When Our Eyes Meet

Three-hundred-sixty-five days, one minute, and four seconds. Red, blue, and yellow sparks wash the living room. The swell and burst of fireworks coincides with neighbors’ drunken whoops. My throat aches as acid gnaws at my vocal cords, trying to release itself. It melts away flesh and claws up my throat. My fingers are plugging my ears, yet I can still hear, even two houses away, the crooning of jubilant partygoers. Shot. Shot. Shot.

I grit my teeth as the acid stings and sloshes against my mouth for release. The smell of burnt flesh and tooth decay billows onto my hard palate. The smoke makes me hack, acid combines with ash, rot, and carbon dioxide to become a tornado. “I hate you,” “I hate this,” “Please, you need to stop,” circle around the living room. Ripping through couch cushions and throwing glass cups at the wall, making them shatter and fall to the ground. No knocks at the door. No worried voices asking if I need help.

All they do is get drunk.

The paint is peeling off the wall now, revealing a rotten wood foundation shaking on the tornado’s impact. With each scream, the years I spent begging all spill outward, and yet all my cousins and tíos I want to hear it aren’t here. The tornado is all around me now, squeezing my body.

There’s a silent pitter-patter of feet rushing from the hallway. I see the face of Gatsby, my beagle, force itself through the eye of the storm. Turning away from him, I’m once again hypnotized by the swirling of my past. Mama’s eyes became a black void as she yelled at my sister and me. My dad threw a glass cup across his apartment. My cousins were giddy at the hoard of glass Pacifico bottles they laid claim to, only for their belligerence to lead to fighting with random men, to countless phone calls from a holding cell, and their mother reliving the moments with Isaura.

Boom.

Illegal fireworks explode with so much force that it sets off car alarms across the neighborhood. Gatsby is now jumping up, barely scratching the middle of my thighs. The tornado dissipates, uncoiling and slithering itself into my mouth. I slide myself down to the ground. Gatsby immediately fills in the empty space made by my legs. His high-pitched whines finally bring me back to the present. I pet his shivering face, moving my hand down his torso until I reach his ribs. I inhale slowly through my nose, letting the fresh air coax it back to slumber in my vocal cords.

I’m here now. Shhhhhh. It’s okay. We’re okay.

For a moment, he relaxes, and I pray we’ve gone through the worst of it.

Then, the world reignites.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

These words shove through the virtual world and spill over my phone with family group chats, friends, and the few acquaintances that do it out of politeness. Yet my phone’s on the couch, precariously close to tipping over as I soothe my shivering beagle. Sitting on my lap, he licks at my hands to keep petting. Soft brown and white fur moves through my fingers. More fireworks, more texts, and an unhealthy amount of libations. I want to plug my ears with wax, wishing that this siren song leading me to celebrate will forget I’m here.

A loud crack across the neighborhood causes my ribs to reverberate and my lungs to constrict into raisins. I look to the glass sliding door a couple feet away where flashes of fireworks show themselves a couple blocks away. But when I look at the sliding door it’s a pitch black sky. It didn’t even sound like fireworks. More so groaning steel, something metallic and tearing apart.

Gatsby jumps over my lap, running through the living room towards the hallway. Taking fistfuls of gray cushion fabric, I hoist myself upwards. Knees popping, hips cracking, and out of breath, I finally achieve the miracle of getting up off the floor in one minute.

“Gatsby, it’s okay. Want a treat, Mr. Brave – agh!”

Piercing, sharp pain travels down my abdomen. I take deep, labored breaths and smooth the locus of pain near the middle of my chest and navel. A burning sensation takes over as the seconds pass, and for a moment, a quick throbbing sting. I fall onto the couch, writhing. Labored breaths become ahhs and oohs. My fingers tread towards my phone a few inches away. My left index fingernail barely scrapes past it as I watch it clatter to the ground.

“No ahh ahh… I can’t … get up.”

I feel something wet brush my arm, and as I barely angle my head upward, I notice Gatsby whining. Scratching at my shirt.

“It’s okay… give me oooh…”

Blood?

A blot of red on Gatsby’s right paw. The very same he scratched me with. Carefully, I pinch my index between my thumbs and push my shirt up. What should have been a fading line is now raw stringy muscle awash with bright red blood.

No screams. No “Oh my god, call 911.” I’m petrified. Each droplet of blood reflects a hospital bed, a naked body under bright lights, and every moment of extreme pain or suffering I’ve been through. I try to pat down the stitches ripping apart, stitches that should have dissolved an entire year and four months ago.

When I had cancer.

The New Year dissipates, the walls surrounding my parent’s house completely dismantling and slipping into a void. The void swallows and chews it into a neat bolus, an invisible mouth spitting me out into a cold and sterile hospital room. Clear tubes sink under my arms and air flows through an oxygen mask.

