Aura LoinardGonzález The Second Time I Lost Her

The Second Time I Lost Her

The first time I met Mariana, I was reminded of a firecracker. She was mesmerizing, tall and tanned, with auburn hair shot through with red highlights, and brown eyes that shone in the sun like copper coins. In her Facebook profile picture, white wisps of water vapor curled out of her half-open mouth and around her face. She was reckless. She danced El Payaso de Rodeo at Dana’s quinceañera party in crimson, five-inch heels. She had a crackling laughter that I could hear from three rooms away. She made jokes during class that teachers at the Colegio Mexicano Valladolid tried to be angry at but could not. Mariana took me under her wing—a sickly-looking fifteen-year-old—after she heard the sarcastic comments I constantly made under my breath. During a study date, in a moment of awe at how this girl managed to be both incredibly smart and ridiculously fun at the same time, I whispered, “Eres una chispa.” Chispa became her nickname. Spark. Soon, her real name grew foreign on my tongue.

The first time she saw me cry I grew so embarrassed that I cried harder. She had informed me she was going to get ice cream, and I joined her despite my best judgement. After all, how could I tell anyone about how, more often than not, the thought of eating made me feel like someone was standing on my chest? I ate two salads and three almonds a day, and anything else sent me flying off the handle. How to admit that every night there was a spectacular showdown of screaming, crying, cajoling, and pleading as my parents tried to get me to eat something, anything? These arguments ended when I agreed to sit down to eat a real meal, but the night actually ended, supervision or threats be damned, with me managing to hide away most of the food, sometimes chewed but always uneaten, and throw it away at school the next day.

Most pertinently, though, how did I tell her all of that? I did not.

By the time I received my gelato—a scoop of sugar-free lemon sorbet—panic had seized me by the throat. My hands were sweating, and as I sat down with Chispa on the cold metal of the outdoor bench I could hear my pulse behind my ears.

“Hey, girl?” Chispa’s voice broke into the inner monologue of my dessert dilemma. “The guy from the ice cream shop? I think he’s looking at us.”

“Hu-What?” I turned around, momentarily distracted. He stood behind the counter, leaning forward, and didn’t bother to conceal his interest even after we made eye contact. “He’s probably looking at you,” I said. It was half compliment and half concern.

She frowned. “Ew,” she declared, loud enough that I was sure he would be within

earshot. I didn’t dare turn around again.

“Let’s move,” I decided, standing up. That would also buy me precious time and allow some of the ice cream to melt.

“Are you scared of him?” she asked. The slightest smirk danced around her face.

“Aren’t you?” I waited for her to stand up, scanned the plaza, and made a beeline for a bench that was safely tucked away behind a tree. He wouldn’t be able to see us from there. “My cousin Lara, she told me once that a guy jerked off next to her on the metro.”

“He’s not gonna pull his dick out! It’s bad business.” “You never know. No one cares what men do anyways.”

Once we’d sat down again, Chispa re-started the conversation: “Do you dig Asian Horror?” she asked.

“Yep!” I said on instinct because it sounded like she dug Asian horror. “There’s a Thai movie from a few years ago called Coming Soon, kind of like the much scarier grandfather of The Ring? I didn’t sleep for two nights after watching it.”

“Sounds cool! Wanna watch it sometime, together?”

“Sure!” I put a morsel of gelato on my tongue and could only swallow it because it wasn’t solid. Chispa’s voice sounded as if it came from really far away.

Concern crept into Chispa’s voice. “Hold on, girl. Are you crying?” “No,” I replied immediately, hiding my eyes behind the crook of my elbow. “Why are you crying?”

I couldn’t say anything for fear that my voice might break. She stayed silent, put her hand on my knee and squeezed lightly. Eventually, I choked out my next few words: “Eating is just—it’s hard. Sometimes.”

