A flower bloomed for me on my way to class and I thought of my grandfather. I had a thousand flowers, all of them withered the second I picked them, littering my room.
I smelled him in the air, not generally but beside me specifically, and I said hi. The leaves on the ground rose in response. They rushed near my face but didn’t touch me and fell back to the pavement in scatterings. Abuelito was subtle; he would not spell out words with sticks or whisper reassurances in my ear. He trusted me to understand, to follow the clues back to him.
It was not a haunting because a haunting necessitated one feeling haunted and I didn’t. It had been nearly four months that Abuelito had been visiting me.
The night before I’d had a dream. I was on one of those old school jungle gyms. I was going to scale the rope wall but it towered in front of me. A fear that wasn’t quite my own made me stop midway and I looked up to find Abuelito smiling at me. He was crouched over the side of the jungle gym, one fist raised, “You can do it!”
In class I drowned out the professor in contemplations on whether or not I should write the dream down. I was good at remembering things—people always commented on the bizarre accuracy with which I recalled moments or lyrics or birthdays—but dreams were harder to grasp.
After class a girl approached me. I wasn’t quite sure of her name but she had a round face and big self-made curls; we were friends in that we were both majoring in the same thing so our schedules often overlapped and we’d gotten used to each other’s faces enough to say hi when we saw one another.
The girl paused in front of me and asked me if I had notes from the Friday before. Something stung me about that—I didn’t care for being used—but I told her I could let her borrow my notebook so she could recopy them and she gave me a look like I’d told her I carved my notes into stone with my rock-chisel.
It was a funny thought. I pictured myself in fur drapery carrying around a wooden club and repainting my psych professor’s PowerPoint slides onto cave walls with fruit for paint. The Flintstones theme played in my head and I fought not to laugh.
I waited until after I’d handed the girl my notebook and texted Sage. I told her about the Flintstones and the fur and she told me about her ancient anthropology professor who went on a rant about cell phones and technology and said he would prefer if they all went back to being cave people because then at least they’d all be on the same page, and though she’d wanted to, she had not said that he as a privileged white man could say this but she as black woman would be royally fucked no matter what the time period.
It was honest in the way only Sage could be honest and I laughed, on the sidewalk in front of everyone. I was smiling in a way I hadn’t in months.
I felt a wind pull away from me, as if my breath were being sucked from my body and in the aftermath there was a stillness surrounding me that no one else seemed feel.
In the sprint back to my room the leaves did not follow me and there was no wind to relieve the heat from coursing down my spine and up my forehead.
All one thousand flowers had turned to dust.
That night I dreamt of the hospital. It was cold because the air conditioning couldn’t be controlled from inside the room and the nurses weren’t in the room enough to notice the chill. The cot in the corner was hard under my body and I was using my mother’s jacket to cover me while I watched Abuelito sleep. My aunt had taken the lounge chair one of the nicer nurses had dragged in from an unused room and she was asleep, her arm propping up her head and her mouth hung open in the sort of exhaustion everyone was used to by then.
Abuelito slept with his mouth open because they’d intubated him so many times that he’d accustomed himself to the position. His head tilted to one side in spite of how often we’d adjusted his pillow so his face was almost looking towards me. His eyes never fully shut because the pain that he couldn’t articulate thanks to his tracheotomy wouldn’t let him rest for more than a few minutes at a time.
In the dream the nurse had left for the night and it was somewhere around three in the morning. The lights were dimmed and I was shivering on the cot staring at Abuelito. It was boring, in a way—uneventful—how easily the whole thing could have been a snapshot, a snippet of a movie made into a poster and hung on a wall. The only thing that was active were my thoughts; I knew that he was dying.
When I woke up my pillow was wet and my cheeks were sticky. I looked around my room to where the dust piles lay. I had not cleaned yet what was left of the flowers and as I stepped out of bed I wove my way around them, careful to not step too heavy and raise the dust into the air.
No new flowers bloomed for me on my way to class but I hadn’t expected them to. The leaves didn’t follow me either.
That night I dreamt of the house I used to live in with my parents and grandparents. It was a big house by nature but gargantuan to five year old me. I was sitting in my room by myself when I heard a voice that was distinctly my grandfather’s and ran out to find Abuelito in his work gear—white polo tucked into khaki’s, his phone strapped to his belt—greeting my two aunts, my grandmother, and my mom. He sat on the couch surrounded by them and I threw myself on top of him, squeezing his middle. He said hello to me and hugged me back.
When I woke up, for a short moment, I felt that my reality had shifted. I had to relive, in a split second, all of the past two months and remember he was dead. I sobbed the fresh loss into my pillow, curling my body around my hands. Weeping had always seemed terribly melodramatic to me—I believed in the dignified silent tears that I’d seen my aunt cry at the funeral—but I didn’t feel that strong.
I skipped class and spent the morning sweeping the flower dust from my room, carefully collecting it all into a glass jar and placing it on my bookshelf.
In the afternoon I went outside with my eyes shut and walked ten paces toward the field in front of my building. I opened them when I could hear the grass crunch beneath my feet and watched the tiny purple petunia bloom from out of the ground. I picked it, grabbing at the root so as not to sever the stem, and ran it back to my room.
I dropped the petunia in the jar and watered the dust into proper dirt with my water bottle. I sighed relief onto its petals that it hadn’t withered.
Andrea Mendoza Perez is a fourth year undergraduate English major at the University of Virginia. Her work has been previously published in Gadfly Online and she currently works as a prose reader for The Adroit Journal.
–Art by Menerva Tau
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