The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

She is happy. And me? I have never been this happy. I keep that memory somewhere inside me—​where it’s safe. I take it out and look at it when I need to. As if it were a photograph.

So what if sometimes Sam was an emotional exhibitionist, going up and down all the time? She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room. So what if she made me a little crazy? All of it—​all her emotional stuff, her ever-changing moods and tones of voice—​it made her seem so incredibly alive.

“Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.”

Dad always said that there was nothing wrong with crying and that if people did more of it, well then, the world would be a better place.

But we have to find a way to discipline our hearts so that their cruelty doesn’t turn us into hurt animals.

But you just have to learn to walk away from wild people who like to growl. They might bite. They might hurt you. Don’t go down that road.”

Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can’t pretend it isn’t there.

Dad told me once that we have to be very careful with words. “They can hurt people,” he said. “And they can heal people.”

we are what we remember.

I let him be. Sometimes you have to let people have their own space—​even when you are in the same room with them.

And I didn’t know how to tell her that I wasn’t all those beautiful things she thought I was. That things were changing, and I could feel it but couldn’t put it into words.

Fito’s heart should have been broken. But it wasn’t. And even though there were times when he texted me and told me that life sucked, I knew he didn’t believe it. It’s just that life hurt him sometimes. I guess life hurt everybody.

Everybody doesn’t love in the same way, Salvie. And just because she doesn’t love Sam the way you or I would like her to doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her daughter.

told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”

“He should have become a writer.” “Why didn’t he?” “He said there were too many words in the world already.”

I wanted to hold on to her and never let go. But I was going to have to let go. And that hurt. Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart? What was it with my heart? I wondered if there was a way to keep her in this world forever. And it was as though she were reading my mind. “No one is meant to live forever,”

there’s one thing they knew how to do, it was laugh. My dad called that sort of behavior whistling in the dark. Well, I guess that when you found yourself in the dark, you might as well whistle. It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.

What if prayer disappeared from the world? Would the world still be okay? Not that the world was so okay. The real world wasn’t my father’s world. The real world believed in fists and guns and violence and war. And I was beginning to think I was a bigger part of the real world than I cared to admit.

“What would happen if prayers disappeared from the world?” “That’s an easy one,” he said. “The world would disappear too.”

And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?

it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.”

“I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is. And we’re not like letters—”

Before I nodded off, I thought about what my dad had said—​that life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things. But he wasn’t right about that. See, my dad said intelligent and beautiful things. And he was real. He was the most real thing in the entire world. So why couldn’t I be like him?

just because my love isn’t perfect doesn’t mean i don’t love you.

And somehow, because she was all over the map, it helped me not be all over the map. That didn’t make sense, but me and Sam, what we had, well, it had a logic all its own.

“Your father knows how to give. But sometimes he needs someone to give him something too.”

What I wanted to tell her was that I didn’t care about sin or about God. I wanted to tell her that God was just a beautiful idea and I didn’t care about beautiful ideas and that He was just a word I hadn’t run into yet, hadn’t met yet, and so He was still a stranger. I wanted to tell her that she was real, and she was so much more beautiful than an idea.

I guess there are times of quiet beauty in life.

‘Every time I look into your blue eyes. Every time I hear you laugh. Every day, when I hear your voice, I thank God for you. Yeah, Salvador, I believe in God.’”

If I were a poet I would write a poem that would make the oceans clean again. I would write a poem so pure that it would rain for days and when the skies were clear again, a million stars would fill the summer night. I would write a poem to make the people see guns are guns and unworthy of our love. I would write a poem to make all the bullets disappear.

There were different kinds of silences between us. Sometimes the silences meant that we knew each other so well that we didn’t need words. Sometimes the silences meant that we were mad at each other. And sometimes the silences meant that we didn’t know each other at all.

Seeing someone. Really seeing someone. That’s love.”

I wondered if that’s what death sounded like. Like a snowflake falling on the ground.

‘Some people are born on third base, and they go through life thinking they hit a triple.’”

A guy like you was born in the locker room, no one ever pointed you in the direction of the baseball diamond, and somehow you managed to get yourself into the dugout. And something in you just doesn’t believe he belongs in the game. But you do, you do belong in the game. One of these days you’re going to be up at bat. And you’re going to hit it out of the ballpark.

“If there’s no heaven, I don’t really care. Maybe people are heaven, Dad. Some people, anyway. You and Sam and Fito. Maybe you’re all heaven. Maybe everyone’s heaven, and we just don’t know it.”

I wondered if drinking double chocolate mochas at nine thirty at night was related to that whistling-in-the-dark thing.

She always called me hijito de me vida. Little son of my life. It didn’t have the same ring to it in English. Sometimes things just don’t translate. Maybe that’s why there were so many misunderstandings in the world.

In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving toward me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I’m not afraid.

Now I knew why people said things like I’ll take that to the grave. I had always assumed it was a bad thing. Just then I realized that it could sometimes be a good thing. And not just a good thing, but a great thing.

I turned the page, and she smiled. It was a picture of the day when we built the human pyramid in my backyard, and I was at the top. The caption read: One day, all these Mexicans built a pyramid to the Sun. “You were my pyramid,” she whispered. “All of you.”

Mima was like the tree. In this desert where I’d grown up, Mima had shaded me from the sun. She was a tree. How would I live without that tree?

Sam was the most beautiful woman in the room. No one else even came close.

“Grief is a terrible and beautiful thing.” “I don’t think it’s so beautiful.” “The hurt means you loved someone. That you really loved someone.”

“Sometimes, I see myself standing on a beach, my bare feet buried in the wet sand. And there’s no one on the beach, just me, but I don’t feel alone. What I feel is alive. And it seems like the whole world belongs to me. The cool breeze whistles through my hair, and something tells me I have heard that song all my life. I’m watching the waves hit the sand, the ebb and flow of the waves crashing against the distant cliffs. The ocean is ever moving—​and yet there is a stillness that I envy. “In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving toward me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I’m not afraid.”

Every time I’d pulled out my fists, I thought I now understood the reflex. Or at least I was beginning to understand. I couldn’t bear to see anyone hurting the people I loved. Because I loved them so much that it hurt me, too.

There was nothing wrong with getting angry. It was what you did with that anger that mattered.

I thought of Mima and Sam’s mom and Fito’s mom and my mom. They were dead. They were like the falling yellow leaves of Mima’s tree. Life had its seasons, and the season of letting go would always come, but there was something very beautiful in that, in the letting go. Leaves were always graceful as they floated away from the tree.

People died every day. And people lived their lives every day. There were always survivors in the aftermath of all that death. I was one of those survivors. And so was Sam. And so was Fito. And so was Dad. I’d watched them in all their beautiful courage. I’d watched them as they struggled through their hurts and their wounds. And there was one thing I could be certain of: I was loved.