Chispa was silent for a few seconds, for the first time looking somber. The warmth slowly returned to her eyes. “Well, of course it is. Lemon sorbet tastes like shit. Here.” I hiccupped out a chuckle as she grabbed the plastic cup from my hands, scraped the sorbet onto the floor, and then transferred some of her ice cream— cookies n’ cream—to my container. “Try this one. Or don’t. I don’t care. The ice cream was just an excuse to spend time with you. Besides, why be embarrassed? Everyone has their thing.”

“What’s your thing?” I asked, momentarily brave.

She smirked, and I knew that her reply would make me laugh even before she started speaking. “I’m too fabulous to have a thing.”

The first time I saw her cry, I was convinced I was witnessing something monumental. She had shown up at my house at 11:30 on a Saturday night, her face puffy and her makeup smeared. The smell of tequila hung around her like a cloud, but I didn’t want to ask if she’d driven tipsy.

We sat on my bed as she tried to recount what had happened to her—one too many drinks, a taxi driver’s “shortcut,” and enough shame to fill the room. She went to wash her hands twice, soaping them up right to the elbow where three fingershaped bruises had formed.

“Do you want to tell someone about this?” I asked her eventually.

“No,” she replied immediately. “They’re gonna say it was my fault. I probably made eyes or something.” With her good hand she tugged at her skirt, stretching the fabric over her exposed thighs.

“But if you didn’t want him to—like, he’s a taxi driver, he can’t do that on the job…”

“Besides, he didn’t do anything. He just… he just grabbed me. And then he tried to grab me somewhere else. But I left and walked the rest of the way here before he really did anything. And I—I kicked him to get out of the car. I didn’t even pay him. So technically it was me who did something bad. So I can’t say anything.”

I was quiet for a long time, grasping at the situation, trying to find words. “I don’t—I don’t think that it’s bad that you hit him, if it was self-defense?”

“But he didn’t do anything!” she said again, raising her voice. I got the impression that she was trying to convince herself more than me. Anger bubbled up in my stomach—I wanted to hit whoever had done this, punch him across the jaw with the keys that I kept wedged between my fingers whenever I was out on the street.

She forced out a laugh. “Look at me, being such a dramatic bitch!” she exclaimed. “I almost look like something bad happened.” She bit her lip. After another second, she said, “Do you mind if I take a shower here?”

Without waiting for a response, she went into the bathroom and locked the door. She stayed there for so long she used up all the hot water.

The first time we kissed, she tasted like citrus. We were sitting on the steps of her porch; she was eating oranges, and I was cradling a lukewarm mug of green tea. Her laughter filled the air between us, crackling like an invisible symphony of castañuelas. I could not stop looking at her mouth. I was mimicking accents for her amusement: our math teacher who had moved to Mexico from Venezuela, the kid in class who had a lisp, my little brother who couldn’t quite speak yet.

In reaction to a particularly well-executed impression, Chispa threw her head backwards and roared with laughter. I was smiling so widely it hurt my cheeks. God, I really wanted to kiss her. The unbidden, out-of-place thought threw me off almost enough to make me stop smiling and turn away, but then she brought her head forwards, still laughing, and I caught her mouth with mine. We both drew back with a sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry,” I blurted out. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“Relax, girl, it’s okay.” Her hand was on my knee. My hands, still clinging on to the mug, were shaking. Finally, she snorted, breaking the electric silence that had befallen us. “That was gay.”

Gay was a derisive word. People at our school used it as an insult. Chispa didn’t sound like she was angry or offended, though: just bemused. “Yeah,” I agreed. I bit my tongue, so I wouldn’t apologize again.

She gave me a quizzical look. “Are you—” “No.” I cut her off with a snort. “Of course not.”

My parents yelled at me all the time, but I still was not prepared for the first time Chispa and I fought.

She had come to my place for breakfast—we made French toast, and I proudly managed a half of a piece. After shoveling three pieces into her mouth, Chispa now sat with her head between her hands, clearly hungover. “Chispa?”

“Yuh?”

“Do you think it maybe would be better if you… drank a little less? And went to parties less?” She raised an eyebrow at me, but I pushed ahead before I could hesitate. “I—Something already happened. And you—you always get paranoid when you go because you’re scared someone will grab you, but you still get drunk. And I think that might not be a good idea? Maybe?”

