Some time ago I taped up a photograph of my brother on my bedroom wall. The photograph was one of the many copies he’d made for a class project and left all over the floor. I carefully added it to the drawings and print-outs of poems I’d added to my wall over the previous weeks. My mother had mentioned this collage only once, and that was to voice her disapproval. “Tengo ya demasiado para que conviertas tu habitación en un museo“, she’d said. “I have enough already, for you to go and turn your room into a museum.” But on this occasion the photograph of my brother, smiling in a garden rendered unidentifiable by our elderly printer’s manic bursts and stutters, made her pause.

“You really love him, don’t you?”

I looked at her, perplexed. Love was not the reason I’d taped up the photograph. The two things, “love” and “photograph” felt unconnected to me. My mother’s comment, however, brought into my world a sudden and very tenuous link between them, twins separated at birth meeting for coffee. It made me look at the photographs of me, placed around the house in silver frames, in a new light. Flipping the laminated pages of albums became like a trip through a dream. If it unnerved me before, to see past versions of myself in lace dresses, absorbed in paintings, reclining on grassy fields – now I’m horrified by it.

Sometimes my mother holds a photograph of me close to her face, something I’d always interpreted to be more out of poor eyesight than affection. She traces the line of my cheek and says little words of endearment: cariño, amor, sol. Mi sol. My sun. The sun, eight minutes away at light speed, but still nearly 164 years away at 65 miles an hour, which is as fast as my mother is willing to drive. “How can you dismantle the sun?”

There I am, sitting on the night table, eight years old and playing the princess in “Emperor’s New Clothes”. There I am again, on top of the shoe closet, leaning against a wall in my elementary school uniform. And again, next to my mother’s red jewelry box. And again, glued to the computer monitor at her workplace. I need to be rid of these photographs. Sometimes my despair is so great I seriously consider taking the kitchen scissors to them, chopping my body into ribbons of glossy paper. “Love” and “photograph”, this makes as little sense to me as the dismantling of the sun did to my classmate. The sun and its termination shock, the point where solar winds slow down and stop, a point whose location is a mystery even to the most dedicated of scientists. God, all those photographs, framed and hung like letters salvaged from an ancient Countess’s boudoir. I want to grab my mother by the shoulders and scream: This is not how you love someone!

(title taken from “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac. It’s also what I was listening to throughout the writing of this sordid, miserable tale)

AVISAR A: Next of kin, a living blood relative, lady or gent in seashell sleeves and moccasins, sharing pulpy warmth and the orange glow of intimate space. Warn, inform, a somebody who’ll sit in the spring green waiting room with collar unbuttoned and shoulders like crumbled cliffs. AVISAR A: Somehow who, without you, hovers nervously, cut off from the rest of the meandering river, an oxbow lake in a secluded glade, swollen and stagnant.

It is Christmas Eve, and it has been six hours since my mother left, four since her last call. Her “hello?” had plucked at me, plunging into the ridges of my bodily tissues and fluids.

“I’m at the sea.” she’d said. I’d recalled our summer house, the Isabelline white hut with rooms like smoking dens, shrouded by the crystalline ocean. Did she stand beside the waves and think them beautiful? Oh, but, the water is very cold this time of year! I am the aging owner of a shore side souvenir shop, crouched underneath the windowpane as my mother, hair aflame, hurls stones at my glossy postcards and carefully glued together baubles.

Phone conversations with my mother tend to end with my delivery of a monologue, freshly cooked on a gas stove, my fingertips dripping faucet water onto sauce pans, enticing the maternal blue flame. “Please come home when you’re ready”, I’d said, keeping it as brief as possible, “You are not alone!” But despite my precautions, the speech was long and wordy enough to give her time and reason enough to cry. Her “okay” hung in the vacuum of the telephone line, in between twin sobs, hurricanes in which her sentiments solidify like eyes.

If one day I am hit by a force greater than one I am able to assimilate, if an act of God leaves me split open by a country road, perhaps some insightful paramedic storing my belongings in plastic bags will encounter my mobile phone. If he does, and if he thinks to go through my address book and begin dialing numbers, this is the first thing he’ll find:

AVISAR A, followed by a discrete colon, and then -

MOTHER

After a while his head, a little disheveled, emerges, and then a hand gripping a napkin. He gives it a perfunctory glance, as though accustomed to textiles in its state of disrepair, before returning to his rummaging in the bag and the search of the That God-Awful Smell. By this point I have almost totally abandoned my attempt to follow the teacher’s explanation and am watching him like a camera man filming a chimpanzee encountering a foreign termite mound.

