This is how my mother tells it. I was three years old and she was taking my tío and me through customs in Guatemala. Because I had the privilege of having my first cries in an American hospital and because my mother is white even in her own country, she could tote me worry-free back and forth from the country she chose and the country she left. She was doing my dad a favor, one of many that she would love to count on drunk fingers when I was just trying to go to bed. She had her brother have a guy who owed him a favor make a fake passport, that looked as real as it could have looked, given the circumstances. My tío spent months mustached and skinny in Guatemala, distilling the song in his Colombian accent with my mother’s family’s alcohol.
I was old enough to walk then, for her to pinch when I wasn’t fast enough, spank me when I was making too much noise.
At the airport, the TV screens kept showing the same red Jeep, the same footage of a young woman who, when she smiled, seemed like her eyes were staring into the sun. Tío didn’t know who she was or why so many people around them were crying and so my mother did the work of filling him in, under her breath.
No one would believe he was Guatemalan if he didn’t love Selena. Or so she tells me on our way to my sister’s house, where her husband is riding his mower and taking in that fresh, nostalgic smell of death. My mother did not trust my tío to say the right thing, so she talked for him. “This one is devastated,” she told a stranger, who covered her own mouth, shook her head at the screen. “He was so in love with her.” I read somewhere once, as we all do, that your earliest memories aren’t reliable. The way we tell stories and the way we remember what really happened drive together somewhere and they fight over the directions and the place you end up is not better than before, but anyway, you’re there. So, where was I, where was she, where were we, when they reached customs and the officer looked too hard at my tío’s passport, then back at his face, then back at the passport, then back at the bead of sweat dancing down his face? My mother’s instincts kicked in. She has told me this story before.
In some versions of this story, she pinches me until I wail.
In others, she whispers, “Cry, Melissa, cry.”
In this one, I get myself ready.
In this one, I take a deep breath.
I scrunch up my face and fat tears gather in my eyes and my little brown face turns into the color of a sweet little onion.
In this one I know, I know, I know exactly what I’m doing.
Buenas noches.
The other year you
stopped eating
meat because you said
violence wasn’t necessary for survival.
The other day you asked
to be choked during sex
because you needed to
feel loved more severely.
The other day you ignored
the news because it was
“too much for you.”
If you are safe can you
even feel alive?
In the end,
what do we all deserve?
Quickly, a flashback
to Halloween
2016.