She put her fork down and sat up very straight. “Are you judging me?” “N-No.” A knot tied itself neatly in my throat. “I’m just concerned.” “Nothing happened, so I have no reason to be scared. I refuse to be scared.”

I had no idea how to say what I thought. I had no idea what I thought. “I think there’s something wrong—”

She exploded. “With me? With me,” she snarled. “You’re sitting there in clothes four sizes too big, you have acid burns on your fingers from shoving them down your throat, you can’t eat half a meal without having a crisis, and there’s something wrong

with me.” “Get out.” I heard my mom’s voice, angry and commanding. I turned around to see her standing in the living room. “Leave my daughter alone, and get out of my house.”

Chispa stood up with a huff, grabbed her purse and her sunglasses, and walked out, slamming the door behind her. My mom said nothing more.

“Thank you,” I whispered into the echo of Chispa’s anger, looking miserably at my mom.

“She’s right, you know.” My mom starting walking back upstairs. “Well then why did you say anything?” I asked, bitterness sour in my mouth.

She stopped for a second, then continued walking. Her voice grew fainter as she reached the second floor. “Because she wasn’t saying it out of love.” Another pause. “Make sure you wash the dishes.”

I sat for a few minutes with my forehead on my hands, and I didn’t realize I was crying until the first few tears fell, petering softly against my empty plate.

The first time I took my clothes off in front of her, I expected Chispa to recoil at the sight of me. “I’m sorry about...this.”

“Wha’?” She lifted her mouth from my neck.

I made a vague gesture towards my bony body and the hair that covered my back and stomach.

“Girl!” Chispa laughed. “Do you think I would have gotten you naked if I didn’t want to see you?”

I burrowed deeper under the covers to escape the perpetual cold that hung around me like some kind of useless coat. “I guess not.”

“Exactly.” She trailed her finger down my stomach and navel. “You’re super cute. You’re funny, and you’re so pretty, and I really like you.” She bent her head down to kiss me, and I held her face between my hands. Her hair wound around the tips of my fingers. When she pulled back, she bit her lip. “I’m sorry about what I said last week, about there being something wrong with you. I just...wish you were a little healthier.”

Something defensive inside of me reared: You’re healthy enough. If anything, you should be smaller. With an effort that felt almost physical, I pushed it down and forced myself to think with the shriveled, rational part of myself. “It’s okay,” I whispered finally. I realized my mother had been wrong, possibly because she could not hear herself when she berated me for being too skinny, and did not realize she sounded the same as Chispa: “You were saying it out of love.”

Chispa leaned down to kiss me again. “I was,” she whispered against my mouth. Her breath smelled warm and sweet.

Afterwards, I lay with my head on her chest. “Maybe we are marimachas,” I whispered. I wondered if our language had any words for what we were that didn’t sound like slurs.

“Yeah, maybe we are,” Chispa mused. “It ain’t that bad, huh?” I rolled my eyes; “I guess not.”

She was serious for a moment. “My mom would never let me talk to you again if she knew. You know how religious she is.”

I looked at her and smiled: “You mean all the crucifixes on the living room wall aren’t just decorations? Here I thought she was just into baroque art.” She smacked me playfully. “People at school are also saying things.”

“Fuck the people at school,” she snorted. “I just want to make sure I don’t have to stop seeing you.” After a pause she continued, though. “We probably still shouldn’t say or do anything at school, though.”

I felt really heavy all of a sudden. It was different than my heaviness, though, how I would carry all sensation in my midriff and my limbs. This one weighed on my chest and the corners of my mouth.

