Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

There’s something about the faces of everyone in my family and in mine. I think you can see in our eyes the kind of sadness, which is in two places at once—mourning the past, grieving the future. Sad in a historically significant and visually satisfying way. Looking sad like it’s your job.

I was just a girl. That part, the fact of my being just a girl, is something my grandmother never forgot and my grandfather seldom remembered.

she scolded me and arrived with a sweater or blanket, saying I needed to dress more modestly around my grandfather because even grandfathers are men.

You can kill things by asking about them, but not by thinking about them.

It was my first time seeing white people dance outside of television and for what it’s worth I thought it was very brave.

The problem with being an object of beauty, a beautiful object, is that you exist only when you’re looked at and thus to remain alive you must be constantly looked at, the way some sharks need to be in motion to breathe. It feels like soul death when their eyes are off you.

I could not remember a time when I did not want to die. But now I no longer felt like dying. The worst had happened, and here we were.