The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I HAVE A MEMORY that is almost like a dream: the yellow leaves from Mima’s mulberry tree are floating down from the sky like giant snowflakes. The November sun is shining, the breeze is cool, and the afternoon shadows are dancing with a life that is far beyond my boyhood understanding. Mima is singing something in Spanish. There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.

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.

Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that only exists in theory and meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. Funeral. I met that word when I was thirteen.

Connection to "One for Sorrow"

I had a theory that everyone has a relationship with words—​whether they know it or not. It’s just that everybody’s relationship with words is different. Dad told me once that we have to be very careful with words. “They can hurt people,” he said. “And they can heal people.” If anyone was careful with words, it was my dad.

“Look,” he continued, “like I said, living is an art, not a science. Take your Mima for example. She’s the real artist in the family.” He looked up at the sky. “If living is an art, your Mima is Picasso.”

I was thinking that I didn’t really want to grow up. But I didn’t really have a choice.

My dad and my uncles and aunts—​if 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.

Maggie was scratching at the door. I let her in. And then I thought that maybe life was like that—​there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.

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.

“We can go through a legal adoption, if that’s what you want. Let me just say that you’ve been my daughter for long time now, Sam. Adoption or no adoption. And you don’t need a piece of paper to call me Dad.” Tears were running down her face. And then she waved at him. “Hi, Dad,” she said. And Dad waved back. “Hi, Sam.”

Dad said Latin was a dead language. I wondered about that. Why did some languages die? Sam had a theory that languages didn’t actually die. She said we killed them. “Do you know how many languages we’ve killed off in the history of the world? You kill a language off, and you kill off an entire people.”

“You know, Fito, some people believe from the start that things belong to them. My father used to say, ‘Some people are born on third base, and they go through life thinking they hit a triple.’” Fito laughed. “I like that.” My dad nodded. “Yeah. Fito, you’re not one of those people. 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.

“So how come you’re sitting out here with your old man?” “Do you believe in heaven, Dad?” “That’s a helluvan answer to my question.”

The F word went flying through the kitchen and landed in the living room, where it hit my dad right in the heart.

FRIENDS. I GUESS I met that word when I met Sam. But sometimes you get to reintroduce yourself to certain words you already know. That’s how it was with Fito. He gave me that word again. It was exactly like Sam had said, about how we had to see people because sometimes the world made us invisible. So we had to make each other visible. Words were like that too. Sometimes we didn’t see words.

I got out of the car and stared out into the barren fields. Barren. That’s how it felt. That’s how I felt. I found myself on my knees. I was wordless and lost, and I had never known anything that felt like this, this, this hurt in the heart, this emptiness, and I wished right then I didn’t have a heart, but I knew I had one and I couldn’t wish it away. I couldn’t wish away the hurt or the tears. I don’t know how long I knelt there on the winter soil. But I felt myself taking a breath and let myself feel the cold air on my face.

I didn’t control anything, couldn’t control anything. I’d always thought that adults had control. But being an adult had nothing to do with control.

I held the envelope in my hand and opened it with all the care that was in me. And there in the envelope were some dry leaves. Yellow leaves. And there was a note. I stared at Mima’s handwriting: These are the leaves that my Salvador gave me one Saturday afternoon when he was five. I knew then that that day had been just as beautiful for her as it had been for me. She’d remembered.

“Did it help, Fito, keeping a journal?” “Yeah. It was almost like having a life. I guess I started when I was in seventh grade. Helped me keep my head on straight. Gave me someone to talk to—​even if that someone was just me.

I pictured my biological father slapping my mother to the ground. Maybe I had a little bit of him in me. A little bit. But not much. I didn’t have to be afraid of becoming like my father. I wasn’t that man. And never would be.

There would always be cancer, and people would always die under its awful and unforgivable weight. There would always be accidents because people were careless and weren’t paying attention when they should’ve been paying attention. There would always be people who suffered and died from addictions that were powerful and mysterious and uncontrollable. People died every day. And people lived their lives every day. There were always survivors in the aftermath of all that death.