When fireworks fade, they leave behind spider-like webs of smoke. In the days after the first time I lost Chispa, as the reality of her disappearance set in, I felt like those grey phantoms, like a macabre negative of my girlfriend’s light. Pieces of me were drifting away like smoke tendrils. I went to her place once—as if to make sure that she was gone—and sat with her mother as she cried. I wandered into her room, and when the scent of Fatale Pink perfume, the cigarettes she pretended she didn’t smoke, and the musky smell of her skin under her clothes cloyed my nose, I felt my stomach turn. Looking at her empty room and the thin sheet of dust over her bed, smelling her without having her there—it felt like a violation. I walked out of the room and stumbled down to the living room, but the crucifixes’ tortured grimaces seemed to mock me and the thought of God offered no comfort. Man shall not lie with man, for it is an abomination. I left the house.

The police asked me a half-dozen, half-assed questions: Was she out on a party? What was she wearing? Did she drink? Did she have a lot of boyfriends? No? I was left humiliated and angry on her behalf; I wanted to spit at their faces. For the first time in years, I found myself lamenting that I was so small and fragile.

As days turned to weeks, I started having panic attacks. If someone didn’t immediately answer the phone, I was swallowed by an anxiety so intense, my hands and feet went numb. I threw up everywhere, all the time, both intentionally and not. For a month I refreshed my social media obsessively, and I refused to sit away from any landline at my house. I lost my peripheral vision, and clumps of my hair started falling out. I lay on my bed most of the time, wishing the mattress would swallow me; I would bury my face in my pillow, hoping to fall asleep and suffocate, but I couldn’t commit and always came up for air. I lost twenty pounds and had a seizure one morning when I stood up from my bed. I spent a week admitted at a hospital with a feeding tube down my nose that scratched my throat and stung when I cried, which was all the time.

The second time I lost her, the knot that had been tightening inside my chest for 37 days unraveled.

I knew almost as soon as my dad called me downstairs, his voice constricted and heavy and soft. “Cielo?”

That was enough to send my heart galloping. “Yes.” “Come downstairs.” “Am I in trouble?” I hadn’t hidden away any food that day. “Come downstairs.” My mom’s face was ashen, and my father’s eyes bloodshot. “Yes?” “They found Chispa.” I already knew the answer to my next question: “Alive?”

She sighed, and he drew in a breath. In the end, it was me who spoke. “Did it hurt?” Still nothing. I barely had enough energy to raise my voice. “Did she die in pain?”

The truth was in my dad’s eyes, clear as sorrow. “No.”

I wanted to call him out, tell him that I knew he was lying, but I could not even speak. Ears ringing and with my vision so narrow I tripped twice, I ran up the stairs. Once in my room, I threw up on the bed and then wailed. The noise was so horrible, so nearly inhuman, I did not recognize it as myself. I couldn’t get myself to shut up, not even when my parents and my brother came upstairs and all hugged me at once, as if they could physically hold me together, keep me from falling apart.

I cried for weeks, with a few breaks to drink Ensure liquid meals. I had nightmares for three months. At school the rumor mill was merciless: she’d been meeting a lover, she’d cheated on a boyfriend, she’d gotten too drunk at a party. Those who pointed

out that she’d never had boyfriends—that, if anything, she spent a suspicious amount of time with girls, with me—pushed the story that she was a marimacha, and that she’d been killed leaving a gay bar. Whatever the details, ‘Slut’ was written in the death certificate in bold, scarlet letters. To avoid the whispers, I missed so many days of school that I had to test into the eleventh grade at the end of the year. It was only months later that I had the courage to ask, and my mom had the courage to answer. I learned what I had already suspected—that she had been assaulted, raped, tortured, and discarded and that she had died from shock. She’d been found near a water processing plant. “What was she doing?” I asked my mom, “When whoever did this grabbed her?”

“She’d gone to the store to buy colored paper. For some kind of school project. It was the middle of the day.” Her chin shook. “I’m sorry I was mean to her, Cielo, I really am. She was a sweet girl. And I know how much you loved her.”

The world became perpetually tinged with Chispa’s afterimage, and on my worst days I still felt like the smoke that sparks leave behind in the night, a darkness that cannot quite blend into the black behind it. My illness should have killed me before I turned eighteen, and all she did was be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yet I was still standing, and she was not. I could never shake the horror of that fact or the scream that it lodged in my throat.

