How to Heal a Mestiza Heart

Issue 48 • Fall 2023 • Fiction

The morning after you end up stranded outside the red pulsing club by yourself, maceless and drunk in a new city, sleep in as best you can until eleven. At least eleven. When you wake, watch the sky from your too-hot bed, through the vinyl blackout shades your new apartment provided. They’ll make it impossible to get out of bed, ha! the property manager told you, sequin-smiled, last month, when it was still the bright bloom of Midwestern June.

It was funny back then; everything was. A move will make you think that way. Soulmates everywhere every time you walk out into your new neighborhood. In fact, during that same tour, you looked at this property manager, hands in his salesman pockets, and thought: that looks like a man that would take care of me. You’d already begged half your credit-shot family to co-sign your lease and handed over the deposit check so big your butt clenched writing it by the time Instagram told you he was already engaged.

So now you lie there, alone in your apartment, buried in your sheets, until your bones start to feel stale inside your skin and you think you cannot possibly get up, come back alive, face this day. You know it’s better to just front load this hopelessness, feel it all now so you’ll feel less of it later. Like venom, a bad night can coagulate the blood.

Pull your vodka-fingerprinted phone out from beneath your pillow and don’t be surprised that the Tinder guy who ghosted you last night hasn’t sent his apology yet. It’s only eleven and he stopped answering your calls at midnight. There’s a thirteen-hour rule for dipshits, or something. That type of thinking. When you start to feel your hangover in your stomach, drag yourself the four steps to your city girl bathroom.

Your hair will still be damp from earlier this morning, when you stumbled in crying at five, just before daybreak. You decided you needed to shower before anything else. Now, you’ll wish there was more time between that girl and you, but if you think like that, you’ll wish your whole life away. And it will be so fucking half-curl tangled, your hair, because you ran out of energy to lift your arms for conditioner after you’d already wet it, that dark drunk hair. Lucky for you, deciding not to condition was your last mistake before bed.

Grab all three combs—the fine tooth, the paddle brush, and the detangler—from the top drawer. Get to work, baby. Tip to roots, tearing the comb through, careful not to break the drugstore plastic like all those times before. Once you’re done, or once you’ve given up, swish it all back into a tight bun at the nape of your neck, like J Lo in that maid movie. You don’t look like J Lo, in case you were wondering. You look too white to claim anything and too mixed to fit anywhere else. Pinch all the broken, leftover hair from your white clean countertop and sink—it might be more lost hair than you were expecting—and throw that clump of dead in the trash. Don’t even think twice about it being gone.

Keep going like this: brush teeth, wash face, sunscreen and CeraVe eye cream because of that skin. Dress yourself: golden halo hoops, sneakers, and sports bra because you are nothing if not someone who likes to hold your chest close.

The Devil himself invented underwire, you sometimes tell the wide-eyed, arms-crossed preteens at work, shopping for their first big-girl bras. You keep telling your leads to keep you out of Intimates, which means they stick you there even more. After dressing, open that engaged man’s blackout curtains. Tell gray St Paul that you love her, even today, because you believe in karma.

Really, you can’t even be mad you ended up out here, in the north end of the city, facing the trees, train, and sky. Everyone in your building is nice enough, with a soft-coated dog or a gym complex. You all work jobs where you use fake voices all day, so you know what it is to be kind. It’s always a new face in the elevator, always pushing their own floor number before asking for yours, always a you new around here? oh, yeah, it’s reeeal nice—for sure, see you around, thanks, without ever exchanging names. The rhythm of the neighborhood works the same.

Most of the time, you like this kind of private informality, how it makes you feel left alone. But today, you wish you knew anyone’s name here.

There’s a tradition in your family, passed to you from your grandma. It’s called cooking and cutting the pain away.

Concave out your single girl fridge, working with what you have: five baby avocados, wilting cilantro, cheap fat limes, jaffa oranges, thirty-eight-cent roma tomatoes. Peel your avocado, slice your tomatoes, bunch and cut the cilantro several times over, squeeze in the citrus. Add extra orange juice for the men on the train who tell you they like it spicy, you sweet Latin baby. Bring out the molcajete and Pete Rodriquez to feel more Latin, but be embarrassed about it. There is no shame in trying to feel alive, no matter what the world outside tells you. It’s okay that you don’t have jalapeños on hand because they make you suck your teeth and wince. Go ahead—act like your grandma to feel tough.

Spice the guac and feel like you made something that really matters, just for a second. You will not be able to eat all of this guacamole on your own, but slide up on your counter and start in on it with some chips for breakfast.

If the boy’s apology text comes in over your noon breakfast, don’t panic. Don’t think it’s better that he didn’t wait the whole thirteen hours. If he respects you, he’ll tell you the truth. But because he doesn’t, he’ll say, it was out of my hands and sorry for that situation and so I guess you made it home okay after all? For anything short of him getting held up at gunpoint like your friend Megan’s once-ghosted date, do not reply. Not right away, but also not ever.

Fold the bag of chips, lime juice and saran the guac, clean up your mess. Set the avocado hearts aside for later.

