When Javier’s fingers run along my spine, I hear the sea outside my childhood home. His rhythm is consistent, matching the waves that crash against the rocks from beyond our garden, over the cliff. There, my grandfather is kneeling, pruning blood red carnations. The thickened skin of his palms protect the soft swollen flesh underneath. In this memory, in this time, I’m in the dirt with him. I’m a preteen, hanging on every word that slips from his mouth. I’m convinced that every phrase holds a secret, some guidance, some answer, some gem of truth.  

This happens often when I’m with Javier. I teleport. I can transfer myself back to my grandfather’s house in Valencia. The reddish-brown terracotta tattooed into my memory, a palette of the past, retaining both legacy and sunlight. His quietly-spoken Spanish has a trance-like effect, hypnotic, easing me back to my ancestors. They are always in the kitchen, talking, a tableau moving in slow motion of all the moments that have come before me and in turn led to me. Maybe that’s why I’m still in this, still here with Javier. Though he has never seen it, he has been a vehicle to this specific landscape. 

 I’ve tried to tell him a few times that I wasn’t made to be confined to city square footage. I’ve been hanging in, though. That could be my motto. It would be more accurate as “I’ve been hanging in, but frequently at work when I get someone’s coffee order wrong, I come to five minutes later drenched in sweat, because sometimes my body shuts down for no fucking reason and the sublingual micro chalk medicine that the sceptical doc gave me isn’t strong enough.” But I think that’s a little too long for mottos, right?  

I do have Jessica. We lie on her cold concrete roof and glare at the midnight sky’s lack of stars. We suck in tightly rolled pollution sticks and chug back low-cal seltzers. She does most of the talking, tells me her father’s sick and that she’ll have to spend her summers back home driving him to his appointments. She smiles when she tells me, and I know there is so much more. But I’ve learned with Jessica that if I pry, I’ll get a perfectly wrapped lie anyway. 

When it’s my turn to talk, she listens. She listens well. She knows there’s just enough fresh air up here for the two of us. I’m afraid to share my suffering. That word, those feelings, she has a better claim to them. 

“Jessica,” I ask quietly. “Why did you come here?” 

“You’ve seen the trash I’m from. Since five I knew I had to get the fuck outta there.” 

“Why here?” 

“Here’s the only school I got accepted to.” She says without an inkling of shame.

I didn’t get it. Jessica brought me to Chattanooga the summer we met. It was something to do. I met her family. There was so much of it. I’d never been to the South. The warnings seemed foolish after the third sweaty bear hug I’d received from cousins or uncles or friends of the family or the guys who were working across the street and caught a whiff of the ribs slow cooking when the wind shifted. Later that night, Jessica’s grandmother asked me to walk the river with her. She said she’d been doing this walk since she was fifteen, with boyfriends and girlfriends, some that were still here and some that were gone. She pointed out where she had her first kiss, how she told her father instead of her mother because he was better at accepting certain things. She had hints of Jessica, or I guess Jessica had hints of her. Conviction. The ability to make it all look good. I remember wishing I had that. Like with Jessica, there were moments I wish I could have asked her grandmother a little more.  

She held my hand for the duration of the walk. I felt safe and home, or how home should feel. Before we returned to the cookout, she asked me how her granddaughter was doing. I told her that I didn’t always know but she was always smiling. She pulled me in closer, so that now I could see the beautiful ash grey of her cataracts. “It can be a front, you know,” she whispered, her look intensifying. Her grasp, the heat, the warmth, the food, those eyes, filled me all at once and I let it all spill out. She held me sturdy in place while I became the river. I told her that I missed Valencia, and that her granddaughter was my best friend, my only lifeline, and the one I’d be leaving behind. 

I tell Jessica my plan. She kisses me between my neck and jawline. It’s somewhere between devastatingly romantic and childish. It makes me wonder why I had never truly asked for her secret, her gem of truth, the hidden world where maybe we would have existed.  

The week before I leave, Javier and I go for tapas at our favorite place. We split a bottle of Cava much lighter and crisper than the occasion calls for. He hears me order in Spanish and though his expression bubbles up at first, a wave of conflicting feelings wash over him with the sudden realisation. After dinner he rushes us to his. There’s now immediacy to his actions, almost desperation. 

When his hands grip harder, I think of Jessica’s soft ones. I replace his saddened gaze and tight jaw with her always smile. When his plea is over, he passes out on me, entangled limbs like grafted vine. I kiss him as if he were her, somewhere in the hidden space between here and home.