By Heymy Patiño Martínez
While in México, my mother sent my father photo booth photographs. Of us. Of her. Border separation, steel fenced. Erected, engineered to digitize the family. In school kids tell us we are weird. Not because we are, but because we are fatherless. Left. Alone. No head of household.
I was born truly incomplete, a hole in the chest, or what medical experts prefer to call an
atrial septal defect—promoting a fistfull of things like yearly visits to a specialist and irregular heart beats; murmur; mur; murmur. Hot, wishful protests; murmur; mur; murmur.
A real biological, ancestral wisdom calling to the next unit awaiting rupture. Before I could, my hummingbird heart, fitfully whispered: there’s something to be missed, lamented, longed for.
Explain to me the ways in which femininity hardens or rather becomes as perfect as ceramic glaze. A classic story of fathers going missing to fetch a mistress, a job, a pint of milk, a vice eighty thousand miles away from their own. Like they desire and follow anything but their own.
I follow my heart. The dutiful whisper that never goes away, that only gets louder with time.
Explain to me the ways in which a hole seals and no longer necessitates the aid of an educated cardiologist. A classic story of integrity, of regenerative prowess. A generation’s aching desire to corrode red gates and red walls and red lining; paint thinner; revealing the fruits of unified effort.
The mending of a broken heart, the mending of aching distance, the mending of policy choices.
My mother’s mother died of mystery heart problems. A woman labeled too tempermental to live,
yet, she lived. Milky, fair. Sill-pulsed perspiring palms: whiteness of the melanated. Believe,
During my loneliest moments. I studied those surfaces. Creases, lifelines a psychic would one day read. They reveal M’s for matriarchs and mountains. They reveal bumpy trails, rios bravos, asymmetrical totality; erased stories of heartly border crossings; stories of incomplete homes.
Heymy Patiño Martínez is a Mexican writer and educator based in Chicago. Currently, she is an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additionally, she is pursuing a degree in English Education.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 