We forget what it took to get here

​Rinconcito is a special little corner in Somos en escrito for short writings: a single poem, a short story, a memoir, flash fiction, and the like.

“On The Car Ride Home”
by Diana Aldrete

For my sister Griselda
 
Time is all but an illusion
stuck in theory
relative to Einstein sitting on a train.
 
Our point of departure,
qualified by loss,
always by those we left behind.
The echoes of goodbyes in the rearview mirror
and the reassurances that no matter space or time
love and remembrance would persist.
 
They ripped us from our beds while it was still dark out,
and dumped us into warmed-up car seats,
the moss of furry blankets ready to cradle us back into slumber.
Papi would say it was to beat the morning traffic,
but Mami made sure to bring our focus back,
“sleep,” she would say. 
But as if by the speed of light
we would wake up past state borders:
Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas,
and then into the open arms of Mexico:
Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Zacatecas, Jalisco.
 
For many months during the year, and for several years,
we shared stories, family anecdotes,
antidotes to scenarios – lessons to learn from the past
inside that car.
We would look out the window,
finding our gaze upon others,
cocooned in their world-on-wheels,
like a rushing herd of buffalos onto the same greener pastures.
Time passed before us like shadows on a screen,
only able to catch on still motions of the mountains,
the canyon drops,
the desert plains, and the flat lands.
The horizon – our point of destination,
but we always arrived at night,
greeted by the smell of manicured grass,
or the occasional wafts of wet earth.
 
At arrival, we fell concave to our loved one’s embrace.
Kitchen tables became radio stations
flash reports of familial current events
announced over cinnamon-spiced coffee,
burnt tortillas, and mangoes.
 
As children, time blossoms slowly
and memory seems vaguely dispersed.
As the only accomplices to each other in the car,
we now draw maps of stories,
connecting coordinates back to an origin
because memory fails us and we forget what it took to get here,
from the dizzying spells of the altitude sickness
to the hugging of curves down valleys of nostalgia.
 
Now with many roads already traveled,
we fall witness to our displacement,
we negotiate mother tongues in static spaces
not sure if home was there or here,
or if time is dilated.
But a search for home, nonetheless,
an oasis in a desert of despair.

Dr. Diana Aldrete is a bicultural, first-generation Mexican-Salvadoran-American living in Hartford, CT. She is a Visiting Lecturer of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College. She is also an abstract painter, a writer, and a musician. She was born in Milwaukee, WI before moving to Guadalajara Mexico where she did her primary education, and later moved back to the U.S. where she has been ever since. She has published a short fiction in Spanish “Los charales” in Diálogo: an Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, and the academic article “The Ruins of Modernity: Synecdoche of Neoliberal Mexico in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666” in Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World, 2019.

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