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.