Suddenly he shoots back up and exclaims: “I KNOW WHAT THE SMELL IS! IT’S MY SANDWICH!”, in the tone of: “I KNOW WHAT THE MEANING OF LIFE IS! IT’S MY SANDWICH!”

And then he proceeds to tell me it’s as old as a month and a few days, and hey, is the napkin disintegrating? Oh, why, yes, it is, hey Emma, is that even possible?!

And that’s when I started guffawing, and my good girl image went straight to Hell.

Cuando es invierno en el mar del Norte
es verano en Valparaíso.
Los barcos hacen sonar sus sirenas al entrar en el
puerto de Bremen con jirones de niebla y de hielo
en sus cabos,
mientras los balandros soleados arrastran por la superficie del Pacífico Sur
bellas bañistas.

Eso sucede en el mismo tiempo,

pero jamás en el mismo día.

Porque cuando es de día en el mar del Norte
—brumas y sombras absorbiendo restos
de sucia luz—
es de noche en Valparaíso
-rutilantes estrellas lanzando agudos dardos
a las olas dormidas.

Cómo dudar que nos quisimos,
que me seguía tu pensamiento
y mi voz te buscaba -detrás,
muy cerca, iba mi boca.
Nos quisimos, es cierto, y yo sé cuánto:
primaveras, veranos, soles, lunas.

Pero jamás en el mismo día.

Ángel González

(We read this in Lengua class and it, spoke to me? Something quite like that.)

“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.” — Charles Manson

A veces, las palabras se posan sobre las cosas como una
mariposa sobre una flor, y las recubren de colores nuevos.

Sin embargo, cuando pienso tu nombre, eres tú quien le da
a la palabra color, aroma, vida.

¿Qué sería tu nombre sin ti?

Igual que la palabra rosa sin la rosa:
un ruido incomprensible, torpe, hueco.

Ángel González

(And because I am wonderful and too lazy to translate the previous, longer poem, I shall do so for this one.)

Sometimes, words situate themselves above things like a
butterfly above a flower, and they cover themselves with new colors

And yet, when I think of your name, you are the one who gives
the word color, aroma, life.

What would your name be without you?

The same as the word rose without the rose
an incomprehensible noise, clumsy, empty.

Ángel González

(Note that I am not an academic, and that this loses 200% of its power in the translation. I’m helpless.)

Almost immediately (hell, who am I kidding, immediately) that poem made think of a certain someone. A Certain Someone. A CERTAIN SOMEONE. Crazy magic stuff, and I want to hit myself, and then I think of this, something I wrote in the margins of my English notebook:

WHAT IT TAKES TO COMMIT A CRIME, OR CONFESS YOUR LOVE, WHICH REALLY AMOUNT TO THE SAME THING, IN MY MIND

Equal parts gut, gumption, all stupid. Optional, but highly recommended: good boots.

Each and every girl believes she is the ultimate authority. She controls the three feet of space in front, behind, and to all sides of her! She makes all definitions in the fortress of her head, all the signs in the hooker of her body!

Each and every girl has a paprika-colored, octopus ink-staining heart and an eventual pap smear. She is neotenic, retaining juvenile characteristics in adulthood, choosing to metamorphose long after the arrival of her teeth. She is a carcinogenic, releasing spores into the air, be they poisonous, be they benign.

Each and every girl may never necessarily put away childish things. Sometimes she continues making and imposing her definitions on anyone who will listen, and a few who will not. Eventually, however, she will begin checking the gas in the middle of the night, learning to accommodate definitions of cruelty, space that is not her own, language of ripping and knuckle dusters and feather dusters. In turn, they will learn to accommodate her.

The boy takes in the selection once, twice, chewing one of his sweatshirt sleeves. His taste in movies is a statistically regular taste for males: Fight Club, James Bond, Sparta. Occasionally, though significantly less in recent years, he strays towards the statistically irregular for males: Before Sunset, Makoto Shinkai, Paris. Now that he has a girlfriend, he’s more disciplined with himself when it comes to romance. He’s embarrassed to have ever thought of lovers, and of loving, especially considering that as a college student he cannot be possessed by such adolescent flights of fancy. He can only be possessed by a schedule, and by his girlfriend, who gratefully assumes the role of his keeper.

