Solito: A Memoir: Chapter Seven–April 5, 2021

This is the best we’ve eaten. Chilaquiles, carne con chile, tacos de carne, Mexican quesadillas, huevos rancheros, tacos de papa.

People went under and the sound reverberated.

To the right of our car, a row of stores with awnings.

Men sit on a waist-high broken brick wall that seems to be an old demolished building.

He’s short and has a scraggly black mustache.

He doesn’t look as tough, but he tries—whenever a man looks at Patricia, Chino glares at him and then flaunts his fake wedding ring.

When everyone is in the back of a crowded truck, Mero Mero #2 takes a last look inside the outhouse. Checks every nook.

It’s colder than last time because it’s windy. Sometimes a gust is hard and the bushes hit my stomach or legs with their thin arms.

Our heads move from side to side, trying to gauge whether it’s flying toward us or away.

Wispy clouds dance in the sky, white ones that look like silk.

With this wind and with this lighting—the blue, the grays—it feels like the bottom of the ocean. People whisper that we’re walking the wrong way, that people are missing, that we’re circling the same place. The grass is seaweed. The cactuses are coral.

When the deer sees us, she freezes. Just behind her, grazing behind bushes, three others, but none have horns.

Close to the ground, small cactuses with pink needles. We watched someone else’s shoe get harpooned.

We’re as close to the fence as possible, our bellies on the ground like sea slugs.

He unzips his backpack again and takes out a clear plastic bag with about a dozen tortillas and something wrapped in white butcher paper. Water droplets cling to the inside of the bag. Chino opens it, and the smell is pungent in the best way possible.

People here are screaming at each other. Deep Voice also shouts. Then, scuffling.

The Centipede looks like the heat took a machete and hacked it into pieces; the space between each section is longer.

I don’t know who they’re talking about, but I remember Abuelita’s chan she made on the hottest days with so much ice. She made it so tangy, with so many chia seeds floating in the cold water, which she tinted very red, sometimes magenta.

After Mister dropped us off, we slept on a cement slab under someone’s roof next to the asphalt road.

The heat is unbearable, the hottest we’ve felt. No shade. No trees, just bushes.

The wave crests near us. Then, like a trumpet, the three honks thunder over the crashing wave.

They have a secret knock: three distinct taps, but with something that sounds like a metal ring.

My parents became insomniacs. At night, their phone slept next to their bed as they waited for it to ring.

Carol’s partner was the future poet laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan.

My parents told their classmates, Carol, and Kay about my state of limbo. Everyone feared I could be dead, and each time the class met, they prayed for me and lit a candle.

Their instructions were to take the very first exit and head to a Texaco right next to the freeway, where Brown Mustache waited at nine A.M. sharp near a telephone booth.

The second happened years and years later, when I began writing poetry and started to process all of my emotions about—and the repercussions of—my migration.

Mom likes to call them my “angels,” but I worry that takes away their humanity and their nonreligious capacity for love and compassion they showed a stranger.

Mom likes to call them my “angels,” but I worry that takes away their humanity and their nonreligious capacity for love and compassion they showed a stranger.

Similar to my parents, I didn’t dwell on what happened to me those seven weeks from El Salvador to California.