The Voice That Sent Me Home
In January of 2025, after somehow evading it for years, I got COVID for the first time.
I quarantined in my room for eleven days while the rest of the house continued outside my window. My partner would leave food at the door and I would watch them through the glass as they walked the dogs. I slept constantly. When I was awake, I worked from bed with my laptop balanced against my knees. Sometimes I scrolled TikTok for hours, feverish and half-conscious, watching videos about the presidential inauguration and the rapid unraveling that followed. Executive orders. Deportations. New permissions for cruelty. The atmosphere in the country was changing quickly, hardening around people like us.
At the time, we lived in a town where another queer Latina I knew had ICE called on her by neighbors simply because they did not want her there. She was not undocumented. She was safe. But that did not matter. The message was clear enough. We knew what kind of country was beginning to emerge around us, and how easily neighbors could become informants once fear became socially acceptable again.
I already had a trip planned to Puerto Rico that spring. At the time, I believed it would be my goodbye trip. I remember telling my partner, “I think this is the last time I go to Puerto Rico.” I thought the country was becoming something so dangerous that eventually we would stop traveling entirely. I imagined us staying close to home, keeping our heads down, trying to remain safe.
And then, sometime toward the end of the illness, the room changed. It began subtly. My bedroom started superimposing itself with my father’s bedroom from the 1990s, the room where he lived while he was dying. Not where he died exactly, because he died in a hospital, but where illness settled into his life and became part of the architecture of our family. Suddenly I could smell albuterol and humidity. I could see the blue sheets on his bed, the oxygen machine beside it, the overhead light, the small Buddha statues and coins on his nightstand. It was all there with me at once, as though space had folded inward.
I did not feel afraid. I did not feel like I was dying. It felt more like my father was there with me somehow. Or through me. Like my body had become porous enough for memory to move through it.
And then I heard my great-grandfather Roberto’s voice.
I never truly knew Roberto. He died when I was very young, maybe one or two years old. There are photographs of me sitting in his lap, but I have no real memory of him and no actual memory of his voice. And still, I knew it was him immediately. The certainty arrived before logic did.
“Vente pa’ Puerto Rico,” he said. “Mudate pa’ acá.”
Come home. Move back.
I remember snapping out of it for a moment and almost negotiating with the air itself. “¿Que me tengo que mudar pa’ Puerto Rico? ¿Si me mudo todo va a estar bien?”
So I have to move back to Puerto Rico? If I move, will everything be okay?
And the answer came back simple and immediate.
“Sí. Dale.”
Yes. Do it.
To this day, I do not know how to explain what happened in that room. Was it a fever dream? A Hallucination? The Ancestors? Or did my nervous system collapse? Was it grief? Or some strange threshold state where the body becomes receptive to truths the conscious mind cannot normally access? Maybe all of those things can coexist at once.
What I know is that after that moment, I got up and showered for the first time in days. Steam filled the room and for the first time in over a week, I felt fully inside my body again. I felt my body begin turning toward recovery almost immediately afterward. It felt as though the illness itself had carried me into a state where I could finally hear something I had been resisting for years.
Around that same time, Bad Bunny released Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an album soaked in Puerto Rican longing, memory, and return. Everywhere I looked, I felt the same message repeating itself back to me through different frequencies. Through music. Through politics. Through grief. Through my ancestors. Through my own exhausted body.
Come home.
So I did.
We grieved deeply when we left. We loved that house. It was our dream home in many ways. Leaving it felt like abandoning a version of the future we had worked hard to build. But underneath the grief, I could no longer ignore the pull toward Puerto Rico, nor the reality of what life around us was becoming.
I have lived back on the island for a year now, and it remains one of the best decisions I have ever made. Puerto Rico is not perfect. The power still goes out sometimes. So does Water. Tourists continue arriving with their own fantasies about what this place is for. People are still people everywhere you go. Queerness still creates a certain kind of distance no matter where you live.
But I love life here. I love doing life here. I love driving to the ocean before work in the morning with the windows down and the breeze moving through my hair as the road curves along the coast. I love the humidity here, the almost unbearable thickness of it. I have never felt air enter my body the way it does in Puerto Rico. It wraps around you completely. You breathe with your whole skin.
The ocean has healed me too. Floating in saltwater every day taught my body how to stop bracing against the world. My frozen shoulder softened after months of swimming. My nervous system softened too.
I think we misunderstand ancestry as something abstract, as though it exists only in photographs or stories or family trees. But ancestry also lives in the body. In the nervous system. In the chemistry of memory. In the ways our bodies respond to climate, language, humidity, food, danger, and touch. My ancestors are not separate from me. They live inside my cells. Inside my instincts. Maybe that is why the voice felt less like hearing something from outside myself and more like remembering something my body already knew.
And perhaps most importantly, something inside me stopped fighting the land itself. Because belonging is not always social. Sometimes it is ecological. The trees know I belong here. The rain knows me. The ocean recognizes my body. Even the air feels ancestral somehow.
Maybe that is what Roberto was trying to tell me from the beginning. Not that Puerto Rico would save me, but that I could finally stop surviving long enough to let the land remember me. And remember me it does: in the soursops and mangos growing in the yard, in the ocean holding my body afloat, in the forests I hike through, and in the roads my family and ancestors have driven for generations. And every morning now, as the ocean air fills my lungs on the drive to the water, I understand that coming home was never about returning to a place so much as returning to a body that finally remembered where it belonged.
Michelle Carrera is a Puerto Rican writer, grief worker, death doula, and cultural witness exploring grief, ancestry, ecology, spirituality, and belonging in a changing world. Their work has appeared in various publications and can also be found through Grief and Liberation.
Grief and Liberation is a creative ecosystem devoted to grief, pilgrimage, ecology, ancestry, spirituality, animals, and the search for aliveness in fractured times. Through essays, stories, and reflections, it asks how we remain open-hearted in a world marked by loss and transformation. www.griefandliberation.com