Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything

by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

When I’m eighteen, I want to find my mother’s skeleton. I want to string it together and sing her alive, just like my grandmother said the first curanderas did, their clay skin still wet from the fog of God’s breath.

So the universe came from milk and touch. I’m not sure I buy that, but it makes more sense to me than an old white man in the sky.

Rose was the one who made me see it, you know, that everything being a miracle doesn’t negate the power of miracles. It means that everything is extraordinary, just as it is. The cracking of seeds to roots, the burning of a star in the sky, the two most perfect angelic babies in our arms. All of them. Extraordinary.

White people—guys especially—always imagine another way because their paths have always been saturated with forks. For Abuela and mi mamá, there was no fork. No other way.

I told Rose the women in our family have always been able speak to the dead. It’s very simple. God made many pathways into heaven. He pierced holes where the light leaks back down to Earth. We see these and call them stars. Taking walks in the starlight makes our senses raw. And we can hear and see and feel our ancestors. They’re always among us, traveling back and forth by starlight. It’s a kind of magic, my madre told me. Star magic is the oldest sort. It’s how humans became something a little different from animals.

“No. But we all make mistakes, Sia. We have to remember that we aren’t our mistakes. We aren’t what people have forced us to do, to be.” Her voice is so low, it’s almost at a whisper. “No one is all good and no one is all bad. Remember this when the anger feels like it’s burning everything inside you. Remember that most of us are just doing what we think is right at the time.”

I begin to wonder if there’s a secret world hidden in everything, like words in the whine of mosquitoes or myths in the hums of bees or even ancient tales in the microscopic mumbles of water bears. Sounds we find ridiculously annoying, but on a level we can’t sense, they somehow hold the whole universe together.

Sometimes I imagine the return of Jesus. Imagine the look on their faces when they see his skin, browner than juniper and driftwood and hot summer sandstorms. The day they realize God looks more like us is the day they become atheists, one by one, as though they ever believed in the love of Christ to start with.

ABUELA ALWAYS SAID THERE’S A hidden world inside of this one. That the world we normally encounter is the world of the mind, and it’s filled with problems and worries and measurements. But then there’s the world of the body. The world where we remember that we are animals, with our instincts whole and accessible, where our nails are claws, our hair, fur, and our hands and feet, padded paws that touch and walk and crawl.

Is this what the universe was like when it all began? When all of matter sought itself out, so tight and so close that it exploded and made whole new worlds, one after the other like empanadas pulled from the oil, crisp and ready to eat?

MY GRANDMOTHER ALWAYS SAID WHEN we experience trauma, our soul fills with espanto, or terror. And that espanto makes your soul split into pieces and run away to hide.