I can’t find Gatsby. I can’t even move underneath these coarse white blankets. A machine beside me shows my heart rate and SpO2. A steady beat and blue line move through the hills and valleys of the machine. I hesitate before moving, yet I feel no pain, only the strain of my lungs. SpO2 dipping lower, to 89. I keep trying to get out of the hospital bed, one leg now halfway down.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The machine attached to my chest with red wires and sticky patches blares a warning. My arms carefully push me down, my right foot dipping onto the cold white tile, my left now delving alongside until I’m standing. My head throbs as what little breath I have left squeezes out of my lungs. I already have an arm lacing around a metal pole where my vitals machine is. Slowly waddling across the floor and finding an oxygen tank in my periphery. My hand lets go of safety and holds onto a spout in the wall, feeding me oxygen.

Come on…just one more step.

My body radiates a kind of pain I thought I would never have again. Neither a dull ache nor throbbing but as if the Reaper’s scythe has pierced itself through my chest. Instead of losing blood, I’m losing my breath. What little is left I can barely cup in my hand and sip. My left foot sweeps past my right, bringing me to my oxygen tank.

But my tube falls. Floundering on the ground.

The beeping is roaring, shrill, and impatient. My limbs are frozen, and my full lungs are ready to burst open and suffocate me. If I bend down, I’ll fall. It’s over. I’ll be wherever the hell this purgatory or nightmare is and never leave.

My vitals are blinking red. Heartbeat at 190. SpO2 at 58.

The past is always close behind me. Its tendrils slinking across my body and claiming it as its own. My eyes grow heavy, limbs slack. I let myself fall onto the ground, maybe, just this time, I won’t fight back.

A gentle breeze harmonizes with low melodic hums, and I feel dry dirt under my body. Opening my eyes, I see a bright sun and birds flying. I can hear footsteps, a woman standing over me watching. Short and stout, with endless waves of black hair flowing down to the hem of her floral skirt. I sit up, holding what little breath left, until realizing my chest doesn’t hurt. Warm, dry air floods in all this new space in my lungs. There are fields of maize circling the land, and in the center a white adobe house, and a woman tending to a garden.

I don’t have to ask her name. I’ve known her.

In this silence, river water pours from a clay pot, shifting through the leaves and stems of marigolds. She moves her fingers through the petals, scooping up small, powdery yellow pollen. Her smooth melody makes unopened marigolds bloom. She tugs at one, fibers ripping until plucked off the ground, and turns around. Finally acknowledging me.

“¿Cómo te sientes?”

I notice golden petals encasing my body. Their light touch is all I can feel. Isaura holds out her hand and helps me stand. Her body shrinks and towers before me. My legs are unsteady. My body flickers in Isaura’s brown pupils, shifting from a haggard man in a hospital gown to a silent girl in a black floral embroidered dress to a man holding a switchblade.

“¿Eres tú? No lo creo.”

“N-no… I don’t…”

The switchblade shakes in my thin, bony fingers. My throat aches and throbs as screams reverberate without a place to release. Its force scraping muscles and stripping vocal cords. My hand moves through empty air, inching towards my pale wrist of fading scars.

The switchblade clatters to the ground as Isaura holds my wrists between her fingers, her mouth slack. I don’t fight back as she rips apart marigold petals, letting them fall onto my scars.

Rays of light pulse and dim as the petals fall to the ground. My scars are still there, but now sprouts are growing from them.

Isaura smiles, pressing my wrists softly with her thumb before snaking her hands towards my face. Shock flashes in her eyes as I push her away.

I know her.

How she let beer bottles fly through bleak LA apartments and shatter near my shell-shocked mother. My tía Dioselina held back my mother as Isaura wailed, punched, kicked, and lashed out at them. Seeking her own release, letting alcohol unleash repressed rage that bled onto her children. Her grandchildren.

My curls caress the ground as I reach for the switchblade and point it toward Isaura. Screams thrash around my mouth, ripping through my tongue. I take slow steps towards her, yet she doesn’t move. She doesn’t flinch as the knife dives into her abdomen. Instead, a smile brighter than the sun spreads on her face. Roses, marigolds, and laelia orchids bloom from the wound, wrapping their roots around my arm. Pulling us closer to one another. I flicker from child to teen to haggard adult. All three push and pull to break free, shrieks now spilling out of our mouths. Isaura listens silently, never breaking eye contact. Her arms wrapped around our bodies, she tells us:

“I know you too, mijo.”

We stay here for ages, my faces combining into one of hesitance. This woman I’ve hated, who I’ve never known, morphs into the tender, ethereal phantom I’ve yearned for all throughout this year. Yearned to be held as cancer encroached on my body and to be known by someone who understood death’s lullaby weighing on my soul, calling me to my eternal rest. These flickering versions of myself fall away as my true self reclaims his place. I wrap my arms around Isaura, tears spilling into her hair, and my body glows. A warm red-orange flame overpowers Isaura’s sunlight as I smile.

“Te quiero mucho abuela.”

I wake up on the couch disoriented, my ears ringing as groaning steel becomes a high-pitched whine. I try to plug my ears and feel sticky slobber covering my face. I look to my right and see Gatsby on the couch beside me, wagging his tail. I brace myself to get up, yet there’s no stabbing pain. I pick up my shirt and notice the scar on my stomach is once again just that. No blood or muscle protruding outwards. I shrug off earlier as some sort of bad dream, the events already dissipating from my consciousness. As I move through the living room I see my phone on the wooden floor. While I bend down to pick it up, a marigold petal falls from the top of my head and lands right on my phone screen.