La Huérfana

The story of how I became a wanderer

The question that haunted me was: “Where do I belong?”

It was a relentless drum that had been beating inside me ever since the beginning in Indiana where I was born and grew up. I followed the drumbeat to New York. Then it marched me down to New Orleans where it grew soft until its deep and chaotic pounding woke me up in the middle of the night and put the idea in my head to sell everything and take off to Mexico.

That’s where I heard a Spanish word one day that named what it was.

I encountered the word in a copy of El Senor de los Anillos (The Lord of the Rings) which I was reading along with the audiobook in Spanish. I stopped the recording when I heard it. Huérfano. It sounded like “Where-Fawn-Oh”. In that word, I heard my old friend the Question. That persistent question of Where?

I fell in love with the sound of huerfano, made it feminine, and threw it into conversations whenever I had the chance. A cab driver or a server or a shop clerk would ask, “De dónde eres?”– Where are you f…