I’ve been wailing a lot. Dangerously dehydrated as I run all the liquid out of my body through tears down my cheeks and sweat collecting between my thin toddler hairs, trying to cool me by even one degree. I always want to complain, whether about ants, the heat, crawling ants, the magnetic heat, writhing ants, the convection oven heat… 17 years later, I’ll think my shuddering disdain for ants is instinctual, until my dad mentions that I’ve hated ants ever since our apartment in Mexico crawled with them, an endless stream of bodies thriving in both the dry and wet seasons.
Here in Mexico, I am no ant. Unruly bangs shining and wet, my body temperature is still not regulated after six months of living here. Holding a bit of Irish in me still. I don’t remember anything of home from before this age, but already, being displaced has sown bitterness in me– my rising toddler temperament exponentialized.
I am no ant. I am a rambutan, an exotic-looking fruit grown in Mexico. I’m speaking Spanish now, naturally, by default. I will carry this language throughout my life like the spiky pink skin of the fruit. At least, my mom hopes I will. Hopes that I will wear this experience as a fanciful exterior, a year of my life in one of my cultural homelands. At the age of three, I know a rambutan is meant to be peeled. I do not yet know that, like the fruit, my thick skin is meant to be discarded in favor of the fleshy white inside. Later, I will come to feel naked without my skin. Later, I will forget that I ever lost it.
But right now, I have not yet been peeled back, my fleshy whiteness is not all of me, just a part. I am vibrantly Mexican like I have never been since. My identity plays out in the bronze tone of my skin, how the round, flushness of me under the broiling light seems just right, even if I tend to complain. Under the sun’s scrutiny, taxi seats are soaked in sweat, metal slides a legitimate hazard. They tantalize me, my playful glee, gleaming in chipped shades of blue and red. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico looks like this no matter the season it’s wearing (give or take a few inches of rain). Even in this dry season, when the forecast low is 70 degrees, Dad brings us to school each day with a sweater poking from our backpacks, so the other mothers won’t accuse my parents of being negligent.
Today I’ve escaped the gaze of the maestras tasked with keeping los niños en linea. I’m on the side of the schoolyard, where there’s only pavement: grayish in the shade, sandy in the immortal sun. Maybe some weeds. The light tries to reach every corner, but my sister departs from its reign, meeting me under a bit of roof that just protects our faces. We still squint in the brilliance. I look up at her matching outfit, the pale blue dress and collar trimmed in black. Bark stuck within the divots of the soles of our simple white sandals. Beyond our deep brown hair and eyes, we don’t look so similar. She’s a full six inches taller, prouder, wiser. It shows.
She comes to sit beside me on the lip of the pavement, against the red brick wall. The schoolyard of Las Palomas could’ve been any other schoolyard. My charter school in Boise, the place I already know to call home. The same brick, same pavement, same cracks, ants, and weeds. But the only smells here are heat and dust, being tossed and shifted, toasted in the sun, clinging to our dresses, to our dollish white shoes, to our ribbed blue socks, that produce a cloud if provoked. We sit, me on the right, Talia to my left. We sit in total silence, though children scream and drop heavy feet in pursuit of bouncing balls in the not-so-far distance. Further, there are taxis, the ones we often take to school for the same cost as a bus ride. Mom would likely break a sweat while making her arms makeshift seat belts for both my sister and me at once. Through lowered windows, I hear radios play reggaeton, ranchera, and salsa music I couldn’t possibly recognize a few years later.
We are miles away. We sit in silence, strangely. Then my sister opens her pudgy hand, pink and just damp, to reveal twin tootsie rolls. I learn the delight of a silent offer. I clutch it in my palm. We hold nothing else, what do you bring to preschool but a beloved lunchbox, sectioned and stamped in Pooh or Hello Kitty imagery? I crumple the wrapper and place the cylindric sweet in my mouth. I salivate instantly, this delicacy.
We are too little to have many things to give.
We sit, heat already radiating from asphalt through our coming-unironed skirts; Dad will have to attend to this tomorrow after we nap and watch LazyTown. Our feet grind away on the pavement, toes scuffing from the kicking of little rocks or gum wrappers that have collected along the lip. Knees dimpled under our skirts rumpling, we suck and chew on the chocolatey taffy.
* * *
My sister is with me in our kitchen at home. We’re making sandwiches on this Boise summer day. We just slammed the windows shut to trap in the cool air of the night. An attempt to keep suffocating heat from creeping in, too late.
“Talia, do you remember when you gave me a tootsie roll at school in Mexico?”
“What? No.”
“We were sitting on the side of the school or something. There wasn’t anyone else there though... Did that happen? It might’ve been in elementary school instead?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember that ever happening.”
She’s with me in the kitchen. At home and away.
I’ve had to leave her many times since for college, 600 miles away. Once, I departed from her after only 24 hours, one night of dancing and screaming beneath an illuminated mirrorball, one short but deep night of sleep in one queen bed, on a whirlwind trip to Denver for a concert. As we exited the stadium, she extended her hand back behind her, for me, palm up, where a tootsie roll once had perched. I held it. In the airport, she did so again. We linked hands in the shuttle, didn’t let go until the clutch and release of a hug when I left for my gate. A clutch and release of my heart. On the plane that took me from her, I wrote a poem where I called her “my train car connector”.
She’s with me. From Boise to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, up and down each coast ten times. She was with me in Mexico. I can leave the rest of my world behind, forget the thousands of snapshots I took that year through my eyes, my tiny hands, the ground I walked in velcroed shoes, the palabras I learned in an ironed uniform. But this tiny piece of my sister, one even her meticulous brain can’t hold onto, for me is abiding.
I couldn’t place our schoolyard on a map. I tried once to find it, to turn this corner just so and see the hidden place, the half shade, the cowering weeds– just to prove that it happened– but no place exists. Our shoes collect la tierra que caminamos. We fall when our feet get too stubborn, stay planted. Algo de nuestras raíces empezó aquí.
Here, in this empty side yard where we could exist together as foreigners of sorts. Only pretending to belong. She knowing more than me how we had come to be here, how we weren’t going to stay but were stuck for the time being. Her knowing felt like an ocean, her hand a darling starfish, her gift, one that spoke: Hermana. You and me. Tu y yo. Tu y yo siempre.