Stories from The Moon / Cuentos de la Luna

I’m walking in a city that isn’t my home. A city I can’t call mine. The people around me speak a language I can’t understand. This is not where my story was supposed to end. After three months of living here, I know on which corners to turn left and where I should keep walking straight. I have no idea what the names of the streets are but I know them by the flower shops and the cafés nestled between them. It feels like having a friend whose last name I can’t remember, but the conversation and the company are real. Bern and I understand each other that way.

Not long ago you got your heart broken in Luzern. You’re sitting with your back against the wall on the long bench tucked behind the dining room table. He is sitting across from you on a black chair. “When I see you, I feel nothing,” he says monotonously. Dry branches twist around your ribcage. They pull and pull until it hurts. You sit there looking at him from across the table. He doesn’t flinch. Your vision becomes blurry with tears. He doesn’t reach for your hand. His eyes are opaque. You remember the short period of time when you had a father. He told you once that when buying fish, you must make sure that they are fresh. “You look at the eyes. If they’re not glossy, don’t buy them.” 

You remember three years ago at the top of the Rigi when he said that at this exact moment, there was a portal, an open door, through which one could begin a new life. He said he wanted to start that life with you.  You felt ecstatic. This person sitting in front of you, with dead fish eyes, is no longer him. Everything inside of you feels disconnected. Everything begins to quiver. Entire bricks that used to hold you, collapse loudly. Everything you are shrinks. You haven’t felt this small in years. You can’t breathe because he’s taken away all the love he’d given you over the past four years with one sentence. You feel loneliness poking at your lungs. You’ll never hear him say that he loves you, again. The branches snap. When was the last time he loved you? He stands up and leaves you sitting there. A mess of twigs and broken bricks. 

Sitting there you close your eyes and see a door for the first time. Like the portal you walked through with him in December. You hope this door will bring you somewhere where it doesn’t hurt this much. Cherry wood door. Golden knob. You open it, and find yourself inside your grandma’s kitchen. She is smiling at you by the sink. You must’ve been seven years old. Cold, black tile on the soles of your little feet. You flex and straighten back your toes trying to stay in this kitchen for a bit longer. She loves you. You open your eyes. You’re trapped inside a life you never saw coming.  You see the slanted ceiling with the wooden beams. How did you end up here, in a country that isn’t yours, so unloved? 

The heart is a bone that breaks. These past two years felt grainy like sandpaper on your tongue. You managed to sand down the flashbacks of his big eyes, of his hands, of his voice on the phone. In time, the blade of the flashbacks became dull and the stab didn’t cut as deeply. You broke down in tears scanning your groceries in Migros. You turned off your camera during class so your classmates wouldn’t see you sobbing. If sadness left a physical mark on your body, everyone would see your jaw, your shins, your back, covered in dark bruises. The tide that carried the years that you were together swallowed you at unexpected moments.  Some of the items you saw floating in the water: 

1. The Mala he gave you in Pune. 

2. The pumpkin seed Bretzels he used to buy for you. 

3. His secret tomato sauce in glass jars. 

4. Incense sticks you used to burn when you meditated together.

You made him promise that he wouldn’t contact you again. He kept his promise and the portal between your world and his world disconnected. If you call the portal, you’ll hear the answering machine. I wouldn’t leave a message if I were you. The first months you woke up without him next to you, you would half-asleep, automatically try not to move too quickly so as to not wake him up. His physical space lingered even after he left. You didn’t know that Phantom Limb Syndrome could apply to a body that was external to yours. For months you would move around life, dragging his deflated presence around you like a dead balloon. 

Slowly the flashbacks stopped stabbing you. You used the sandpaper on your tongue to smooth out the waves. You got lost.  This is me reminding you to keep swimming, to hold your breath when a wave of sadness threatens to push you underwater. You open doors in your mind to the places where you’ve been happy to remind yourself of who you are. To remind yourself that you’re not alone, that you’re Mexican. That you carry all of your ancestors and their strength within you. 

