It’s October 31, a night when every woo woo girl swears the veil between worlds thins. It’s also my birthday and I’ve never been more content. I’m surrounded by people who love me, and I’m on the threshold of a more fulfilling path. Even so, it’s wish time and there is always more to ask for. As the candles on my cake flicker, I begin to wonder if the witchy girlies weren’t as kooky as I thought. Just as I allow this possibility to creep in, the room tilts and the light tugs at my core. Suddenly, I’m in the driveway of my parent’s house, and I see her—my four-year-old self lugging my unsuspecting baby brother toward the big garbage can. I’ve heard of this moment many times but seeing it is altogether different. I’m so small and determined, convinced what I’m doing is necessary.
“Hey!” I shout softly.
She jerks her head toward me, a deer caught in headlights. “I wanted a sister. And there’s no room for him.” she says.
“You’re afraid to lose your sense of belonging in your own home.”
As the words fall from my mouth, I realize it’s the first time I’ve understood why, after months of warning my parents, I enacted my mischievous plan. My eyes find the front door just as my mother bursts out. She scoops up my baby brother, gives my younger self a stern look, and rushes him back inside.
“Who are you?” my childhood self asks.
“Someone who’s been where you’re going. Come with me.”
The room bends again and we’re peering into a dance studio, watching a ten-year-old version of ourselves pas de chat across the floor, surrounded by slender white girls built for this.
“Tonight, your mom will tell you she’s putting you in dance lessons so you have ‘an outlet for your extra energy.’”
“Because I tried to throw him away?”
I nod as we watch.
“I like this place,” she says.
But I know she will come to love it, and my chest tightens. She takes my hand as we move to the window of an adjoining room where a 15-year-old version of us whispers with a dance instructor as the other girls murmur and stare.
“What’s going on?”
“This is when we come to terms with the fact that, no matter how much we love dance, it will never love us back,” I say.
I don’t have the heart to tell her that, after years of instructors trying to discipline and contain her body, her best friend’s mother will convince her teacher to kick her out of dance group because of her weight. So, I say, “People will project their issues onto your body. But your body will survive them all.”
This heartbreak creates space for a new love—theatre—and the room dissolves into the stage where I made my Broadway debut. My four-year-old self’s eyes light up. The smell of sweat and dust pervades my nose, and it all comes flooding back.
“Is that us?” she asks.
I press my finger to my lips, shhh, as we watch this version of ourselves chat backstage with another cast member.
“I know it’s a burger spot but trust me… they have the best salads.”
“I’m skeptical, I still think the salads at the place next door are the best,” I say.
An eavesdropping cast member shout whispers, “Yeah right, like you eat salads!”
He laughs and I watch myself bite my tongue. This was the version of me who worked herself to the bone but was still called lazy. I make no point to tell him I have a salad sitting in my dressing room because I realize it won’t change the fact that my body tells him a story that cannot be changed by facts.
“People will try to shrink you, but you’ll grow a voice bigger than any stage can contain.”
The room bends once again, and Harlem wraps its arms around us—stoops rise from the ground and jazz permeates the air. My childhood self looks around as she takes in the beautiful thick, Black women of Harlem.
“They look like me!” she says.
Her Blackness, until now, was something she learned through contrast. Harlem teaches her she can experience it through connection.
“This is where you fall in love with yourself,” I tell her.
She smiles, ear-to-ear, for the first time.
“I have one more thing to show you.”
Harlem folds in on itself and, when it opens back up, we are in the warm, sprawling chaos of Los Angeles. Black queers mingle around a charcuterie table—they range from thin to fat, all are at ease. It’s clearer than ever that in Black, queer, polyamorous community, where people love without scarcity, I have found myself. A self-defined not by discipline or shrinking, but by fullness. Where my need to tell my own stories was given permission to grow, and where the woman who finally learned to love the parts of herself others tried to edit out began to emerge.
“Here, there is no part of you that must be hidden to be loved,” I tell her.
“This is what you came to teach me?” she asks.
Without warning, I’m pulled forward—to Halloween, to my birthday celebration. Around the table, the past versions of myself look at me, unguarded. My gaze settles on the youngest—the four-year-old who once tried to toss her brother into a garbage can—and I tell her,
“No. I came to thank you. For surviving long enough for me to become the person I am.”
With a background in acting, a Master of Arts in Social Justice & Community Organizing from Prescott College, a Master of Arts in Cinema & Media Studies from USC, and current studies toward an MFA in Writing for Screen & Television at USC, Marisa brings a deeply interdisciplinary perspective to her storytelling.
Marisa currently consults at various points of production to ensure retention of creative authenticity surrounding characters from marginalized identities and has been working with studios since February 2020. She also leads undergraduate student discussions at USC for Race, Class, & Gender in American Film and Intro to Film.
Marisa performed on Broadway (MATILDA), she was seen on television (MR. ROBOT), and she’s the voice of Olivia, the Kahuna of Akala Island on the popular animated series, POKÉMON. In 2019, she was featured in Forbes for her work with Final Draft on their inclusion software.