They found Apá blindfolded and tied up by the side of a road. He lived. That is all I have to say about it.
At night, I press a flashlight against my stomach—the ring around it is like a small eclipse. It is no accident I am named after my father.
I love you, Daisy.
I am now six months sober, after filling in many boxes on forms with a blue pen. I want someone to take my picture, for it to feel like being touched.
I believe most in my body in the precise moment of pain, not in the reflection afterward. Memories lie to me, and this is why my body can never be a map.
I’m happiest locking myself in my room in the middle of the day and lying on the floor while playing Lana Del Rey as loud as my speaker will go, and pouring a little dirt from my houseplants into my belly button. There is always dog shit everywhere because we never bothered to house-train our two-year-old shih tzu–poodle mix. I can never keep up with anything in the house. “He hit me but it felt like a kiss,” Lana sings, and I think of the first time my father hit me, as if I owed him money.
I thought things would be better by now; now that all the family is reunited.
I am starving myself. I consider the shame of letting myself go hungry, as if it’s something I’m trying on, like a new sweater in the fluorescent light of a department store. “Chíngate pues,” I hear people tell me. I go from 180 to 110 pounds in a year. This is called “learned helplessness,” my therapist tells me.
I am slowly depriving myself of everything that gives me pleasure. Meat, alcohol, sugar, sex. I have isolated myself from the world and refuse to come out.
I consider how much I hate myself for my hunger. How I wish to disappear into nothing like my father.
Sometimes I don’t realize what I am saying, say too much, and lose friends. Or I don’t say anything for months and lose them as well. I want to know the perfect amount of myself to give to someone else.
In the morning, I make myself an espresso in a stovetop metal cup and watch the coffee pour from the little fountain on the top. I open the fridge and eat a pepper. I place the seeds under my tongue.
Standing alone in my kitchen, I think of the different ways I’ve ruined my life. Maybe I was meant to be taken in the field when Amá buried the seed, pregnant with me. Only when I lie underwater do I feel as I did before my mother left for Mexico. Even though she’s back, it is different. It is only in that underwater solitude that I can learn to blame someone else for the person I’ve become since.
In that moment I hope that rising is like a baptism, and that I will be washed clean.
I imagine that being loved is like holding my breath underwater, temporary, something I can’t hold for long. When I fell in love with Rubi, she said she loved me too, but then she left.
Though I know it will come, the feeling of rising to the surface still startles me—it’s in that moment when I’m slowly starting to realize that although I still blame myself for many things that aren’t my fault, I am still capable of being loved. She and I eventually got back together.
But I want to experience love the way I experience drowning—never coming back to the surface, never finding relief. Always just a click away from dying, which I admit is selfish, because it’s easier to be desired than to go on with the work of desiring.
I know I can swim toward tenderness, but so many times I refuse. I refuse because I imagine that stillness is part of tenderness, and if I reach that place of tenderness, I won’t know what to do with the serenity.
I open the hot container of espresso, pour it into a small cup, and raise the cup to my mouth. I burn my tongue, yell, and wake up Rubi, who is sleeping in the next room, now pregnant with our child, who we will name Julián after my Amá Julia.
My child will know his grandparents by touch and not through a screen, or through my yelling as I push the phone to his ear.
I am always looking ten seconds into the future—looking for the nearest door to run through. Always needing to move.
Rubi is in the hospital maternity ward. Rubi is wheeled away. Rubi is lying unconscious on a surgery bed, with the doctor’s hands inside her. No one expected a cesarean. They split her open and are taking things out and placing them in bags like shoes on a door rack. It doesn’t look like they will be putting them back into her. The doctor reaches in and pulls out a small pink thing covered in blood, taking his first breath of this world.
He is screaming as if he has seen the future already and knows the past. They toss him around with towels to clean him, and though milky and gray, his eyes are already open. I am probably just a blurry shape and shadow to him, softening into the empty space around me, an interchangeable thing, just as my parents were to me in Tijuana. If I, too, am like the birds packed tightly together on a tree, and if a loud noise startles me, what would be left behind on the branches?
The nurse swaddles him tight and places him in my arms while the doctor staples Rubi’s abdomen back together.
“Mijo, mijo, can you see me?” I say, and we are both shaking, as if we have either just finished, or are just getting ready to run.