Cleaning out the attic of my childhood home, I come upon photographs, black and white, faded and worn. Boys and girls with dour faces, men with moustaches and stern eyes, frowning brides in heavy dresses, poised for the endurance test to come. When I ask my father who they are, he says he doesn’t know. “Forgetting is inevitable,” he affirms. It is how it’s meant to be. I disagree. We deserve to outlive ourselves, at least for one hundred years. We deserve to have someone remember us, just as I want to remember this girl in a rose garden with a white dress and parasol, these wrinkle-faced boys in baseball uniforms, this gathering of young and old for a family picnic – men with names like Edward and Stan, women called Stella or Teresa, people who barely smiled and rarely embraced. The men worked in the steel mills or in breweries that gave free samples, then went home to collapse on a couch; the women ironed sheets and pillowcases, dressed their daughters in matching yellow skirts for Mass on Sunday morning. I want to hear the story of the distant cousin who got a letter from her high school suitor who’d become a sailor, who left spouse and child to seek his fortune and never made it home. I want to hear the story of the great-great-aunt who left her date on prom night, ran away to join the Felician sisters, sat giggling behind the convent door while her boyfriend and father knocked and knocked, knowing the home she yearned for was the women who lived within that dark wood. I’d like to hear more about my great-grandmother raising ten children and one grandchild as a widow. I want to know if she ever dreamed of putting on a red dress and sneaking out to dance at the parties in the fire hall. I want to know how people lived their whole lives without ever leaving the confines of ten city blocks, how they were village sorcerers and wise women and fools. The stories, lost when they died, course through my blood, waiting with so much urgency to be told, rising up through my throat in a voice not my own.


“You’ll be okay relearning the name of the ruin.” – Lucía Estrada, trans. Olivia Lott