Dispatches: A zombie is a traveler
Why am I here? I hate it here.
Money is running low, but I buy my plane ticket to DC anyway, a super-saver fare on Avianca that only allows me one backpack and routes me through San Salvador before shoving me back up, past Mexico, into the lands where I was born. The whole trip from my house in Oaxaca takes over 24 hours. The plane is freezing, the leg room penitent, and I can’t fall asleep because every time I start to relax I feel a pressure like an electrical current rolling through the lower half of my body and it makes me jerk and smash my knees on the seat in front of me. I arrive in Dulles with dark plums beneath my eyes, soft and ripe, which no amount of caffeinated under-eye cream can wither. My KN95 feels like it’s crawled into my air passages, and my ears are about ready to quit my head in protest. Why am I here? I hate it here.
I’m going to meet my new niece. That’s important. I want my niece and nephew to at least recognize their Aunt Alaya. I’m going to see my mom and my aunt. That matters, even though it’s always hard with them, because they live with my father and I don’t talk to him any more. But the real reason I bought those tickets I couldn’t afford was because my best friend’s mother has cancer, and the prognosis isn’t good.
I arrive at their house as the sun is peeking over the browning leaves of trees lost between summer and autumn. I sit on their porch, lie down on my backpack, and wait for someone in the house to wake up. I am too early, but this miscommunication is so reminiscent of my adolescence it almost feels comforting. I have never belonged, but I have always been welcome.
They say that you can’t outrun your memories, that changing your place doesn’t change who you are, but that hasn’t been my experience. Sitting on this street where I felt safest growing up, I feel as though I am inhabiting an older version of myself, the one who is spiky and loud and full of fearful secrets. Lying there, watching the joggers and dog-walkers determinedly avoid eye contact, I remember her mom’s chocolate chip cookies. She must have made them several times a week, considering how that cookie jar was always full and how I always took them out two at a time. I remember the orange juice in the fridge, which no one drank but me, and the cheddar cheese, neither of which I questioned until I was much older. Her mother always made sure they had the food I liked.
(This brings out another memory, of how after I left home, when I had started to pull away, my dad started to buy orange juice during my visits and tell me loudly how he had made sure they had it because he knew I loved it. By then I’d stopped my orange juice habit entirely, but I just smiled weakly and made sure to pour myself a glass before his avid gaze.)
Eventually, her father wakes up and gives me the keys to the house across the street, donated by their kind neighbor on vacation in Europe. I take a covid test and spend the day by myself. I can’t see my sister yet because everyone is sick at their house—her oldest just started pre-school. I don’t know how I feel about being back, but in a different space, inside but outside, cared for but other. I don’t know how I feel about it because it’s always been this way. My father thought I belonged to him, and all I knew—all I know—is that I’d rather have no one than have that.
Something scares me about these old streets with these familiar people. The whiteness of them. The careless affluence. The Giant is a block from where it used to be, but the food is four times as expensive. Every label is a memory, or a pointed sign saying how little I belong. On my way out, I hear the Black cashiers joking in the accents of my childhood and something in me eases. I don’t have a place here, but at least I can remember who I am.
The national alert system test turns my phone into an unholy screamer that afternoon. I could almost believe I’m turning into a zombie like the conspiracy theorists say, but I don’t—or at least, not any more of one than I already am, shambling, sleepless, through streets that cannot understand how and why I’ve changed. Can a place be a disease? A family a wound? I’m like a convalescent, cured, but weak and haunted.
I don’t know what I’m doing here, except my friend asked me, and I came. There is too much love between us, too much debt, too many memories of that ivy-covered colonial, and the mother who seemed to me impossible, someone so full of protection that she gave it even to a changeling child, ill-grown and hurting.
The next day we have dinner together. I make Swiss chard with parmesan. She eats a little. We talk—I tell stories of Mexico, of my dogs, of my lost goats. I make everything funny. I feel as though I’m performing, but not in a false way. I want to make her remember, to give her a gift, perhaps, of the memory of how I used to be, contrasted with how I am now. I want her to know: what you did for me mattered. I survived in part because of you. I don’t know why. I only know that you were there. Even though I never said anything, in some way, you understood. You were there. I see you now. Thank you.
Hey friends, it’s been a while! Welcome new subscribers and hello again old friends. With this newsletter, I am announcing the rebirth of A Stranger Comes Home. First, the good news: I am going to be publishing one essay a week, mostly dispatches from my life like this one, alternating with more meditative pieces about the recovery from trauma, or maybe literature or philosophy or something else that’s caught my interest. Now, the caveat: I am officially making this newsletter partially paid subscriber-only. For now, two posts a month will be free to all, and two posts will be paid subscriber-only. So if you want to remain a free reader, you’ll still get more content than I’ve posted here for a while, but I hope that you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber if you have the means.
Why? Well, like so many of us in the current hellscape, I’ve been struggling financially. And because the majority of my income comes from my writing, financial struggles imply professional ones. I love The Library of Broken Worlds with all my heart, but the simple fact is that it hasn’t done nearly as well as I had hoped that it would. The current YA market is so different from the one that I published The Summer Prince and Love Is the Drug into that I don’t even recognize it anymore. The squeeze from right-wing censorship in schools and libraries has devastated the genre. I am working on how to change my career to be viable in the current moment, but let’s be honest—book writing and publishing is slow, and me and my dogs need to eat at least twice a day. So to bridge that gap, I’ve decided to invest in my non-fiction writing here on Substack. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I have no idea if it will help to keep food on my table while I’m writing my next novel. But I know that I have to try.
So this is my appeal to you: If you like my writing, if you think that my voice is one you’d like to continue to see on bookshelves, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. In return, I promise to be genuine, to tell you about my life here in Mexico, and to be honest about the often painful but also joyful process of recovery from trauma. I find most social media emotionally exhausting because I feel this pressure to conform to a certain style. Here, I hope, I can allow my own voice to flourish with a group of like-minded readers. This will be a journey, and I hope you’ll come along.
If you can’t commit right now, but would like to support me in another way, buying one of my novels or my short story collection, would be a huge help. Thank you!
Absolutely love this!