Florencia's Ghost

Last night I dreamt that I was dead and Mama wasn't.

In the dream, the skies were purple, and the ocean swallowed the entirety of my body. Mama sat at the shore, waving goodbye with a rosy smile as if it was my first day of primary school, and after a few hours, I'd return to her.

A thud coming from the door startled me awake. Another thump forced me up. My first instinct was that someone was trying to break in. A strange assumption, but anything can still happen at seven in the morning. Even weirder, though, through the peek-hole, I saw it was a box dropped off at my doorstep. Then, looking out the window, I noticed a drone whirring away.

The box is still sitting on my vanity, unopened. It looks familiar, something I’ve seen many times throughout my life. It's small, and it has that sweet homemade look. It’s wrapped in brown paper, with a little twig of dried flowers taped on it, and my name just above it. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands, letting my eyes roam freely over every fine detail. It makes me think of one person: Mama.

Ever since I could remember, Mama always had this look on her face for my birthday and Christmas when giving me a gift. This aloof yet prideful look. She followed it up by saying that the gift wasn't that big of a deal to get, that it was nothing at all, just a little something I deserved to have. Before I could speak, she'd grab my face with both hands, tilting it up just a little to look into my eyes, thumbing away my tears, and saying how much she loved me.

"Te amo, mi hija," she would say, her breath all cinnamon-warm and voice all lakewater sweet.

There would sometimes be different variations of it like:

Te quiero mucho, mija.

And:

Te adoro, mi vida.

Or:

Eres mi todo.

But always:

Gracias por hacerme madre.

There's that undesired thing in my chest again called grief. Staring at the small brown box, my eyes well up with tears. And my head hurts from trying to solve the mystery of this stupid box that's come to make me cry and miss Mama more than I already do.

The thing is, it feels like I have become a ghost. Lately, I feel like I'm a ghost, and home doesn't feel like home anymore, not without Mama. Sometimes I wish Mama's ghost was with me. Then, we'd be ghosts together. Instead, she's buried at the cemetery under her favorite purple petunias, and I haven't seen her since then.

Florencia, amor, me ayudas a vestirme?

Me duele mi cuerpo, me ayudas ir a la cama, por favor, mi flor.

Mi amor, perdóna que me estoy muriendo.

It hurts being a ghost.

Being a ghost hurts, and I wish Mama's hair were the color of fire before she left.

In the afternoon, there's a knock on the door. It's my friend, Rodrigo. He's brought me a bouquet of white roses. He doesn't know I prefer a splash of colors.

"You shouldn't have," I tell him, putting the flowers in a vase. "This is very sweet of you, thank you. How have you been? How was Vegas?"

He sits in the living room, watching me find a place for the roses. The plums under his eyes tell me he hasn't gotten much sleep the past few days.

"Of course, I had to bring you flowers on your birthday," he says, smiling. It's sweet, the way he looks at me. "Vegas was alright. Just a bit too much. Overwhelming, you could say. I'm glad to be back. I hope the next business trip is somewhere calmer. Shit, I wouldn't mind going to Yosemite for a meeting."

I decide the roses look good on the piano. "Mama drove us to Yosemite for my sixteenth birthday. Everything felt large. Everything was so beautiful it hurt."

Silence fills the room. Maybe it's in my head, but I can hear Rodrigo's heartbeats. There's a pretty hue of pink on his cheeks. I don't want him to feel obligated to pick up the pieces of my shattered heart. My gaze flicks over to the window. I didn't realize it was a cloudy day, perhaps with a chance of rain.

"Let me take you out tomorrow, yeah?" He asks. "It doesn't have to be a date. Doesn't have to be anything– spend the day with me?"

Anxiety sits below my palms. I rub them over my knees over and over. "That– that would be lovely, actually. Yes, please."

Rodrigo grabs my hand and gently squeezes it. "Great."

Mama, before she died, warned me about all the tears I would cry and how my heart would shatter into a million pieces. She warned me about how, sometimes, the sun may not be as warm anymore and how the stars and the moon may not seem as beautiful.

"But you must live," she told me, "you must continue to live." Her voice dripping honey; meanwhile, the sharpness of her eyes as she stared into mine cracked me open like an egg.

"I want you to live," she told me, all honey and chamomile, "however you want, just live, Florencia."

I close my eyes and let my body melt in bed and let my eyes cry, and let my heart do the thing it does when it misses Mama. Sometimes this is all I can do.

Mama hasn't been dead for long. I still haven't been able to wrap my head around how she left this world quicker than it used to take me to count to a hundred when I was five years old. Quicker than the time water takes to boil. Faster than— a heart falling in love.

Mama fell in love three times. She said once in high school with a boy she never got to hold hands with. And then, after meeting me at the orphanage for the first time, a crazy mess of brown curls snatching a toy from a child much bigger than me. And lastly, a third time when she found out about her cancer.

"How could you fall in love with cancer?" I asked her.

She did not answer. Instead, she asked me to fold the laundry. That day, I tried to memorize the lines of her hands. The way her hair smelled of aloe vera. Her brown eyes-- hues of comfort, sweet as chocolate. Her many ways of always caring for me. My many ways of caring for her sick body and forever wishing I could've done more.

At night, I open the box.

Inside, there's a little red jewelry case with a gold pendant. The one Mama used to wear always but suddenly disappeared after her surgery.

There's also a note folded in two halves, written by Mama's older sister. She, in the end, made things complicated when Mama decided to stop all treatments, and her days became numbered.

Querida Florencia,

I hope you're well. I took something that did not belong to me. Please forgive me.

I wish you a happy 27.

Con amor,

Tu tía Carmen

P.s. Yes, I've kept every gift box Sandra gave me.

A ghost named Sandra visits me in my dreams when I fall asleep. She tells me to stop being a ghost. "It's not that easy," I tell her. "But I'm trying not to be a ghost. I'm trying, I promise. I'm trying to live."

I cry and shiver when I wake up, but I don't feel so ghostly.

Today, I don't feel much like a ghost.

Today, I wear Mama's necklace and go outside.

Today, the sky is blue. The sun has come out to sit with me, bathing everything in gold, at last warm, steady, and– soothing.