At work, act like nothing happened. It’s a new job. Even in retail time, you’re too new to talk about the bad night, the being sent to voicemail outside the cold club alone. It’s not funny yet, and the girls here hardly even know you anyway. A couple weeks ago, the other Latina girls came up to you one at a time, stone-faced, asking you if you’re Latina, and what kind, and do you speak Spanish, and you’re half-white huh? You were relieved when you found out that none of them know any Spanish either. Now you’re kind of sisters.

Smile in the faces of the mall tourists, count and carry their dressing room leftovers. Tell them the coral jumpsuit looks best against their skin because it looks best against everyone’s skin. Say, no, thank YOU! Fold ribbed cotton tees, laying and folding and flipping the standard shirt board, hearing your lead’s girl boss voice ring, Standards, standards, standards!

Pick up gossip with the only coworker who’s even newer than you. She and her wonderful thick cellulite thighs will tell you about the video of her boyfriend cheating she was sent on her lunch break. You’ll feel bad that none of the other girls have taken to talking to her. She’ll keep going. Don’t
ask too many questions, just nod, fold, call him some names, and carry her deep heavy ache in your own chest until you both go home, sweaty, exhausted, and just the tiniest bit richer.

Hear the police sirens calling outside your apartment, all across your neighborhood, probably headed toward Rice to stand watch at the Mobil down the street. In just a month, you’ve found that cops are like ants around here; tucked around every brick corner, neighborhood tree, lip of the street. You’re new to this city, but not new to the pulse of this country. You come from cowboys and tumbleweeds, from men with snakeskin boots, guns in their pockets, ready to fight back.

Now, here, the policemen pull over to watch you walk your mile around the Capitol in the mornings, not in the way that makes you feel unsafe but rather in the way that makes you feel too visible, too thick-hipped and brown-haired and doe-eyed to be circling this white-white building.

Once home, text your best Aries—your first retail best friend—that you wish she was here, in this new echoing city, with you. And remember that you’re no longer together because you’re off somewhere far away, far enough that home actually feels like a place to be missed.

She’ll send you a voice text, just after midnight, in the middle of her bar shift, saying: Ciara, what you need to do is beat the fuck out of your face, go to any coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks, be an aesthetic, and when the barista calls up a cute guy, grab his coffee and say, “Oh! Your name’s Paul, too?”

Listen to her laugh into the phone, the way she cracks herself up, the way it’s so self-assured like your favorite 2000’s R&B. Text her that she’s stupid. Text her you love her. Text her if it weren’t for her, you’d already be dead. You would.

That night, open the fridge and pull your avocado pits from the old Country Crock tub you threw them in for safekeeping earlier. Hold them in your palms, those cold wooden orbs, and let them cool the lifelines your great-grandmother could’ve read for you if she weren’t dead. Pull open your balcony door and step out into the night. Throw the avocado pits off your sixth-floor balcony when no one is looking. Do it as the clouds cover the moon and stars, as the Milky Way smears itself like slept-in eyeshadow, just to hear the way the pits thud against the neighboring apartment building’s grassless parking lot mud. Like a heart, they’ll thud.

And don’t be surprised when, after two sweaty summer weeks, after you’ve already forgotten about the boy, the guacamole, the pits, and the thud of it all, six avocado trees spring up right there in your neighbor’s backyard parking lot. Five from the pits, one from the miracle of it.

Short little trees, green as parakeets, flowering elliptic leaves and endless avocados down below; so many avocados that the apartment complex next door will not be able to keep up. Thirty, forty, fifty new avocados a day. Avocados that will warm and brown in the late summer heat, fall off their trees, roll beneath the tires of the cars parked back there, and smush all over your neighbors’ Lincolns and Camrys.

The sweet-smelling trees and the summer sky turning quinceañera pink every night will pull all your neighbors out of their sad little apartments and onto their balconies. Your neighbors down below, with their loud chisme and Hot 100s music, will probably paint their metal patio chairs aqua. The man with cinnamon cigars next door may sit on a single stool. The small girls on the other side of you will most likely lay butt and belly down on bright, circle-shaped beach towels. Look at all this sky, they may say to you, waving their fruit-stained hands at it.

It will be a mess, those melting summer evenings. Without knowing why, you will start crying on your balcony at twilight and, before you know it, everyone else out there will start crying too, drunk on the sweet smell of the avocado trees. You’ll all hold it together in the elevators, in the hallways, when you’re hauling out your trash. But, as the sun falls into the bird-ornamented trees and turns the sky to fire, you will hear singing and humming and breathing from your neighbors, wiping their oily cheeks with the palms of their hands. Your trees will make the whole street love-drunk, weepy, afraid to look in the mirror and enthralled by it, the mapping of their own faces. For the rest of the summer, those trees will grow and drop heavy avocados, beating towards the earth, a part of it.

You’ll tell your Aries about it. You’ll take your time brushing out your tangles. You’ll stop looking at men like they might do something for you, because you will know you did this, that you might be a witch like your great-great-grandparents, but you won’t feel scared because that’s how you do it—by holding the magic that’s always been yours.

Issue 48 • Fall 2023

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry