Americana

Viernes came and went. She felt unsatisfied. It was late. No one was around. Four years. Four years for nothing.
Ahora que?
The stillness of her muebles made her feel like the curator of her very own Chicana museum.
La Louvre, a la chingada.
This was no Louvre.
This was home, her home, and she'd make the best of it.
But for who?
There were no children, no noise, no birds or dogs. There were no parents or siblings.
"Then it's not a home," she told herself.
She was getting used to the sound and flavor of failure.
She could eat it for breakfast; regurgitate it if she had to.
She could hear generations of women speaking to her.
"Apariencias mijita, apariencias."
The simplest things became difficult for her to do.
"Lavate, limpiate, peinate."
You mean, sonriete, caminate y callate?
How was it that girls in high school became mothers?
This one goes over her minutes every month.
"Sit down," a voice told her.
It was the soul of her youth. It was the loud laugh, the sparkling eyes and porcelian skin.
She saw long black hair, a young body, but most of all, she saw hope in the soul. She saw hope.
The soul looked into her older self's eyes and saw what she had done and retreated back into the frame.
Una lagrima, y la mirada de La Virgen.
El frio congelaba sus huesos sending a familiar chill to escape her already deflated chest.
Consequently her eyelids fell and her body found refuge between two spaces, one with a tag that said Made In America, and the other from somewhere else, it didn't matter where.
The colors of her Persian rug rose and painted the ceiling.
She dreamt of a Mexican heaven.
She dreamt of her grandmother, her great-grandmother and her tia's cooking.
But where were they?
In her mind she was running, running a marathon between identity and self-preservation.
"Maybe I should make some beans," she thought.
What for?
Is there a difference between being illegal and illegally being?
They are one in the same.
They crowd your veins and make you get up to pay the price on your head if you are found.
They create girls in pink quinceanera dresses hiding pregnancies beneath taffeta and tattoos.
Huevos juntos pero no revueltos.
It had been too long since she opened her box of recuerdos.
Now that she peered into the abyss of memories de la prepa, de esto y aquello, she suddenly felt stronger.
She was born on February 2nd and died on February 3rd, twenty-one years later.
The music of the world still played and she still occupied a space but her soul had quietly escaped that morning in the clinic while she slept under the careful watch of la Malinche y la Llorona.
They must have missed it creeping through the woods.
They must have mistaken it as belonging to an old dying person not a young confused one.
Either way she would find it.
"It must be in here," she whispered as the notes and photos came to life in her palms. "Maybe it's decided to come home."
But her soul was not coming home and it hadn't escaped in the clinic. Someone else had it.
The radio screechecd a love song from the kitchen and the momentary happiness possessed her in a belly dancing frenzy for the nieghbors to see through the ventana.
"Mi mayano, mi mayano," she cried as she twirled in a cadence summoning her soul to return.
Her running shoes couldn't take her far enough away from herself so she accepted it.
Not a mirror in the house and that's the way she liked it.
Beautiful, ugly, fat, skinny, it didn't matter.
To her she was la Malinali.
To others she was Queen Elizabeth.
To be any of those would have been easier than to answer her door and return to complancency.
Any of those would have been easier than to make love in a hew of uncertainty and doubt.
But according to la Mama Grande, she was normal, she was American.

By, Anonymous

Photo by Diego Rivera