An Interview With a Scribbler-Scrabbler

The young girl, bright-eyed, fresh-faced but also a little mischievous, loved writing in places she wasn’t suppose to write. The oh-so-popular ‘Blank was here’ on old picnic tables, dirty bathroom stalls, and rusty locker doors always made her chuckle. “Somebody was here before me,” she’d think, and for some unknown reason, that made her smile. “People should be allowed to leave their mark. That’s their God-given right.”

The young girl, Catalina, was her name, ventured through life with these daring thoughts in mind. It was exactly this type of thinking that led her small hand to mark odd, little spaces in her very own bedroom.

Scribbling, jotting, doodling, her inky pens scratched away.

To the untrained eye, one might think the room is free of scribbles and scrabbles. The cleanliness of the white walls might fool them. But you ask Catalina to point them out to you and she’ll show you where you need to look.

“Forget what you can see and think of what you can’t see. If you think of it as a room with a twin-sized bed, four walls, and floral curtains, you won’t see much. But if you think of it as an endless puzzle of possibilities, a colorful art studio for a patiently imaginative child and a limitless page for the limitless trials and tribulations of a growing adolescent, you’ll discover a new world—my world.”

Catalina, known to have been a peculiar girl growing up, did not make friend’s easily. Her Little Golden books, Lisa Frank journals, and Jellyroll pens were her most trusted companions. With such colorful materials, it makes sense that her earlier scrabbles were more drawings than writings.

“See that white closet door there? No, not white, eggshell, as Mami would call it. See that white slash eggshell door is no ordinary door. If you look right there on the bottom right, next to the hinges that speak—I mean hinges that squeak—you’ll see two small dots with a half circle underneath. A smile! Yes, that is a smiley face. The Mona Lisa of emoji’s and the first choice of a child showing how they feel.”

Indeed, there was a smiley face on the bottom right there. And, indeed, those hinges did squeak. Once you spot the smiley face, a trail of dots leads your eye to the closest corner. Young Catalina mapped out a pile of breadcrumbs to show you the way. Etched between the connecting walls, also on the bottom, are two stick figures: a tall, smiling man and a small, smiling girl. Above the girl is written ‘Catalina’ and above the man is written ‘Papi.’

Many were the days before the actual written record started to appear. Once those first words were loose, though, the rest would follow. And have followed, ever since.

“Try underneath that windowsill there. No, not that one, the middle one. Right there. See one day I got so sick of the theory and practice of homework. All I wanted was to be free of Algebra problems 1 through 20. ‘Help me. I don’t want to do homework anymore,’ my 15-year-old-self wrote. Not an award-winning poem, but now anyone who reads it will know how I felt in that time and space.”

Look to the left of the window, inside the closet, and several hieroglyphics will be found. ‘We made it.’ ‘This is our year.” and ‘Obama 2009’ are neatly scrawled next to the shelves. This was the year Catalina shared her pen and murals with her friends. This was also the year she graduated high school. The “2009” was for Obama just as much as it was for her.

Soon enough, the blank canvas that were her walls were not enough. Restricted, suppressed, and confined, Catalina decided it was time to leave the nest and explore the outside world. And so she did. But it is only up until now that her Lascaux Caves have been shared with the world.