Chapters 4-6 Reflection #2

After reading the chapter of Aurora I was surprised to see what yunior and his girl were up to. At that age i wasn’t really expecting Yunior to be involved in drugs but it also made sense due to him trying to survive the real world. With everything going on seeing his friends and his girl gave him that escape from reality and moved him into a place he would be comfortable with. I can compare to Yunior in this aspect because I try not to stress myself out with what is going on in my life such and school or work by going out with friends or even my cousins in order to clear my mind and enjoy the moment. In the chapter we get to that Yunior is involved with drugs as he takes them as well as sells them and Aurora plays a big role when it comes to drugs. We get to see that Yunior gives heroin and cigarettes to Aurora every time they see each other and in a way they both use each other in a way that Yunior uses her for his pleasure while Aurora uses him for the drugs and cigarettes. After reading the chapter we can interpret that their relationship is toxic but yet they both still have love for each other.

Aguantando gave us a sense of how Yunior spent his childhood with his brother and mother in Dominican Republic. Yunior would spend time playing with his friend Wilfredo or even climbing trees. He even gets sent to his aunt’s place for about twenty days and talks about his stay such as trying new foods and her awkwardly staring at him while eating.The mother gets played by the father many times as we get to hear from Rafa, he sends letters saying he is coming back from New York but eventually ends up going out of radar and being “lost” due to no one knowing about him. She recently got a letter from him again and suddenly disappeared for five weeks to recollect herself. After reading I felt sympathetic towards the mother because she works non stop as mentioned by Yunior and also it was a joy for her to see that her husband might come back but he ends up ditching her over and over again. It seems like Rafa has already gotten used to it and it doesn’t hit him as hard as it hits their mother.

Drown is one of the chapters that really surprised me because it was totally unexpected. Yunior gets informed that his old pal came back to town but he doesn’t seem that excited about the news. The mother talks about how close they were and that they should really link up again but Yunior doesn’t seem to give him the time at all. We get a backstory of Yunior and Beto and their time as friends, we get to see the wild stuff they did such as stealing and getting caught as well as sneaking into a pool but it was common as many kids did the same. The chapter was pretty normal and that is when the problem showed up and it was that Beto started to get closer to Yunior. He would be all up on Yunior and this left Yunior in a completely frozen because he didn’t know what to do. After this occasion, this started happening constantly every time they would meet and this caused Yunior to hesitate meeting up with Beto. Like I said before, I was really surprised because it came out of nowhere and I was expecting Yunior to do something like he did in the first chapter but instead he was frozen and didn’t know what to do. I am intrigued to see what would happen next if Beto and Yunior stumble upon each other once again, whether to see if Yunior takes a different course of action or not.