Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.

“We’re all innocent,” she said. Sometimes she believed this.

“You are my home,” she’d said. “Even if my mother makes me leave you, I will always come back to you.”

People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.

There is only the path you make. Any other would be just as wrong or right.

Lies often accompany longing.

“You’ll be okay, niña. It’s like driving these mountain roads. You can’t see what’s ahead if you keep looking in the rearview mirror.”

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion.

When a cumbia came on, he asked our mother to dance, and we watched our parents sway, finding each other’s rhythm as if they’d never fallen out of step, as if the past fifteen years were only a dance interrupted waiting for the next song to play.

And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.