You close your eyes. The glass door slides open in Mexico. Preschool. You want to keep playing with your grandma. You refuse to go inside the building. She pushes you in the swings. Higher. Higher. Higher. Another door takes you to Chiapas. You open the car door. It has stopped raining. Your uncles shake the lemon trees and pear trees, so you can have more rain. You aren’t aware that you won’t see her again. Raindrops bounce off your black Mary Jane shoes. You relearned how to buy groceries for one. You learned that in Reinhard you can buy half a loaf of bread. You feel exposed, as if the word UNLOVED was written on your forehead. You keep opening doors.

Kindergarten. You’d missed class again. You open the green door to Miss Lili’s classroom. Your friends leave the low tables and come rushing to hug you. You hug them back in a big tangle of arms. You open your eyes and remind yourself of your friends here in Switzerland. They perform CPR and throw confetti at your mushed-in heart. You stop writing his last name next to your name. 

The wooden floors smell like oranges. It’s a small hotel in Dublin and you feel at home. Rain knocks on the glass roof. You’re twelve years old. This is the time when you wore those thick hoodies in bold colors and those chunky-knit mittens. Your mother goes back to Mexico. You stay in boarding school. You push open the red round door with the ivy around it. You’re sitting with your friends at the dinner table eating Banoffee pie. The nuns glide between the tables. Remember sleeping in the high bunk bed. Your feet are cold. Flashforward to when you’re seventeen. You live in Florida now. Remember the long tree branches almost touching the grass. The pink glare through your bedroom window. The smell of sunscreen. Blue Gatorade. Tennis practice. You open another door. You’re attending college, waiting outside his office in the English Department. Dr. Platt says Eloise and you can come in. You promise him that you’ll keep writing. Don’t you dare lie now. 

You open your eyes and feel the bricks inside of you are rearranging. You breathe and realize you haven’t cried in more than two weeks. You begin to remember what it feels to smile. You understand friends have superpowers. Your heart still looks like a wrinkly Medjool date, with many of its broken pieces lying stiff beside it. You have decided to carry those spare pieces with you in a paper bag, so they can breathe fresh air. You’re attending university again and you’ve been playing tennis. You keep opening doors to remember who you are. You close your eyes. You get out of the tuk-tuk. Noise everywhere. Orange petals, white flowers on women’s heads. Strong smells of herbs and smoke and something sour. You walk barefoot. You smile at the birds on the trees. Incense sticks burning on metal trays. People pushing past you. People staring at you. People nodding their heads yes and no. You continue walking. You already know that you are coming back. You leave your Birkenstocks at the entrance door. You wash your hands and sit on the floor next to a man you don’t know yet will break your heart. A woman is frying something on the stove top. She piles food on your plate and you eat it. She brings more and you eat it. Coconut chutney. Spicy sauce from a little metal jar on the table. You go back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. You open the shutters and see the Balinese jungle. You feel older than the twenty-two years you’ve spent on this planet. You feel like rain, like wood, peaceful. You move slowly hoping time will move slowly with you. You step on grass. That delicate grass you feel like eating with garlic croutons and a light vinaigrette.

I open my eyes. How did I end up in Bern, with a paper bag full of love? I never thought you could be so utterly broken-hearted and yet-happy at the same time. I hear the knobs turning. All the places where I’ve been happy burst open inside of me. I close my eyes quickly. A gust of wind sends pictures of the people I love dancing in my head. Saint Pete Beach with Abel. Sitting by the fireplace with my family. Making molotes with Flor at my mother’s house. Playing house with my three cousins at Christmas. Door after door, after door. I can hear my mother’s voice telling a story. I can see my grandpa in his swivel chair wearing a single black glove on his left hand. The only hand that gets cold. I see a woman. She looks like me. Revolving doors continuously open. I breathe and open my eyes. I take the paper bag in my hand, open it, and see that it’s empty. I smile, look up and think of my grandma. I’ve been told that I have her smile. I keep walking, bringing all those mental spaces with me, like a miniature world inside of me. At thirty-years old, I am beginning to remember who I am. I turn right on Schanzenstrasse.