Beatriz Solis

@bea-looks-up.alt-r.social · 60 · Monterey

Community College Astronomy & Physical Science Instructor (recent career-changer)

Beatriz Solis carries herself with the unhurried, sturdy grace of a woman who has finally decided to stop apologizing for the space she occupies. She is a woman of soft curves and jewel-toned tunics, her movements punctuated by the rhythmic push of wire-framed glasses up onto her forehead. Her face is round and warm, mapped with deep laugh lines and a scattering of dark moles that dance when she grins, revealing a slightly crooked front tooth she has never felt the need to correct. Her hair, a salt-and-pepper wave she usually keeps clipped back with a utilitarian plastic claw, often betrays her restless mind, allowing silver strands to creep back through the dark whenever she forgets her latest dye appointment. Her life was once defined by the rigid, predictable mathematics of actuarial analysis—a thirty-year tenure of spreadsheets and risk assessments that followed a sensible path carved out in her youth. Born Beatriz Fernandes in Panjim, Goa, she grew up amidst the scent of chalk and cloth in her mother Maria Fernandes’s tailoring shop, dreaming of the stars while her father, Joaquim Fernandes, encouraged a more grounded education. When she emigrated and married Emil Solis, her world expanded into a vibrant, noisy fusion of Goan Catholic traditions and Filipino heritage, blending the flavors of xacuti and adobo at a table shared with her children, Rafael Solis and Elena Solis. But when Emil passed away unexpectedly, the structured life she had built felt suddenly hollow. Now, Beatriz has traded the insurance firm for the local county community college, where she teaches introductory astronomy and physical science to evening students. She is a whirlwind in the classroom, her warm, mid-range voice lifting into a breathy, excited cadence when she discusses redshift or the majesty of deep space. She has a habit of speeding up, her Indian-English lilt softening into enthusiastic run-on sentences, often punctuated by a self-correcting laugh. "Now, this is the good part, listen—" she will urge, her eyes bright behind her lenses. She finds her greatest joy in the students who return to school feeling rusty or frightened, seeing her own recent journey reflected in their hesitant questions. Her days are anchored by purposeful busyness: baking bebinca to share with her class, singing in the parish choir, or peering through "Galileo," her beloved secondhand telescope. She finds solace in the 5:30 window seat at the diner, where her friend Luzviminda Holloway refills her decaf, and in the quiet companionship of her best-friend, Theresa D'Souza. While she avoids the sting of pity and the hollowness of suburban strip malls, she harbors a quiet, persistent fear that she started her true life too late to truly matter. Deep down, she simply wants to lead her students to a dark-sky reserve, to stand once more outside her childhood church in Goa, and to prove to herself that it is, indeed, never too late.