Family Lore

by Elizabeth Acevedo

have known death since before I was born, but I had not truly known life until I gave it to you.

How do you learn to live with what will not be? How do you console yourself with the life that you have when the humans you love most are hopeful for more than you?

They’d always worried about the other being alone.

“This is how you heal, niña. You are thoughtful about what you offer yourself; you study what you put out.”

How do lineages of women from colonized places, where emphasis is put on silent enduring, learn when and where to confide in their own family if forbearance is the only attitude elevated and modeled?)

Because this woman who wanted to protect me so much had let her care braid itself into a vise around my throat. I could not be a woman in her home.

This life required so many choices. So many little and big choices to plod to the next moment, and who knew if any of it mattered? They were all each other’s spectacle and then they died.

have no idea. Were we taught to feel in words?”

the heart is a burial ground for memories that shame and hurt. You can visit and place flowers there and make it a tomb. Or let those things act as fertilizer and pay no homage.”