The dog neatly steps aside as his master opens the door and ties the lead around his wrist. His colorblind eyes move towards the next obstacle in the obtaining of his dinner and soup bone: the three blocks home, filled with pitfalls only known to the astute canine. It is dark out, and the streetlights illuminate the sculpted rhododendrons in the garden of a house next door, where a girl will wake in the morning thinking of love letters.

I wrote you an opera once, a sort of perhaps opera, about box jellyfish. It started with your hands are nematocysts, but I did not know what I meant by that. I wrote you letters once, you wrote me letters once, but I got tired, you got tired, didn’t you? We took bikes, but you were the one who turned back.

I am without water, and you are full of it, am I the Cassandra to your Poseidon? CPR doesn’t restart the heart, it only delays termination. Sea turtles eat box jellyfish, but we’ve never seen turtles. CPR only delays termination. When I stood next to you I could hear the chords for my perhaps opera in your pulse. I did not want to go home to an empty mailbox.

Panthalassa speaks untruths I hear, but I am the Cassandra to your Iphigenia. CPR doesn’t restart hearts, especially not nematocyst hearts. Did I do something wrong? I only wanted to cry you a perhaps opera. Sea turtles are immune, but you are silly flesh wired to a killable heart. We took bikes, and I dragged yours home. Rescue boats tied to the wharf, but you cannot make a drowned bird coo, and you cannot love that which has no intention of returning.

Watching you walk around, drawing out every organ in your body in search – it brings out the most primordial needs in me. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but I want to slip down to where you are and fix you where you break and warm you where you are not okay. The whole of my biology wants to keep you sane. I don’t even know you. I don’t even know you, but what I do know I want to keep. You are a cellophane humanoid I can open up and see symmetry in.

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But everyone was part of one of these such groups? Everyone? How had I not seen this anomaly before?

Thanks to the combined teachings of my prepubescent cousin, an Elle magazine fished out of the trash and half an hour of a Nickelodeon sitcom, I came to the conclusion that what I had been witnessing was the queer social phenomenon of the clique. I was eight then, and frankly puzzled. I asked myself questions.

An exclusive group of people who shared interests, views and behavior? What made it exclusive? How’d you get in? Who got in, and why? Who was the alpha? Who decided what everyone did, what everyone wore? Where were the definitions for each clique? Was everyone supposed to be in one?

The next day in Art class, while doodling idly, I debated. In society, I reasoned, one was supposed to conform, if one wanted to avoid issues. Did I want to avoid issues?

I did.

Would I have to join one of these “cliques”, then? Even if I didn’t think they made much sense?

I would.

So which one did I want?

Ahem.

VARIABLE I. EMO

From what I could gather, they had continually depressed facial expressions, frayed clothing, black nails, The Night Before Christmas obsessions and an alarming collection of broken scissor blades. They gave each other sad looks and seldom held hands.

I admired their darkness, in a way. But necrophilia wasn’t really my thing.

VARIABLE II. WALLFLOWER

They huddled, whispered. Some smiled, but it was always too faint for me to be completely sure. Sighing seemed to prevail in their conversations, and other than that I could never find anything meaningful. They were all so frail, so vulnerable. They went everywhere together, and if one happened to be left behind, they completely fell apart. I was seized with urges to go over there and shake them.

I was shy, too. But I hoped not to be that fragile until I was well into my nineties.

VARIABLE III. PREP

The bizarre thing was, they were simultaneously adored and hated. When they passed out party invites, freshmen made lines. Their approval was craved. But once their left, criticism swarmed. Vanity, expenditure! Cheerleaders and jocks are blase, people said. I wondered.

They could be nice. But who could spend that much time on their hair? I looked at my own dirty head, my speckled hands. Nuh-uh.

VARIABLE IV. PUNK

They were annoyed. They never took off their headphones. They frightened me. End of subject.

VARIABLE V. NERD

They conversed about chess, nuclear physics and duct tape. They gave each other the Vulcan salute and spoke in L33t. I found this to be thrilling. And also kind of irritating.

They had a ridiculously good image of themselves. One could practically see the self-confidence radiating off of them. And while that’s all well and good, I did not appreciate their ridicule of the other cliques, based mainly on math grades. I was terrible with numbers then. This irked me.

Ugh. Variables, variables! Too many, good Gad. I had to stop. There were too numerous to classify.

What was I supposed to do, how was I supposed to form a hypothesis?

You know what? I told myself. And yes, I know I told myself this, because I remember very clearly.

You can just be Emma.