Say Her Name

Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I’ll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it’s like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever. I wouldn’t sell that tube of sticks for a thousand dollars.

I wish for anyone else to live through this. I stamped out Aura’s cigarette and lit another one. Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada.

Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever. I wouldn’t sell that tube of sticks for a thousand dollars.

that I sometimes let immaturity masquerade as youthfulness, so that when I was spoken to as if I were practically still an adolescent, or a man-boy, a niñote, I’d allow myself to feel camouflaged and even flattered. Sixty is the new thirty. But that’s not how I was with Aura. Now, I have to guard against the danger of confusing how Aura’s mother regarded me or spoke to me with any aspect of how Aura did—one of death’s corrosive betrayals.

When I look at that photograph of Aura now, I feel more aware of our age difference, more uneasy about it, than I ever did when we were together. Juanita rarely said anything, in my presence that is, to make me feel embarrassed or apologetic about my age. I think that wasn’t so much out of consideration for me as for her daughter, playing along, pretending to see us as Aura wanted others to; or maybe it was for herself, too. Juanita almost always spoke to me as if I were closer in age to her daughter than I was to her, but it’s not as if it would have been better for any of us if we’d spoken like two parents.

This was probably the first time I’d so disappointed Aura. What did it mean? What if I was like that bedroom? A negligent, aging romantic goofball, his enthusiastic promise exposed as a gloomy, suffocating, cell of killing walls with an uncomfortable, cheap bed

The first time I opened the pinkish jar, the larger of the two, I found the indentations of Aura’s scooping fingers like fossils in the scrub’s slushy, coconut-hued surface