I got out of bed this morning and sat with my grandma at the desayunador, news channel on, elections upcoming, blah, cigarettes out, and instead of crafting a magnificent multicolored yogurt bowl like usual and holding my breath when she exhaled smoke, I set a pot of water to boil for coffee and lit one up with her. Sleep had been insufficient last night and I awoke with a new flavor of I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-I’m-doing-with-my-life, fragrant as the yellow peppers sautéing on the stove.
“Smells so good,” I said, and prepared her for my next enunciation with “Voy a preguntarte algo intenso.”
I asked her whether she ever regrets having left my grandfather. We talked for a couple hours as I sipped coffee and smoked two more of her Marlboro Reds. She smoked six and guided me through doing the cooking. I accidentally ashed into the steak as I salted it.
The answer was yes.
She didn't start the mess, which involved a massive, literally criminal-court-level scandal, but she wasn’t able to withstand it, and she sees that now as a mistake.
My mom left my dad too. My grandfather and I were in his kitchen in Cannes one day waiting for our ice cream to get soft when he whispered to me that he never got over his divorce and that my dad didn’t either. We both cried. Swelling between his words was a mountain range of untold stories, a mythology glittering with delicate detail, dense with valuable lessons, and of course the grand finale of an apology. But none of that was acknowledged. As if a head could run off unattached to a body full of fear. This act of leaving cut itself contextless into my self-awareness, branding my heart with a guilt that it would take me years to make myself deserve. Not that it was necessarily some sort of prophetic curse. It’s just what has happened. The softened ice cream was good. If I had been alone I would have sliced it with a paring knife to eat while hard, chewing it like gum.
I'm alone in the kitchen now. On top of a slice of my grandma’s birthday cake, served in an ornate plate from a set gifted to her by my grandpa before everything went downhill, I pile greek yogurt, hemp protein powder and frozen cherries. Some of the most peaceful times of my childhood were in this apartment, being a granddaughter, and here I am, grown up and still a granddaughter, held by this relationship which makes my lineage visible and sets a lovely, decorous, cigarette-stinking stage for my panic as well as my hope that I can heal.
Late last night I wrote the following poem, which is the externalized manifestation of why I got insufficient sleep:
Memento decapitatio (clarity as a heat map)
She was skiing down a slope one winter when
Eleven dwarves disappeared from a nearby cabin
The tea was no longer hot but lukewarm, creamy, and sweet, and the sweater empty
He had not died, she had not forgotten to keep measuring the pain she caused over and over, the shape was a circle, still swerving. She hadn't gotten to writing overwrought sentences in her journal that morning but yes every other and the idea of them being read ached like embers in her chest as it often did, not for emotional but aesthetic reasons
She sped through snow feeling like she knew that one day the reason would become emotion so acute that she'd stretch her fingers out towards a carving knife but never reach—if I were to get my nails done today for the first time in a decade what color would I pick? Cherries
Conflict in the center of a pit, teeth breaking in frustration towards a taste
Gratifying to feel her tongue freezing, preserving the wisdom from all the soil she had licked from behind the ears of you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you, making you all dirtier in the process, and ah, to no longer be that yawning pleasureless girl, to be a woman, green as a pine ever eager to shed every single one of her needles all at once but no longer (and herein the difference) knowing what it means to leave; the desire itself for a dissolution into love enacting a final living remembrance of the worshipping gesture of two calloused hands behind her neck softly, around it, the pain
To be hated is to be loved
To be hacked
Down a mountain so white it’s only visible as translucent crimson streaks, deescalation at last as it gets so swooshed-past by time that it phases into the fresh glory of formlessness, and then the image of a claw reveals through its quiver the nature of the surface on which it is reflected: just a puddle in one of Earth’s belly buttons, no longer hot but lukewarm, and I know you remember the rest