Mareada

Te vas sola
al parque central. Buscando desmayarte, allí
entre los árboles ingleses y las piedras
por alguna razón que ni tu 
entiendes bien.

Mi abuela se fue del mundo un par de días después, estaba malita. 

I was mapping the activity in my brain, chasing synapses maybe. Like passing my hand over a flame to understand a volcano. 

I google near-death experiences, prone to believe the ones that describe it as routine. Like falling asleep. 

When I drive I think about the passage of time. I think lots about how it feels to think something won't happen for a long while, but then there it is happening. The temporal distance turns out to be no distance at all; the wait, no matter how long, is always nothing. Time the mother, time the story, time the amniotic vertigo.

If nobody is ever really gone, as they say, then perhaps nobody has ever really been here. Maybe we’ve never been anywhere, maybe time has never passed. 

When I started writing this book it was different. But as writing went on, and as pages were added, death was eventually braided in. It is true that I was rolling my abuela’s hair in melon-colored velcro curlers in 1998, but it’s also true that immediately after, I wrote this book. Immediately after, she died. I started the car, drove, then arrived. Just as “empty space” is a myth, so too is the alleged empty space between temporal markers. 

Here we aren’t. 

One can be as alive as dead. But what a heavy word, dead. Not especially better, but different, is muerta. Perhaps it’s worse; a troubling evocation of morder, and a macabre little rhyme with puerta. 

Isla Margarita is 25 miles north of the Venezuelan mainland, in the south Caribbean. My family took a ferry from Puerto La Cruz. I had just read Island of the Blue Dolphins for my fifth grade class, and this coincided with my first dolphin sighting; they chased us all the way there. At the beach, my great aunt Carmen told us we could find pink pearls on the strand line.

My grandmother was fine. We talked about how at eighty-seven she was this and that and irascible but in an endearing way, alive though in a garbled way. She was mean, but in a manner we all learned to flatten into character. Then one day she fell, and then I don’t know? The day came back to me, in 2001, at the front gate of her house, when I said goodbye and scrubbed the intrusive thoughts about never seeing her again, because the government was getting stricter, because whatever, because because. 

It isn’t that I don’t understand how things work. How an eighty-seven year old woman falls and something breaks, unlocking death, what was formerly kept aside like a rolled up rug or a plastic covered chair. 

It’s that we couldn’t see her. We couldn’t sit in the Valencia heat, swatting mosquitoes, hearing ice cream bells in the distance, wearing white, gazing at the mountains. 

Bueno. En fin, I signed up for neurofeedback sessions with Behavioral Associates. They shipped a device, instructing me to fasten it to the parietal ridge of my head and connect it wirelessly to my phone. “Mindlyft” was the name for the training sessions meant to condition the brain to gradually adapt to specific presets based on the intended outcome. I am anxious, so my programming was set to increase beta waves and decrease thetas. Or maybe it was the other way around. 

I tried talking to my abuela over the phone but she didn’t completely know it was me. I felt that she knew it was me in her peripheral dreams, but she never said my name, she echoed what the neighbor told her to say, she hummed. 

I crouched listening, a periscope with a foggy viewfinder. Just as I was nearly finished writing, she vanished, taking her things with her. 

Look at how the moon faces us, shines on us, quieter than the sun. 

We don’t even know how the moon happened (do we?) We don’t know if it was once part of earth, or if it fell into our arms.

Connie Mae Concepción Oliver is a poet and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book of poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me (Operating System, 2017) is about nuclear disarmament. Her second book, Science Fiction Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is an homage to Miami-Dade County and color photography in the early aughts. The piece featured in this issue is from her third collection of poems, dormilona, which is forthcoming in 2025 from Burrow Press.