You will get used to the bland food, the rice without salt or pepper, and the grape juice shake with a raw egg. Your mother’s insomnia was to make you eat more. The ginger ale to prevent nausea must be lukewarm; otherwise, it will give you a sore throat. You will get used to the shivers that being sick produces in you. You will arrive trembling to your chemotherapy appointment because your skin knows all too well the pain that the needles cause. But you will be prepared to escape into the fantasies proper to your age. You are lifted into a wheelchair. You turn your head to all sides, looking for your mother’s hand with despair.
You are the center of attention in the hospital’s hallways. But that is not important; what gives you a bit of vitality to continue is your mother by your side. During your chemotherapy sessions, she sings your favorite songs. The difficult moments become pleasant with her melodies. The brown wind of her hair amazes your eyes. You will then be surprised by the Manhattan skyline and the dreams about your homeland. That city view, however, gives you the sensation of knowing yourself alive. Looking at it, you know that there will be no before and after, no nurses or doctors interrupting your dreams at three in the morning. Only the vibrant sound of the river and the firm security that the only valuable way to live is to be next to your mother, alive, and that view, with her by your side, gave you that feeling. The hospital room’s window on the 48th floor will become an eye, and your astonishment will be called The Hudson.
Silence will cover up the voices of the nurses and doctors. All you will hear is the murmur of a needle entering the skin. Those infinite evenings in the hospital will give you many hours of solitude when your mother is out working. You will spend them soaking in the horizon. When your mother returns, you look at her as if she were the first woman on earth, and the Hudson behind her is a gray serpent of salinity and astonishment, seagulls, and rocks. You look at your mother; her waves are a caress, bright hair, a sun of rays, luminosities, and a seashell that dissipates the grayness and pain. You don’t know what is happening. You are tired because the medicine has drained you, but you have just enough energy to contemplate her. Only your mother is there, giving you life until you open, suddenly, your eyes to the horror because a shadow crosses in elastic grace over your dream. It’s your doctor, and he has some news.
Once again, losing. The tumor is still sprouting, growing, and growing, making the cancer disseminate to other areas. You will have to be opened. Massacred turtle by an unredeemed god. Worried about the expenses, your mother’s concerns drive her to get another job. You are saddened because you don’t want to be alone. So, you turn to your dreams where you can get away and visit your sweet land, which you know very well from the photo albums your mother keeps in the closet.
In a dream that melds with a picture you looked, you recognize your mother’s finger on the bottom right corner, at the foot of the pyramid. Through all of the successive dreams, you will travel to your mother’s home, because it has been decided, prefigured from other times, before the arrival of the conquistadores, even before the pyramids, and way before the birth of the people who would have to construct them, centuries before the sea’s arrival and the rock’s burning ochre. You will travel towards the whispering shadow of the tamarind tree that looks over your mother’s home in Chapachapa. You will wait with your eyes closed, without previous news, for the world to be born again. Your mother will be there, and so will your brothers and sisters. You will all hold hands and will walk slowly, but surely towards the pyramid. The sun will shine above you. You will climb up five steps. Yet undoing the way is your adventure, turning your back on the summit as a state of being.
You are born over the earth; you are tied to the earth; you are the earth; together on that site, you shall contemplate each other. However, you keep climbing, and your siblings stay behind. Only you and she, and now it is she who shelters you. The sun illuminates everything around you. You will feel the pain of the earth. Other ages will sow you. Because you were born to love, because you are also a massacred goddess, because you are a wave on its way to the sea. You will then travel in solitude to the horizon that your mother also went through by herself. You won’t want to open your eyes then. You will wish to leave. To stop. Freeze in that instant. You will be pushed to the abyss that returns you to the origin.
You will have to open your eyes. Go ahead, girl, the air, the sun, the sea, and the pyramid all have your name, your fragility. You will walk towards the pyramid’s first step. A light shadow will anticipate the farewell. Midday has ended. Once at the top, you will finally know that the happiness of being together with your mother has kissed you with the most tender melancholy. When the day ends, you will return to the hospital bed. It will be your last night in the hospital.