Federico Escobar: UNWRITING • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Federico Escobar
UNWRITING

An energy healer told me I was a vampire in a previous life. She was deep in toning, stopped, and told me this. It seemed bizarre enough to be true. I didn’t know what to say. She kept toning.

This healing session was for my son. Nine years in, his life still revolves around three months. Three months born ahead of time, three months of the fangs of IVs cutting into his skin in the relentless beeping of an ICU. And nine years in, so much of my life revolves around nights, his nights. Looking after him when he goes to sleep, when dawn breaks, when he wakes up. Nights of spotting signs that may require action (is that a blank stare?), taking this or that medicine (new ones phasing in, old ones phasing out), maybe another hospital trip. His mother came to fear nights, took them in with shudders. The shudders stopped when her heart stopped. That was three years in.

So that is giving.

And this is stopping, stopping because I had plans for this sinuous piece that was all fact even if it began with vampires. I had plans: writing about how I grew up in Colombia, South America, and was nearly kidnapped right before I went off to college. For years, I wove narratives that spoke of how the specter of violence settled in this country, as much a part of its geography as the Andes.

The plans didn’t stop there: talking about my dad next, and how being born in the neighborhood where he was allowed him to have an old age that doesn’t involve selling lottery tickets at a street corner. And what a clever example it was, the lottery, because this was the lottery of life at play, something we all know but are very eager to forget because we want to take credit for things. There was a good line about how an ounce of violence makes us forget a pound of fairness.

I had written all that and now I have unwritten it. I now know that I had written about The Issues as a way to make this social, to leap above the situation about my son and examine it for a few seconds from a different angle, supposedly a higher angle. But I wasn’t leaping at all. It was a way of making this smarter, sharper, going from anecdote to commentary. Making it less painful.

A couple of paragraphs away from finishing my plans for this piece, I rushed to the hospital. Again. Hauling an oxygen cylinder in an Uber and trying to hold my son as upright as possible as his body seemed to assemble and disassemble. And there, waiting, I continued typing this on the phone, with machines beeping and blood coursing through IV lines and bleached sheets all around. Waiting, this piece gave up its plans and transformed into something else. Something more painful, something about standing in front of a mirror and not focusing on the room behind my reflection.

So this isn’t a social critique or commentary or whatever it is that tried to turn the silence of the room into the pain of a nation. But what is the pain of a nation if not many silent rooms and many confused streets and the way we choose to sleep in some and carry on in others?

What I’m writing is about something that doesn’t lose its sting or its demands when you try to blame it on others, when you stop looking at people and search for structures. This isn’t about the society or the family that birthed me. This is about admitting where I am and where I’ll probably be again.

The energy healer’s words come to mind as I sit by my son at the ER. The idea of immortality seems ever more distant when life can be so fragile, when a single moment can shape and unshape a body. But some decisions we make, decisions of love and compassion, seem to endure through lifetimes. Even in the darkest moments, a tiny decision to give still has the potential for light.

So this is about giving after all. A giving that isn’t about grand gestures or heroic acts, but about decisions as simple as showing up, being there, without judgment or expectation.

And this is also about taking. We will all do this today, we will all go from giving to taking. Giving our time, our energy, and taking the pain, the confusion. Giving a kind word to a stranger, taking their silence in return. Giving a hug to someone we love, taking the ache of their absence.

With luck, we will stop keeping score or seeking balance. In our brightest moments, we will embrace the ebb and flow, the dance between the different roles we play.

Ultimately, it’s about the quiet moments, the silent rooms, and the decisions we make within them. The question is what stories we tell ourselves about these moments. The question is how we feel when we are taking turns in that dance as givers and takers. The question is what our intentions are. I have answers to these questions, sometimes, answers that shift and evolve as I sit by my son’s side, writing and unwriting the stories of our lives, waiting for his eyes to open.

Federico Escobar, originally from Cali, Colombia, has lived in New Orleans, Jerusalem, Oxford, and Puerto Rico. He writes short stories, poems, and academic articles in both Spanish and English, with his work featured in publications like Cleaver and Best Microfiction 2025. This piece is his first publication about life with his son. Federico currently works in education.