When I Sing, Mountains Dance

by Irene Solà

Some men’s tongues get stuck and just shrivel in their mouths, and they don’t know how to open up and say nice things to their children, or nice things to their grandchildren, and that’s how family stories get lost,

I would forget all my grief and all my rage, I would force myself to swallow the bile and the bitterness like medicine.

thinking only of the good memories and giving in to the piercing longing that never lets up, that intoxicates the soul, or bathing in the streams of thought that lead me to sad memories,

I was butter because Domènec loved butter.

The crying starts like a small animal. Like a single cloud, like a thin fog in my chest. It starts like a tiny pain, like a slow swelling. Like a discomfort, like a small bone lodged in my throat, like a series of stones in my sternum. And it grows, little by little.

Used to be, in my day, in our early twenties, at twenty-three, twenty-four years old, we were already men. But now, now young folks don’t grow up that way.

that there’s no war in the mountains, that wars end but the mountains never do, that the mountains are older than war, and wiser than war, that once you’re dead they can’t kill you again.

But she never will be my mother, not even if she wanted to and I wanted her to, but I don’t want that and neither does she.

And you can’t do anything, you can’t want anything, you can’t feel anything, not with all that fear. You can’t go back to being who you once were, before you learned fear. Once fear gets you, that’s it, it’s over. And then you have to take the pills, and try to sleep, and you have to do it again the next day, and the one after that.

Mia has the equilibrium of embers, and it makes you calm, it makes you feel like laughing again, and drinking coffee, and makes you want the summer to arrive, and the autumn, or whatever it is that must arrive.

And I’m sorry for forgiving you, when I forgive you. And I’m sorry for not forgiving you, when I don’t forgive you. And I’m sorry that sometimes being sorry’s not enough, like how sometimes loving’s not enough.”