Triggers

The evenings used to be ritual.  Tea and conversation in Spanish while I mostly listened.  I wasn't the only man in a house of women, but we so seldom saw Karina's father that he remains to this day a complete stranger to me.  Sometimes on Friday nights we would meet at Marcela's and trade tea for rum and wine and Ximena with her sister would pry me open to jab at my sensitive innards.  Now when I drink my tea, it is out of a blue, metal cup and no one forces me to talk about my sentimientos.
The first husband had hanged himself one week before Ximena's first daughter was born.  That's why I had to talk about feelings, and what I missed of home, and how it felt to be heartbroken.  She would not let the men in her life escape the easy way anymore, there was far too much at stake.
I talked about being held up at gunpoint, beaten in the streets, falling out of love.  I told them that I was the happiest I'd ever been.  Back then, the tea had such flavor.

Now, I walk out in the rain looking at the yard, covered as it is in leaves.  The trains howl in the distance; the metallic clack, horns, and the houses rumble.  I think maybe that it is the worst time of the season, and the birds have the right idea to keep passing through to wherever birds go.  You can feel the tensions of the year, her growing pains, in the voices of everyone you know.  Relationships were straining against such violence.  The reminders of the previous Januaries still lingered: the hole in the wall made by one of the brother's fist.  The scars in the paint that ran along the side of my car.   The lone bottle of conditioner left in the shower and untouched.
Friends and lovers are better met in spring; warmer weather, warmer hearts.

It would be good to leave again, but we lacked wings.  The old same shackles still clamped our ankles, and there is nothing more comforting than the familiarity of bondage.  Still, my heart said move and find that next piece of life.  Sleeping alone in the same place for too long is just practice for being dead.

Somewhere I'd find a postcard and in as few words as possible send it off and hope for salvation.
Send Money.
I would address it to some last true soul I knew in the world.

I wrote Brandon for money from the end of the rope when my last pesos were buying cold empanadas.  He was no problem giving it to me.  Of course, he said, how much do you need?
I would have wrote my mother, but didn't.  She had asked what I wanted for Christmas and I had said money.  She went ahead and sent some straight to me even though it was November.  Even so, she had presents waiting for me when I made it home on Christmas day.  One was a new jacket that has saved my life many times since where the money had the once.  She was always doing that, saving my life.  I think she saw that she had as much ownership on it as I did, since she brought it into the world.  Maybe all mothers think that way a little.  I'll never know.