The Weight of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

my index is up, and in the background all my aunts and uncles are laughing and cheering. She tells me this as we’re sitting on her couch in my parents’ rented apartment in Bucktown. She hands me the photo, which is slightly warped. I’m helping her put the rest of our old pictures into albums because right before they moved here there was a flood in their old house. The box of photos was on top of a small toolbox. If the water had been an inch higher we would have lost more than a decade of memories. Yoli had started putting them into albums, but the process was slowed because humidity had seeped into the box, and many of the pictures fused together. She’d laid the fused ones out on the living room floor, allowing them to dry in the sun before she started gently peeling them apart.
    The moisture made many of the figures in the picturesunrecognizable. Some were no more than sheets of blossoming color that looked more like exploding nebulae than the artifacts of a human life. And in a way they were similar: they represented the destruction of many realities. Without the photos, the particularities of our collective events would fade and continue to fade until the entirety of the events themselves would be lost to oblivion. For the time being, Yoli is able to make out what had been in the ruined photos: the entrance to the gazebo in the town square where we lived, my uncle Victor dressed in his white medical school uniform just a few weeks before the car accident that mangled his left hand, a small patch of grass where I took my first steps.
    She hands me a stack of photos and explains that I should group them on the living room floor in some kind of order—whatever seems related—as best I can. The task is surreal because the home where they’d been living for the last five years was repossessed, and they scrambled to find an apartment with their bad credit. This, the only place they were able to get, was the apartment Martín’s aunt Hilda had first lived in when she moved to the United States more than thirty years earlier. When Yoli and I arrived, we’d moved in next door. One of the first photographs in the stack is of Yoli stuffing me into a bright blue snowsuit during my first Chicago winter. My arms stick straight out, and we’re standing in the very spot where we’re now sitting over two decades later. My mom is a lot thinner in the photo, but she still has her full head of black hair that looks like wire, and there still isn’t a single white one. I wonder whether she thinks it was all worth it. It seems, in this moment, like some circle has closed, like my mom and dad are exactly where they started, and for a moment I want to acknowledge this. I think about asking if she would do it again knowing how things turn out, but I decide it’s a cruel and stupid question.
    They knew it would be hard, but people really don’t understand what that means until it becomes their life, andeven then there’s no understanding. It just becomes the condition in which you live. Staying would have meant growing up in the conditions post NAFTA and after Calderón and Clinton’s declaration of war on drugs. In a letter Martín wrote on the occasion of my first birthday, knowing Yoli would be the one to read it, he says he hadn’t expected to feel so bad. “The solitude feels like it’s in my body. I don’t feel physically well. Nothing is like
over there
.” Nothing. He still hasn’t found a place that sells the small avocados with the skin you can eat, and he can’t tell when people are insulting him, but it feels as though they are all the time. “A million differences cascade into each other,” he writes, “until you find yourself in a strange place and even
you
have become difficult to recognize.”
    In high school, when I started smoking weed and going to parties instead of studying, they would invoke the sacrifice