The fistful of pink glitter slammed into the sidewalk at my feet and bellowed upward around my shins. Next to me, a young woman with a green bandana around the lower half of her face held up a picture of José Luis Castillo at the Brillantada. No Me Olviden, Falto Yo was printed in bold letters, white over pink, across his handmade, plastic smock. Don’t forget me, I’m still missing. In front of me, a woman with a megaphone was pushing through tears to get her words out: “¿Cómo chingados no voy a estar enojada? ¡Lo quiero quemar todo! ¡Me mataron a mi hija!” I want to burn it all. They killed my daughter. I was surrounded by handmade signs: Qué ganas de ser pared, para que te indignes si me tocan sin permiso. ¿Amiga, llegaste? Vivas nos queremos. Ni una menos. With my right hand I clutched Silvia’s wrist to keep the throng of people from separating us, and with my left I was holding up a slab of cardboard with a list sharpie’d on it.

Unable to come up with a punny or sassy quote, I had bulleted all the firsts that Chispa hadn’t gotten to have: She didn’t graduate high school. She didn’t get to build a career or even decide what she wanted to study. She never went to Greece or Paris

or anywhere outside of Mexico. She never wore a wedding dress or held an infant to her breast.

I hadn’t written down the list I was really thinking of, though: the list of all the firsts that I had without my Chispa and couldn’t share with her. How one July morning I woke up and realized that I was starving. How I went to parties in skimpy outfits and got so drunk I couldn’t walk, so high my friend needed two strangers’ help to walk me home, so crossed my male coworker gave me a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and exiled himself to the couch to let me sleep in his bed. How every morning after those irresponsible decisions and self-medicated nights I woke up, with a leaden head but alive and unassaulted, and felt guilt and gratitude and grief. How I gained weight and moved away and fell in love again, with girls who reminded me of Chispa and girls who didn’t.

Standing in that sea of anger and green bandanas, I felt my eyes begin to sting. There was pink glitter and red smoke everywhere, permeating the air like the fiery ashes. Throwing my head back, I imagined they were sparks. Everything here reminded me of Chispa: the colors, the noise, the outfits, the chaos. The shining pink sparkles and crimson-colored smoke. Her attitude shone through the choreographed Un violador en tu camino dance and the palpable anger and determination in people’s movements. How we were all out here, mourning her and others like her, screaming for justice. Looking at the grief etched in all the faces around me, her loss became fresh again.

“Are you crying?” I heard Silvia speak next to me.

I turned to her, wiped my cheek with the green bandana I had wrapped around my own neck. “Yes.”

“Do you wanna, like, leave, for a bit?

I smiled. “Yes, actually.” I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack to take a drink, then handed it to Silvia. She took a swig from the metallic, blue bottle and handed it back to me. “Do you want to go to a café or something? I want something with sugar.”

After detangling ourselves from the crowd, we walked down the cobbled city center streets. As we were waiting for the green light to cross, I heard a rustling from somewhere below me—then looked down to see a man crouching down to look up from under Silvia’s skirt.

“What the fuck!” Without really thinking about what I was doing, I slammed the half-full bottle over his head. The metallic clang elicited a groan and a thud as he clutched his head and fell to his hands and knees.

“Oh my God, Natalia!” Silvia let out a nervous laugh.

I grabbed her by the wrist and started crossing the street before he could get up. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, my God,” she said again. “I cannot believe you just did that.”

We got to the café, then moved to the gelato shop next door instead because— probably because of how many people were attending the demonstration—they were out of almost everything. “Let me buy you ice cream!” Silvia told me. “You just punched a bitch for me.”

I laughed, clutched the bottle in both hands to hide that they were shaking. There was a rust-colored stain on its lower edge. “Okay.”

“What flavor do you want?” I didn’t even look at what they had before speaking. “Cookies ‘n Cream.”

This piece is dedicated to all the women and girls that Mexico has loved and lost.

Aura Loinard-González Cornell University, ’21