Jazmín is Home

Fabián González González

When little Jazmín left, I was eight years old, sitting at my desk at school, in México. Our teacher bid us a farewell for her, and the children sang the saddest song I’ve ever heard on this cold earth:—Adiós, Jazmín, que te vaya bien en los Estados Unidos—. I did not sing along. I stared at Jazmín as she held her mother’s hand and retreated, not into the distance, but as if inward, into the deepest and most susceptible part of my memory.

Years later, I wondered why I didn’t sing along. Would it have changed the sound at all? Would it have changed my life? Strangely, the memory I recall with greatest ease is the way I could hear my arteries and veins beat like a dozen hives. My blood’s frantic buzzing, since then, has become the song I sing, alone, for my eternal and lost Jazmín, every day.

When I, too, left the village in which we were born, I thought about the hills covered in emerald cacti and acacia, I thought about the silver water streams that descended from the hazy mountains after heavy rains. No longer would I stand beneath my favorite huizache tree, or run like my goats did in the meadows filled with cinco llagas’ golden hues.

While I was away, I did not yearn to see Jazmín as much as I yearned to be within the house of stone in that fairytale village I was proud of calling home.

But on returning as an adult, I no longer felt the life beneath the world I’d left. As I saw a boy fly a kite, I guessed both the boy and the kite knew where home was, for they only tried to reach the sky. And I remember pining to be rooted as a tree, longing to be the next valley glade for the nightingale or run like water in rivers and streams...raving to be the bread, the very blood flow to keep the memory of Jazmín alive. And I felt lost.

Place, location, that which might be home, is the memory of little Jazmín bending to tie the pink shoelaces on her purple shoes. Then springing up, full of life, full of flight... Her spirit was a song, so that now the birds’ chirping in the morning and the crickets’ evening serenades bring, to me, her soul.

Place, location, as such, has ceased to matter when once it was the only thing my compass sought. I have a mind to change my mind, to revise the visions of my wakeful nights.