Until that point, desire wasn’t something I directed at people, at least not in the way I was feeling then, toward América. Words had never made everything melt before, had never made a body explorable, understandable—understandable in the way you understand the hug of your bed after a long day at school, the scent of your Abuelita’s cooking on Christmas Eve, the sound of your own name. This shit had to be more than her words. Why else would a testimony about generations of conflict and struggle cut my breaths in half, ripple waves of warmth through my forehead, chest, and, most alarmingly, my verga?
I am the life and death of New Mexico, América said at the conclusion of her presentation, all without glancing down at her color-coordinated flashcards. I am everything that makes this land my home.
Even though she ignored my full, open-eyed stare throughout her talk, didn’t even turn that crown of ink-black curls toward the margin of our classroom, I felt more noticed and seen and naked than I’d ever been in my life. It was as if my body was entering the world for the first time, each pang in my heart a new birth, thumping over and over again.
That evening nobody was home when I made it back to Pops’s place, which was late ’cus of my biweekly Personal Growth & Defense Club meeting (a month prior I’d joined the group, one of our afterschool “empowerment” programs, to kill time, maybe learn how to choke a motherfucker out from the MMA vatos they brought in occasionally). My father was probably pulling overtime or out with some girlfriend, which stirred relief into my gut. I wanted to be by myself, to finally spend time alone with the memory of América and soak in the exhilaration she’d created like a bath.
Before sealing myself behind the door to my room, I put a frozen enchilada dinner in the microwave. This was the diet I kept at Pops’s pad. I’d been staying there more often ’cus Moms, after scoring some librarian gig up in Santa Fe, had moved to Placitas, an almost-nothing village crammed into the shrub-spotted hills thirty miles north of the varrio. She’d found a house twice the size of my father’s casita, which she’d hoped would entice my moody ass to live with her. Think of it, honey, she’d said, so much space and fresh air to yourself; doesn’t that sound nice? But my mother’s new digs, all big and hollow and quiet, just reminded me of her loneliness, her failure to find room in my family. It threw a rock into my throat, the way she tried—tried to be a good mom, tried all by herself, tried despite Pops’s pride and obsession with control, tried despite my shame of her being so goddamn white. I couldn’t tell whether that rock was made of sadness or humiliation or rage, which only led me to avoid it and my mother altogether.
The enchiladas and whatever I had playing on the lunchbox-sized TV knocked me out before the thoughts of América had time to digest. They followed me into sleep, mixed with the color and light of my dreamscape. América, or at least the feeling of her, stood in the middle of it all, far away from me. The details that followed were just sensations, flowing with energy as if my body had become a collection of clouds, growing darker with electricity as the presence of América drifted closer and closer. Suddenly she fastened onto me and we were rolling against one another, the clouds of my body continuing to thunder, some part of me preparing to explode into the atmosphere. I wanted it to end. I wanted it to last forever. I wasn’t ready to give myself away. I was ready to give everything away. Then the lightning struck and I was awake, heart punching my rib cage.
For a moment I seemed to be floating, my head a hot air balloon, body unaware of itself under the covers. But recognition and panic cut that shit real quick. I discovered my boxers were glued to my skin, secured by some stickiness, its consistency somewhere between water and paste. I jolted up and yanked the string to the single bulb in my room. With the light shining down on me, I pulled my waistband with a hooked finger, the way you do when checking tin-foiled leftovers in the fridge for rot. And there it was. Proof something had left my body and entered the world, my love for América made real.